Adding Curb Appeal on a Budget #LowesCreator

About a week ago, I shared our May Lowe’s Cre­ative Ideas Blog­ger theme of “beau­ti­fy­ing curb appeal” (with a great $100 give­away too!). Well, I’m pleased to say that we’ve com­pleted our lit­tle projects and are really happy with the results! Our main project was putting together a lit­tle DIY tree ring flower planter.

It was SO easy to do & I love that we now have a pop of color out front! As I men­tioned in the first post, there’s not usu­ally a lot of color asso­ci­ated with most desert land­scap­ing here. Every­thing tends to blend pretty well with our nat­ural (neu­tral) desert col­ors. And, obvi­ously, with the rather high tem­per­a­tures and low humid­ity, many flow­ers & plants don’t do as well. But, at our old house, the whole front walk­way was lined with flow­er­ing plants. They were really quite pretty and fairly low main­te­nance. Orig­i­nally, we didn’t know what they were, but soon learned the flow­ers are called “vin­cas”. Here’s baby Big Brother hang­ing out in them at our old house!

So, when we started dis­cussing our options, vin­cas were an obvi­ous choice for us. And, we thought the tree ring would be a nice solu­tion for keep­ing every­thing con­tained & look­ing nice! We set out for Lowe’s & found the per­fect mate­r­ial for build­ing our tree ring raised flower bed–curved scal­loped edgers! It made putting every­thing together a breeze!

After clear­ing some of the rock, we put 8 edgers around the tree (cre­at­ing a lit­tle over 4 foot in diam­e­ter ring), mea­sured to make sure we were all cen­tered, & added some gar­den soil. Then, we planted our vin­cas! There was already a drip­per line to the tree, so Mr. Mom Endeav­ors just added on some addi­tional lengths of hose and some sprin­kler valves to help water the flowers.

In addi­tion to the tree ring & flow­ers, we also added some solar walk­way lights (which we found at “Buy 2, Get 1 Free”) & installed new out­door light fix­tures (to replace our ugly, brassy builder’s grade ver­sions)! If you’ve never installed your own light fix­tures, here’s a quick lit­tle demo on South­ern Hos­pi­tal­ity. All in all, our curb appeal projects cost a lit­tle over $100 and took just a few hours–a per­fect week­end project!

The changes are noth­ing dras­tic, but we’re please with the results and def­i­nitely added some curb appeal on a budget!

What would YOU do to add a lit­tle budget-friendly curb appeal?

*GIVEAWAY: If you haven’t entered already, check out the $100 gift card give­away post here (run­ning through 5/31/12)

For more great ideas, check out Lowe’s Cre­ative Ideas on FB, Lowe’s on Pin­ter­est, and the Lowe’s Cre­ative Ideas blog where you just may rec­og­nize one (or more) of the faces there!

Dis­clo­sure:  I am a mem­ber of the Lowe’s Cre­ative Ideas Cre­ators & Influ­encers Net­work and received a Lowe’s gift card to com­plete my projects. All pho­tos, opin­ions, and expe­ri­ences are my own.