More landscaping... :/

Let's play word association...Ashley - paint - carpet - water leak - landscaping...great! More landscaping! Well an excavator dude came today to give us our diagnosis, and he said the same thing as a couple other people...take out the rock in the landscaping and fill it in with dirt to create a slope that goes away from the house. We pulled back some of the rock and discovered our problem. The dirt is definitely slanting toward the house. It's a good 4 inches lower next to the house than at the edge of the landscaping boulders.

So...in another spontaneous move this weekend, we decided it was best to do this...

You might ask...didn't you guys just do some landscaping last summer?? Yep, almost a year ago...would have been the perfect time to take care of our water problem had we known it existed. Oh well, I didn't really like those bushes anyway, but it was going to be too much work and cost more to replace them at the time. Now we're just spending more money a year later, but we thought it would be best just to get rid of them so that we could fix the grade of the dirt as best as we could. Now I can plant pretty flowers instead of ugly shrubs!

Wondering what it looked like before??