Summer 2014’s (yeah I’m a little behind…) big expensive project was redoing all the beds around the house. We purchased the home from an estate, and the father had been ill for quite sometime, so the yard had been minimally maintained for several years.
There was virtually no mulch left anywhere and the timbers were pretty rotted, other than the big bushes we could never manage to pull out we were starting from scratch.

It took us a weekend to just pull out all of the junk we hadn’t yet, then we did the timbers, landscape fabric and rock the following 3 day weekend.
Instead of landscape timbers we chose 4x4 ground pressure treated wood, which we stained with some reddish Thompsons Water Seal we already had. The stain helped reduce the icky pressure treated greeness. We’re hoping that by going pressure treated these will last a long time.

We went with the lava rock, based on cost and weight. Moving “light lava rock” was hard work, I can’t imagine us moving one of the heavier rocks. It’s also helps that it’s one of the cheapest since the front of our house is 70 feet long, we needed 1.5 tons of rock! It also goes well with the color of our brick.
We also decided to go with rock because we have very deep eves, so all along the house we just have dry dusty dirt.

Two years later our rock and timbers still look great, the weed block is doing a a pretty good job too considering we had a ton of annoying invasive vines.