Nothing like waiting until the last minute...

I've may have mentioned (maybe I'm thinking of my other blog...) that my husband and I are in the early stages of possibly building a new home. Part of this process will include selling our existing home. It's cute, well kept, and was updated throughout just three years ago. The market is sagging, but I'm hopeful we've got enough to offer here that it will sell.

Hubby and I started discussing a few days ago that we probably ought to spend a little time and money in some landscaping to help with curb appeal. We've done absolutely nothing to the exterior of our home in the three years we've owned the house except replace the roof and dig up two dead trees. We've planted nothing, done no weeding, no trimming of bushes, and no watering to our yard. Remember - I am a very new gardening enthusiast, only very recently taking an interest in my yard. My husband' thumb isn't black, green or otherwise - for him, it's about money. He's tight with it, and hasn't considered the yard a valuable place to spend it. This arrangement worked fine for us until a) I decided I wanted to dabble in gardening and b) we found ourselves in the position of worrying what OTHER people thought about our yard.

So, here we are in the dog-days of summer in Texas - in an especially warm and dry summer at that - thinking of what we need to do to spruce up our space. And I'm so clueless that I don't really know where to start or which plants would have a running chance at surviving transplantation in this weather. I think first we'll need to get a sprinkler and be willing to spend a few dollars a month reviving our grass. Hubby picked up a new weed eater yesterday (his died a while back in the middle of trimming along our fenceline. I wasn't convinced of the coincidence of that at all.) I perused what was left at Wal-Mart's plant selection: not much, and even less that looks healthy. There is one other nursery here in town that I will likely go check later this week.

Okay, here is where I embarass myself with photo confessions of just how neglectful we've been.

Front and center of my house. It's an 80's ranch style. See my dead grass?

Left angle: there are overgrown shrubs flanking the front porch (read: 8x3 concrete slab).

Here is a right angle showing the right-hand corners of the house.

Here is a close up of the overgrown shrubs, or in this case, the absence of one. It was dead when we moved in but we never removed it.

Here is another shot of my gangly rose bush I posted about a couple of weeks ago. This shot was taken then, so it does look slightly less dead now that I've been fertilizing it, but I've learned it's too late to prune it for this summer, so there it sits in all its leggy glory.

Go ahead - you can feel sorry for my yard. I do too. Too bad I didn't take an interest until now.

So my questions for you, oh wise garden gurus: what would you recommend for a fast, inexpensive make-over? Fast because we will likely be putting this house on the market in the next month or so, and inexpensive because we only want to invest as much time and money as necessary to add curb appeal. I don't want to labor or dump a lot of money into something I won't be able to enjoy myself. I'll save that for landscaping my new home!