Upcoming changes

With the arrival of spring we are totally motivated towards the great outdoors and as big landscaping dreamers...we are designing, dreaming and wishing. A lot of our plans unfortunately may never happen just due to money (well, lack there of actually) but as we learned last year we can do a whole dang lot for FRRREEEE! Here is one of my dreams which is very much within reach...

Behold--the back door in all of its...well, boringness.

Rarely do people come to our front door. For those of you who have been here the back it just the best entry. It is boring and kinda ugly and we have dreams of a small covered porch, a larger and nicer back door, recovering the addition to the house with brick, sweet lantern-type light to the right of the door....and other dreams.  Here is a picture from last month's Better Homes and Gardens:

This is a very simply built archway but I thought something like this would be lovely at the beginning of our gravel pathway. They have climbing roses on this one which are pretty but I'm not sure how I feel about getting thorned every time I pass through...

And here is a pile of lumber that we hope to clear away this summer. See that curvy root? We pulled that out of our ground and August wants to throw it out but I just thought it was so cool, it really tells a story. I wonder if it could be incorporated into our archway? Any thoughts?