The front foundation is looking fantastic! It's always the way when planting out a new area - you want it to look good there and then (it's even more difficult to get the spacing right when you are using plant plugs or newly-struck cuttings), but for me, that is when I enjoy doing phase two of the garden, which is transplanting shrubs that have outgrown their initial space into somewhere new :-)

I really like your blog (especially showing the good and the bad! It's refreshing).
I grow a lot of salvias, agastache and penstemons, and to dead-head these, I use the line-trimmer....it sounds terrible, I know, but for soft-stemmed plants, it's quick and effective, especially if you don't like dead-heading much.
I just avoid doing it on the more sensitive perennials in the most humid weather as it doesn't give as clean a cut as secateurs....Matt