Gardening: The Plan and some Initial Work

I have two/three separate garden spaces. One to the left of the garage in this picture, before you get to my front door.

It looked like this when I moved in, and up until today. There are a lot of different flowers in this spot, including a rose bush, azaleas, and possibly hollyhocks. How do I know this? There is a master gardener in my neighborhood who offered to help me prune the bush you can see in the above picture, and I also picked her brain about the rest of my gardens.

The next garden you come upon is to the left of the front door. It looks like this:

Here you can see the overgrown violets and the shrub, along with the lovely lava rock that is being used as mulch. I'm planning to remove those bad boys and replace them with regular mulch. I think I'd also like to plant some pretty flowers in the open space. We shall see, as I am not an experienced gardener!

The last garden is along the whole south side of my condo. It is by far the largest.

It has three huge shrubs, that here look like one right in the middle of the picture, and then some smaller shrubs to the left. To the right of the monstrosity is a rose bush and some other random flowers.

There really is a lot of work to do here. First, those three shrubs are blocking the living room windows. Second, the beds in general are a mess of weeds and regular grass from lack of upkeep over the past years. The woman that lived here before me for 35 years was 90something years old, and I'm certain she wasn't outside weeding gardens. 

This is what the same corner looked like after about 30 minutes of pulling vines out of the ground. Now the window is unobstructed and the azalea and rose bushes are visible!

Azalea bush. So pretty.

Can't remember the name of this guy.

Can't remember the name of this either. Should have been taking notes!

Ahh, one more look at the clean bed.

Before

 

After:

I am generally overwhelmed by the gardens I have to take care of here, so I am going to start slowly. My goal for this spring is to get the two corner gardens in good shape by removing the lava rocks and putting down mulch, and then next spring I can focus on the longer back garden. I want to remove those large shrubs from the back but need to figure out how exactly that can happen. Dig them up? Cut them down?