Question Weeding the Front Flower Bed

As you can see, a few years ago when the Google truck drove by, the huge flower bed at the front of the house used to be filled with flowers:

But over the years, it came to look like this:

Eventually, we want to completely re-landscape when the driveway and sprinklers are re-done and have this:

virtual landscape plan

But for now, I have been using the rainy April weather to aid me in at least getting the weeds out of the flower bed, which has taken me about 4 hours +:

Feels pretty bare now.  See the pile of weeds in the walkway?  I had to wait for the garbage truck to come and empty the can of last week's weeds before I could clean that up.  Sigh.  We'll pull out the trees and bushes in front of the chimney, pour a new driveway, and install sprinklers when we've saved up more money . . . maybe fall 2013 now that we know how much sprinklers will cost.