I always describe our neighbors and neighborhood as just "normal". Its amazing how different it is than our old neighborhood. Everyone that drives by waves. All of our neighbors are so kind and nice. I knew we were in a bad situation with our old neighbors right next door before, but after leaving and being so welcomed here I really see how toxic that environment was. When I go by the old neighborhood I still get a bad vibe and its better just to avoid it, I swear I have a little PTSD from it!
My mom and sister are currently going through the buying and selling process. They found a house on 63rd in our neighborhood!! I couldn't be happier for them to be over here and so close! I have visions of the kids riding their bikes down the sidewalk to get to Gram's house! They have an accepted offer on the new house but have not had luck yet selling. It's been an up and down ride of emotions and it brings back all the emotions I experienced during our buy and sell a year ago. I read back my blog during that time and I certainly did not include all the emotions I was feeling, but you can tell by all the dates of when I finally blogged about it that I was skeptical the transaction was really going to go through. I wrote about it only 2 weeks before closing as that was when I was confident things were going to happen. It was not a very fun process at all!
Bringing back all those emotions again I thought it'd be fun to do a year in review of the things we did around the place. As time went by I didn't think we did much to the house, but now going through pictures, I guess we did!! Here are a few things that I haven't blogged about yet:
We hosted Christmas at our house. I was able to setup a large table that everyone fit at!!
I lost countless hours of sleep prior to moving worrying that the camper would not fit in our driveway...it fits!!
In April we replaced the patio door, the kitchen window, and our bedroom window. At inspection we knew some of the windows were bad, but over the winter we could see how mad they really were. We are replacing about half of them now and then will do the other half at another time.
The back "steps" were terrible when we moved in. We replaced them with larger wood steps. I didn't get a good picture of the new steps but you can see them in the back of the 3rd pic, and also the canopy we added.
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At the end of April and early May we took out all the over-grown bushes in front of the house and cut down the big pine tree out front. We still have not planted anything new yet, but I think I have finally figured out what I want to plant and that will be a project for the spring.
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There is only one tree in the backyard and it is totally slanted. When we moved in both of us said that tree was coming down in the spring. We called it the ugly tree. Well on Mother's Day it got flowers! Then some time later we noticed apples! Of course the ugly tree is an apple tree! So its not coming down. Since we didn't know it was an apple tree we didn't spray it for bugs in the spring. We got a ton of apples but a lot of them the bugs had gotten into. We did eat plenty of them though, I made an apple crisp and apple sauce and Mike made cider. Bentley was a huge fan of them and ate multiple apples a day! So next spring we will definitely spray and hopefully we get better apples next fall!
In May Mike setup the kids playset. I added new landscape edging and woodchips along the back of the patio. Throughout the summer I added perennial plants and also tulips and daffodils this fall.
We bought a riding lawnmower in May! I had mowed the backyard the weekend we moved in and I quickly realized that our new yard is huge and takes forever to mow with a push mower. So we knew all winter we'd be purchasing a rider in the spring.
Mike built a raised garden and we put in a pumpkin patch.
There was a spot in the yard for a pool but it was not big enough for the size pool that we have, so Mike made the spot bigger. The sand area in the first pic shows how big it was originally. We brought it to the patio.
We are really enjoying how close the walking path is to the house! We can hop on it right from the neighborhood and it goes to Lions park! The lakes around this area are so pretty too!!
We put up a shed in the back corner of the yard in early summer. There was already a shed against the house and we planned on getting rid of that shed but we never did and it actually worked out really well for putting the pool toys in. We did some landscaping around the shed and planted some trees, bushes, and perennials.
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In August our neighborhood celebrated the National Night Out with a gathering down the street. It was fun to meet new neighbors!
We did some more landscaping in the backyard at the end of August.
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Kate had a birthday party with her friends for her golden birthday. We got a pinata and planned to do it in the garage. It turned out to be a really muggy night and then a big storm rolled in. Mike wanted his truck in the garage protected from the storm so we ended up hanging the pinata in the eat in dining room. There is a hook in the ceiling from a previous light fixture so we hung it up there and it worked perfect!! I can't say enough how much I love the space in this house! We moved the table into the front room and had room for a pinata!
Mike got a pub table for Christmas that was supposed to go in the garage, well he never got the garage heated so he couldn't go out there and get it all setup over the winter because it was too cold out there. So the pub table sat in the front room - which was empty. We ended up really liking the table in there, we used it a lot to play cards and just hang out. For the longest time I just couldn't figure out what to put in the front room. I didn't want to fill it with furniture that I wasn't going to use just to have it filled. Then one day I walked into Slumberland and they had an area setup with a high top table and a sectional couch. I knew right away this is what I wanted to do! The room is so sunny in the morning so its a perfect space to relax with a cup of coffee. Plus a nice high top table would be fun too. As soon as the kids went back to school and I had time to shop again I found a couch and table for the "pub room". I LOVE how it turned out!! We use it a lot. The table is a great space for the kids to do their homework, do Lego's, for Mike and I to eat a quiet meal by ourselves, and play games!
We replaced all the 2nd story windows in September (Evan's room, Jonah's room, Kate's room, and her bathroom). We had purchased 2 of them back in the spring with the other windows but quickly realized these are way too heavy for Mike to bring up a ladder so he would need to rent a lift in order to install them. When we figured out we needed to do them all in one day since the lift rental is expensive we ordered the other 2 and did them all at once.
I painted the spindles on the staircase in October.
We did a lot of setting up and getting the house the way we wanted it over the first year. It'll be nice to enjoy it this coming year! There are plenty more projects I'd love to dig into.....but since we don't have a disposable income to do all those things - in time they will happen! I'm just glad we are here and we are really loving it!
