New Addition

This title doesn't refer to the house this time but to our new puppy! For our 1 year wedding anniversary Nate got me (and Madeline) a new puppy. Her name is Zoe and right now she's about 2 lbs.

She's really small right now

At first Madeline didn't really know what to do with her (we think she didn't know it was a dog) but now they are playing non stop and she's sleeping through the night so we're happy.

Back to the house... We're working on the outside right now but grouped into that is the back porch. We started ripping the water damaged part down and taking out windows and such (we're completely redesigning the window and door situation so that we can get more light into the back porch and subsequently into the kitchen. We ran into some surprises while ripping out the area with water damage.

When we pulled the plywood off the inside it took the frame with it! The water damage was a little worse than we thought but luckily the door is going to go there so that wasn't a big deal. However, the slightly bigger deal is that the floor support below this is pretty much rotten through. To see the full extent of the damage, Nate just started ripping things down.

This is the back of the house. We discovered old windows that had been covered up on both sides of the basement. We also discovered that we're going to have to replace the floor support for a chunk of the porch.

 

We also finally got around to replacing our very much beat up front door and reside the area around the kitchen window. 

New, pretty (actual storm) door

This door is pretty cool. It has a retractable screen attached to the top window. When you lower the window the screen appears!

This is Nate almost done siding around the new kitchen window. It's really nice to have natural light in the kitchen and to be able to open the window!

Mowing Adventures

My parents are awesome and surprised us with a new lawn mower when we got home from Italy. I must admit that I have never actually mowed a lawn before. I tried to once when I was much younger and ended up crashing my parents riding mower into our fence ending my career. Therefore, I was really excited to use our push mower. Nate showed me how to get it going and then off I went. The front yard was pretty straight forward and I must say it looks quite all trimmed down. The backyard was a different story. As you could see from my last post, the side yard is quite overgrown. Nate and Tom had cleared out all the big stuff so theorectically I could go over the rest with the mower and mulch it all up. This worked really well until I got to this one section. All of the sudden my eyes started to uncontroablly water and my nose and throat started burning. This was quite overwhelming so I stopped and took a break. After things calmed down I tried again. Same thing! After getting things under control a second time I tried a different section. Once again the water works started up. At this point my head was completely overwhelmed so I went inside and took a shower to get whatever it was off me. While I was inside both Nate and Tom tried to mow the area but were bombarded with similar symptoms. We're not positive on what is causing this severe reaction but we think it may be the veins that have completely taken over that side of the yard.

We were able to make significan process on the yard despite the mowing setback. We were able to break apart about half of the cement around the pool.  This went quickly as it was pretty thin and as you can see there had been some weird setteling leaving gaps between the cement and ground.

Nate and Tom also removed a lot of fencing near the driveway which really opens up the yard. Nate's Mom brought us some rasberry and blueberry plants which we planted where one of the fences used to reside.

New bushes and lack of fence

Only other section of fence we're taking down

(Once the pool is filled in)

No more fence!

Some new some old bushes (yard view)

And just in case you were wondering what this pool looks like, here it is in all it's "glory"

Summer Time

Many of you may not know about one of the nicer parts of our house since I have yet to post anything about it. This is the backyard. In its current state it's not a lot to look at, but there is a lot of room. While we will continue to do miscellaneous work around the inside of the house, the next three months are going to be dedicated to the yard. We are hoping to turn it from an eyesore to a useful and relaxing space.

The major item that we have to deal with is the pool. You can't see because of the cover, but there are bushes and trees growing up from the bottom (the liner is gone and it's a soft bottomed pool). Needless to say, between the costs to maintain a pool and the cost to get ours up and running again, we aren't going to keep it. This requires ripping out the walls and filling it in with clean fill

Here is the pool. You'll also notice there is a lot of cracked cement around the pool. This means that we need to rip out a lot of cement. Nate decided that instead of renting equipment to do this, that we are going to do this by hand. Crazy you say? I thought so too. Regardless, Nate went out and started wacking at the cement with a sledge hammer. To our surprise, the cement is actually quite thin. Underneath is actually some really nice rock that we may reuse to make a patio. Since it actually is pretty easy to break apart, and we have the time to do it, Nate wins this one.

Here is the broken up cement. Even I can break it apart (although I have to use the little sledge hammer)

This is after a combination of Nate and I working for a total of about 3 hours. One whole slab is almost gone! This was taken from our 3 season porch. Our goal is to put doors in that lead out onto a deck.

From this view the deck would start right above the door to the basement and would wrap around the house. Another thing we have to deal with in the backyard is the falling down gazebo that is currently holding all of our large trash items from the inside renovations. We are going to rent a roll off and load all the trash and broken cement into that and then down the gazebo will go. Right now it is doing a good job blocking the side yard so we're hoping once we get the pool and gazebo out it's going to look like the huge yard it is.

Traveling around the gazebo you can see that the side yard is pretty overgrown. Hopefully some TLC will get it looking very nice

The most private part of the yard is a small section on the far side of the house. We're hoping to have this be a seating area of some sort.

So that's our backyard. Hopefully over the next few months a complete transformation will occur!