The Joys of Home Ownership

I heard a too-true quote on facebook once: Trying to clean your house while your kids are around is like trying to brush your teeth while eating an Oreo.

No kidding. It seems Herculean to not only maintain tidiness, but actually get something cleaned. (I am not Hercules. That is why I suck at this.)

I feel the same way about over-all property upkeep. You get all kinds of ideas of ways you'd like to improve your house/yard, but end up spending a good deal of your time just making sure nature doesn't turn it into a haunted house.

We've now lived in this house for three years, the longest we've stayed anywhere. For a long while after we moved in I really felt like we were just living in someone else's house. There were so many things that weren't to my liking. Bit by bit we've made big and little changes, some because we wanted to, and some because we had to. Those have-to's really bite sometimes.

This is a pile of sticks: This was a had-to. Too many branches growing perilously close to other trees/structures required DH to pull out the ladder and the handsaw and led to the creation of this pile.

This is a pile of sod. This was a wanted-to (for me. Which turned into a had-to for DH.). This sod came from two big efforts. The first was the efforts of the men who came and installed curbing in our yard. The second (and significantly more laborious) was the shoveling of sod out of our garden area to expand it. This was done 96% by DH and 4% by me. I really wanted to do more, but, to put it simply, I'm too wimpy.

Since we moved into our house we have put in a new furnace and installed central air. We also got a new water heater (stupid have-to). We pulled out the front shrubs and built a flower garden around the porch. (That was 96% me, thank you very much.) We built shelves in the storage room and repainted a bunch of the interior. We also replaced the mailbox, thanks to some Halloween pranksters who bashed in the old one with a pumpkin.

This year alone we've had a storm door installed, replaced the exterior light fixtures and house numbers, re-shingled the roof, got curbing in the yard and fixed a leaky water-softener.

Though there are still a plethora of changes I'd like to make (many of them to the interior) the house is beginning to feel like ours.

I've made several attempts at gardening in the past, some more successful than others. I was gung-ho about the Square Foot Gardening system a couple of years ago, but did not see results like I wanted and ended up scrapping the whole thing. For one thing, the neighbor cats (dang them all to heck) thought they were their personal litter boxes. For another, I just didn't like how it looked because the area around the boxes got scrubby. It didn't yield much and I hated that I couldn't till it.

So we got the garden area curbed as well. I'm really loving the defined line around the garden, and we extended it out quite a bit further than it had previously been (hence the sod digging). We're tilled, we're planted and hopefully in a couple of months I'll be able to show a sequel picture of lush green vegetable plants filling up this space. (Provided I keep up on the constant have-to of weeding.)

Meanwhile, I've got a list of projects to get done this summer, which we'll keep chipping away at until we run out of will power. Or money.