Here are a few additional pictures.  I loved all of the flowers but it was difficult to maintain and since i'm not retired my time is limited.  I won't mention that I don't have a green thumb either. 

You can see the greenhouse in the backyard - one of my favorite things about this place.  I thought it might help me practice growing plants, we'll see...

Its been too long since my last post but on the bright side I found the pictures of our ugly house.

I forgot how far we’ve come in the past couple of years.   The amount of work, inside and out, that needed to be done was sometimes overwhelming – secretly I didn’t think we would ever make enough progress as we have.  There were so many things to mow and weed eat around that it took us two days each time we had to mow so our first projects were to remove as many obstacles as possible.  You can see from the pictures that there were fences, pavers, garden décor, bushes, trees to clean around and what you can’t see is the bathtub next to the house used as a home for frogs (yes, I’m serious, somebody actually thought that was a good idea) and a 10 x 10 canvas pavilion covering the koi pond.  The front walkway was some type of red stone that had long since broken into a million pieces and was basically being taken over by weeds/grass.  Seriously, there was no need for me to go to the gym, all I had to do was spend an hour each day outside moving, digging or doing some other chore.  And I did...

We bought the property for location – everyone says you can always make changes to the house but you can’t change the location, right?  I’m not so sure that I would follow this advice if I got a do-over.  The house is UGLY!  I mean, seriously I don’t know what people were thinking in the 70’s.  Wood paneling, a strange floor plan and even a wet bar in the living room that’s 10 feet from the kitchen…really?!  I don’t get it.   I think I complained daily for the first year and several times I asked myself what the heck were we thinking.  But then I remind myself that its temporary and that when my kids get older they won’t care that we had an ugly house, they’ll just remember all of the amazing adventures we had.  (And we’d better have some good ones because I’m counting on this!)

I’ll post some “pre” pictures as soon as I can find my external hard drive where they’re all saved.  

We aren't really city people but have found ourselves like most folks these days, living where the jobs are.  But deep down we long to return to the slower, simpler days of our childhood.  So, we bought 2 acres on the edge of a large metro area. 

At first our kids went kicking and screaming, convinced we ruined their lives because they had to change schools and do manual labor - oh no, what have we done?!  Now that we have chickens (yes, they were excited about chickens - they gave them all names!) life isn't so terrible and I think they secretly like living here, although I don't think they will ever admit it. 

The property we bought is in desperate need of work - we spend more time mowing and weed eating around everything then we do actually enjoying the space.  We quickly found that neither of us know what we're doing and we fail more often then we succeed.  In fact, we've given my husband Carl the label of "wood challenged" because his wood building skills are that bad.  I'm hoping that in 5 years and enough practice, we'll actually be able to build something solid - I don't recommend you bet on that though...