Let's take this outside

Now that you’ve had a tour and have a good idea of the inside of the house, it’s time to take a look outside.  Be prepared to be unimpressed people.  Most people would look at our lot and think “why would a family buy this?  There’s no real yard”.  I can see how you would think this, but we see it differently. VISION, people.  

Lets start by looking at the front of the house.  You’ve seen the big picture of the outside, but closer up we have a good sized porch on the front of the house that we’ve thrown some colorful furniture on for the time being.  Don't mind the dead poinsettias hiding behind a column from street view. 

   

  

We plan to repaint the front door.  It’s currently black, which isn’t bad, but we want to give it a little more life.  Several colors have been thrown out but we’ll do a post when we get to that so you’ll be able to see the decision process unfold. Also, other little things like replacing the crooked house numbers and getting a larger/prettier mailbox is on our list. It is also early February so any porch plants are pretty much nonexistent. But we do imagine this adorable little bench to house some flowers and other items

All the landscaping at the front of the house is sad.  Forgotten little holly bushes, lots of leaves from the giant trees, and some uneven ground because the city came and dug up old pipes a couple years back.

 

The driveway is on the left side of the house.  Slightly treacherous but thankfully we own large vehicles that can handle the slope.  For now the driveway is gravel, but that will one day change.  Priorities, keep this in mind.

When you head up the driveway toward the back of the house you notice some lovely empty lots where homes were torn down fairly recently on the left. That is where the infamous coffin house used to be.  

 

Thankfully, a very well known builder in Starkville has bought this property and will be building two homes next door to us in a similar historic style to match the neighborhood.  

 

As ugly as this little walk is, there is hope as we see the beginning of spring and some budding daffodils. They run the entire driveway and are particularly plentiful in the back left corner.  This will be pretty very shortly!  

The driveway empties into a pretty large parking area.  Because this house was a rental for so many years, just imagine the amount of college kid cars that were stored back here.  Made perfect sense.  Well, we don’t really need all this parking space.  Sure, it makes it nice because I can turn around back here easily without having to back out onto a busy street, but still, we don’t need THIS much gravel parking space.  

 

At the back of the property lives this little red barn.  Our dismembered play set is sitting here until the new fence goes up so we can place it accordingly.  It’s too cold for the kiddos to play on it anyway.  When we were looking at the house the previous renters actually had a rooster back here.  A small part of me actually hoped they would leave it.  He was cute and pretty funny.  Can you imagine adding a rooster to our mix?  It would make good blog material if nothing else. Again, George does not agree.

Behind the shed is the rest of the yard that slopes down a little but we will build that up a bit.  It’s pretty shady because there are a lot of trees, but some of them will be coming out.  My dad is a forester and that’s pretty handy when you have this many scary looking trees on your property.  We’ve mentally mapped out what trees will be going and what will be staying.

Turning around facing the back of the house you’ll notice the outside addition that was added maybe 40 years ago?  We’ll eventually be replacing the outside of this with another material (or completely tearing it down and rebuilding to our liking…). Notice that there is a little covered area and door to get into the house, but unfortunately that goes to the sitting room and the "master bath".  So if we enter that door our whole family (and any guest we let follow us), will have to walk through the sitting room and our master bathroom before entering the rest of the house.  Not ideal.  Also, living in the sitting room and master is our grumpy cat, Gumbo, and he does not like to be disturbed. 

Walking around to the other side of the house is a pretty sizeable side yard.  It measures about 15 feet wide.  If you look closely you’ll notice a LOT of vines.  

 

 Some are pretty thick and scary.  These aren’t your run of the mill vines, we pretty much have a wisteria factory of this side of our house.  At least it will be beautiful come spring!  We will be chopping out a lot of it. 

On this side of the house this is where we plan to put the French doors.  This will be our main access outside for the kids as well as the dog.  This will all be fenced in so there is no fear of kids or dog running into the street.   

 

Unfortunately, fence can’t go in yet because we have to have this stinkin' gas meter moved for the doors to be put in place of these windows.  On a bright note, these windows are probably the worst windows in the house so it's pretty exciting we have a good reason to completely rip them out to put in a set of insulated french doors. 

Gas companies don’t actually read the meters like they used to, but they do need to have access to them if there is a problem, so they’d like it to be on the outside of the fence, even if we weren't doing the doors and deck. This will require us to actually move the meter about 8 feet toward the front of the house so we can get it out from behind the imaginary fence that will go up sometime at the end of February. 

We’ll be adding a ton of grass, landscaping, fencing, and yard work. This will be a pretty slow process though as the inside is much more a priority for the short term!