Four Years Later

 Today I was in the backyard after my husband had finished mowing the lawn, the first full day of summer, and it dawned on me how MUCH we have transformed the back of our home since moving here in the spring of 2013.  I loved the interior of the house on purchase day, but my husband had really wanted the previous home we had viewed the day prior.

I told him that the interior was better than the other house because the other house had closets the size of a house built in the 50's or 60's, the other house did not have a garage space for his lawn keeping items, the master bedroom was far too small, and I REALLY did not care for where the swimming pool sat.  It also had a driveway that was far too steep for getting up and down it with a vehicle during the winter months, as well as hauling trash down to the roadway.  The kitchen was tiny and we would have had to take down walls to increase it's size as well as the laundry room.  So.... I'm not sure why he liked the other house moreso than this one.???

Needless to say, I talked him into THIS home, which has also required a few improvements, but no knocking down of walls, which is something we had done in our Maryland home, and I did NOT want to live with all of the sawdust inside once again.

So, the back of the house was a plain jane, with no deck or even a way to get from that screened porch you see, down to ground level.  A strange situation indeed.  

There were no bushes, no roof over the basement entrance, and dirt everywhere that turned to mud in the springtime or anytime it rained.

Changes have happened over the past four years!

Here is the back of our home as it looks today.

The addition of a deck with stairs and a doorway leading from the screened porch to the deck.  Flowering bushes surround the edges of the concrete slab beneath the porch, a tree just outside the basement doors, trellis to hide the area beneath the stairs, mulch beneath the deck as well as around all of the bushes.

A roofed area outside the basement doors, and a small stonelaid area at the bottom of the deck stairs.

 

It's a much more user friendly area now.

You need to have a vision when buying a house.  And I say house, because it's not your home until you make it your home.

The prior owners had built the house and lived in it for six years, but it was an investment for them when the selling market was HOT.  It was not a house that the wife had fallen in love with, so investing anymore money in it was simply not in the plan.  The housing market stumbled and then crashed, so I think it became their albatross.

We are not world travlers, so our home is our Shangi-La and making it a place of joy is very necessary.

Four years later this house makes both my husband and I smile.