House Tour 2013: The Outside

So you all have been so patient to wait until I get organized enough to start giving a tour of our new house. The nice thing about the virtual tour is that I can choose to wait until things are clean or organized or more settled before I choose to start the tour. If you want to see the current, sometimes messy, often chaotic, state of our house feel free to drop by in person!

Our house is a cute little two story with a couple of walls completely covered in ivy. My mom and my aunt both think it looks like a fairy tale cottage. I took this picture from across the street so you could see the extremely tall tree in our backyard. It is one of the taller trees in our neighbourhood. We have a super-long driveway leading to a detached garage.

And that tree in the front is a Saskatoon berry tree. I grew up with Saskatoons and I LOVE them. They are like blueberries, only wayyyy better and I am thrilled that we have one in our front yard.

This is another view of the front of our house. I love our little light post, which works, and the window boxes. There is one on either side of the front door. The flower bed the light post is in needs some work and will likely be a project we undertake next Spring.

This is a view of our detached garage, a bit of the backyard and our mailbox, which used to be a milk box. I really like it but it isn't very energy efficient so we will have to insulate it, close it up and install a different mailbox somewhere. Sadness :(

This is a view of our backyard. We have no fences, just hedges, the clothesline and the garage. Except for the big tree, the yard is quite open. We haven't talked a lot about what we want to do with the yard. The little stone patio is where we had our BBQ and table and benches when we moved. Last weekend we cleaned the yard up for winter and so now it looks kind of empty.

These are the three raised beds behind the garage. One of them now has strawberries growing in it and the other two are to be determined.The picture on the right shows the back left corner of the yard. I can see this spot becoming a secret hideaway for the kids as they get older.

This is the view of our house from the end of our yard. The door on the second floor leads from the bathroom to the roof of the playroom. The white-sided part is the sun room (playroom) addition. Eventually I would like to turn one set of those windows into a French door leading to a deck which will be built around the tree. But that's some long term planning. For now, we are just dreaming about what we want to plant in our yard come Spring. And saving for a new roof since that's the main thing the home inspector said needed to be done (in the next year or two.)

Sometimes, when dreaming about how we will use this house in the next five or ten years I am giddy and think, "Ahhhh! The joys of owning a house! Whoo hoo!!!!" Other times, when I think about being responsible for a new roof I think, "Ahhhh. The joys of owning a house?!?!?!?" But mostly it is very good and I feel very fortunate to be on the path of home ownership.

Note: I don't know how often I will be taking you on a tour of a room in our house but I think I will try to do Rachel or Sam's room for you in the next week or so. Thanks for being patient.