5 Years at Home

A thousand words couldn’t properly articulate how much we love living here. We celebrated our 5th “homeiversary” in June, and just wrapped our 6th summer in this lovely place. This year, I attempted to replicate a few of my favorite photos from our first week including:

And this, which shows how the fence used to be completely overgrown, making the back half of our property completely unusable:

And even our “new” outdoor living room (a long post about its evolution is sitting as a rough draft):

We’ve had a busy few months (and if you follow me on IG, it’s 99% garden related). Shorter, colder days and a new back-to-school routine will hopefully give me more time to write again (I really miss it).

Though brainwaves related to these projects are still mostly unpublished, these are some of the things we did in our 5th year at home.

1. We moved the fire pit.
2. Changed the play-flow in our yard by opening up the rustic fence.
3. Started a compost pile.
4. Installed flagstone veneers to the covered porch (peek shown above).
5. Removed the siding on our covered porch to expose the original cedar walls.
6. Wouldn’t it be so great to have the back of our house fully landscaped? On the list. Lots of scheming has been done.
7. Met with a kitchen designer; we could be gutting and remodeling as early as next Spring.
8. Transplanted lots of pachysandra.
9. Installed underground electrical fencing for Martha.
10. Lost a white birch tree, a sassafras tree, a tiny pine, and a bazillion branches.

If you’re here for the first time, here are 10 projects we’ve done around this house in previous years that we still adore:

1. Painted the barn
2. Built a bigger garden
3. Installed a big flagstone patio
4. Created my own walk-in closet (I started with my closet, but we’ve done it to all bedroom closets at this point)
5. Upgraded our fireplace to gas
6. Installed a giant projection screen in our living room (movies and video games at max size)
7. Created an art room in our basement
8. Installed hardwood floors
9. Painted our kitchen cabinets (a good makeover, and the paint has held up really well)
10. Improved storage in our entryway