My grandmother has requested pictures of the new house. She wants something tangible, but it got me thinking that I should probably post some photos here.

The house sits atop a very steep incline. Or what this flatlander thinks of as very steep. I don't think the picture quite shows the steepness of the driveway. It's so steep that we often (less so now, but it in the beginning all the time) scrape underside of the car trying to get up the slope. The first thing I did at the house, even before the movers came with our stuff (that's another story) was do some gardening. There's a beautiful Rose of Sharon at the base of the drive that was just going into bloom. In the front of the house, there were some pink gladiolus in full bloom, but they were accompanied by a bug-eaten hosta (I hate hostas) and a bunch of weeds. There was also an abandoned side garden.

So I dug in (rather, Josh did), getting rid of the hosta and replacing it with some asian lilies, mexican heather, and rudbeckia. I put a sunset-yellow coneflower and some lavender and yellow-orange mums in the side garden. I converted the mailbox that was on the side of the house to a planter with some yellow mums, put some orange and purple dahlias and celosia in a long deck planter on the patio, and put a beautiful salmon hibiscus in an old concrete urn planter on the front landing.

The mailbox became a planter because 1) it's nicely decorative and 2) it was useless as a mailbox. Sometime in the last hundred years the mailman stopped coming up the drive to deliver mail. However, nobody had ever put a mailbox in at the bottom of the drive, where the mailman will deliver mail. So putting in a new mailbox was one of Josh's first projects. Around here, you dig about 3 inches and hit solid rock, so the mailbox isn't set particularly deep, and it's a bit wobbly, but the mailman will put mail in it (hint, hint) so we're happy.


The house itself was built in--I don't know, the stone age? In addition to the living room and kitchen, it has three bedrooms and "two" baths. The bath situation is a little weird. There's one main bath, fully functional, with a shower-tub. Then in the largest of the bedrooms, there's the pink bathroom. Outfitted completely in pink tiles and fixtures, it's a little closet bathroom with a small tub. The tub, however, is connected only to the hot water supply, so it's not particularly useful.

The basement "bathroom" is little more than a toilet and a sink in the corner. It is in a little room, but that room has no door, so privacy is an issue. Here again, it seems that only the hot water is connected (well, I haven't checked the water in the toilet, but the sink only runs hot).

There are three bedrooms: two smaller ones and a larger one. We selected one of the smaller ones to be our bedroom, and the other small one is set up as an office. The large one is a storage/work/guest room. It has a small closet that we have designated the tool closet, and a very large walk-in where I am keeping all of my crafty crap. Typically the room will be set up with a work table so I can do my sewing or whatever, but right now we've got it set up as a guest room with our elevated air mattress as the bed.

In addition to all this space, we have a tuck-under garage and a basement. The garage is a 1-seater, but that's okay as we've reduced our ownership to one car. The basement has 2 large rooms and some smaller ones, but most of it is filled with student desks from the college. Josh and I estimate that there are about 300 of them. So our usable room has been minimized. We did, however find enough space for a washer and dryer, and have some additional storage.

Overall, we're happy with the place. The decor is a little iffy, but things are pretty functional. We had hoped to spend less than a year here, so we could buy a place and I could have a garden, but it seems that I'll have enough garden space here to "take the edge off," and it's ridiculously cheap, so we might stay a few years.