In Which We Have A House!

We got our key this morning, and now the fun begins! Here's Connor and Jer in our potential library alcove or dining room: whichever works better. Connor likes the light in here, though I'm not overly fond of it. That's the railing for the sunken living room in the foreground.

We've got a lot of work to do. And when I say a lot of work, I'm not talking about painting or remodeling or ramp building or any of that. I'm talking about cleaning.

The place needs a lot of cleaning.

The bathrooms are, to put it mildly, disgusting, and the laundry room (pictured here) is not much better. I firmly believe that when you move out of a house you should take things like your hair with you, but these people were not of the same mindset and left it all in the drains for me. Whoo hoo. There are trash bags full of garbage scattered in the middle of rooms around the house like little presents for us to find. Old earring backs, washrags, candles, hair ties, and other treasures sit on the window sills. Little bits of foam and paper litter the carpet. The walls are splattered with various unidentified substances and there are cobwebs thick in the corners of the rooms.

So I'll be hauling cleaning supplies over once Connor wakes up from his nap (after a stop at the drug store for some disposable gloves), and I'll get started on slowly getting things picked up. The sooner I get things ready for our move, the sooner I can get to the project I really want to tackle: what I have dubbed the Great Wall O'Ivy.

This wall has got to be at least 40 feet long. It runs the entire length of the property on one side and has been entirely buried by English ivy and my personal favorite, blackberries. This is where I'm going to be putting in my edible landscaping (yes, in the front yard) and herb garden. I won't pull all the ivy out this winter because I don't want to lose all my soil down the hill, but I'm at least going to get it trimmed down to where I can see what I'm working with. There's a wall of stone boulders under there that should look really cool once you can see it again.

The rest of the yard isn't in too bad a shape, though the fence is falling down. It's a little overgrown, but I should be able to put it right without too much work, and there are already some beautiful established plantings back there. I can't wait to get started!

I did take some measurements today, and there shouldn't be any problem at all putting a ramp in-- the flower bed is almost twice as long as it needs to be to get the proper slope, and the porch is more than wide enough. So now we've got to get our permit and get crackin'!

~Jess

P.S.: Sorry about the weird formatting. Blogspot currently hates me, and I don't have the energy to go fix the HTML because I am lazy. Oh well.