Well no one else is going to do it for me.

I love my new house. I love love love it. It sucks that we still haven't sold the old one, and that I have a "meeting" scheduled with our renters tomorrow night about how they are responsible to pay for their own propane, but it is all worth it because I love my new house. There are so many great things about my house that I could blog about but today I want to discuss my yard. I love my yard. The original owner of the house was a landscape architect and it shows. The yard, which sits on a hill, is leveled in well designed and quality ways. All of the retaining walls were built with the support beams actually going into the hill.

There are lots of great details. We have beautiful slopes of landscaped river rock and lots of potential flower beds. There are beds for an herb garden with a matching compost bin.

We even have a gazebo with bridge. The house sits on a 1/3 an acre lot and sits next to another 1/3 acre lot. Originally the lost were owned together, (they are even landscaped together with a path going from the gazebo up the other lot to a fire pit are,) but when the previous owner foreclosed, Fannie Mae tried to split them up and sell them separately. Well lucky for us Fannie Mae hires law students to do their closing and no one seemed to notice on the documents that the lot was included. I saw it, asked and the student was like, whatever it's yours now. SWEET. I love it when employees just don't care.
One of the major downsides to the property is that it takes a lot of tlc. It is really hard to find time to work on the yard. Max is old enough to play while I work, but the other downside to the yard is that there is no fence and lots of falls. No place for anyone under 3. Probably under 5 would be better. So I have to work when Mae is napping. Since we bought the house we have had to devote all our extra energy to the other house. (The other house always has a beautiful garden for potential buyers/renters.)
I therefore always feel the need to apologize to my current neighbors for the state of our yard. It isn't so much the lot our house is on but the neighboring lot needs a lot of work. So it is just a little bit here and a little bit there until... well it will probably never end.
Today's task was to get rid of this huge junk pile of leaves and logs behind one of our flower beds. I had been ignoring it for almost two years, hoping somehow it would be taken care of by someone else. I didn't really know who, just someone.
It is the kinda pile that looks smaller then it actually is and it looks like it could be the cosy home of snakes and other lovely animals. Luckily I didn't find any friends, but I am a bit worried that I have inhaled enough mold spores to kill me. I didn't know wood could decompose into some of the colors I saw>

Crazy. I would say that I have gotten about half of it busted up, but then the question is how am I gonna get rid of all the leaves, and all the logs. . Oof. But at least it isn't so visable to people driving by anymore. One step at a time.