How We Spent the First Weekend in Our New House

One of these days I'll have to write a post about the lessons we learned in our first house, because we would do more than one or two things differently.  The number one thing that Chris and I both took away was, you can't take even a season off from exterior up-keep. When we moved into that house, the yard looked great. The grass was green, the plants were thriving and we were feeling really lucky. We mowed the lawn and patted ourselves on the back.  Until the next year--things weren't...as nice.  What happened?!  We only mowed the lawn, that's what happened.  Maintaining a yard takes continuous effort, and I don't even think it has to be a lot of effort--but more than mowing the lawn.  So, we made a pact to do more at our new house, to really put as much effort into our exterior as we do our interior. I feel like when we arrived, this house was already giving us the side-eye and testing to see if we were really going to keep that promise, so we made it our first priority.

The yards on our street are immaculately kept. In fact our neighbor, who recently moved, is a pedologist and consistently sampled his soil and adjusted it accordingly.  You can imagine their grass! No you can't--It's the most gorgeous grass I've ever seen. Our yard needed some attention. The biggest concern was all of the overgrown trees that now were resting on the roof on 3 out of the 4 corners of the house.

We knew that this could cause roof leakage or damage, so Chris went to work pruning them all back.

And while he was at it, thinning a few out since the branches had become so heavy, they started to sag.

This 14-Foot Tree Pruner made pretty quick work of all 4 trees that needed attention. He liked that it gave him two options to cut smaller branches easily by pulling the rope and slicing through them, or sawing the larger pieces.

While Chris was pruning, I gave the bushes out front some tlc and removed the shooters growing at the bases of the trees.

All in all, it probably took us around 3 hours to get everything trimmed and groomed.

And, hey, we gained another window out of the whole deal, too. Here's the before again:

And now:

We still owe you a little exterior tour.  Our lot is an interesting shape, but we have some pretty great plans.