Day 313

I guess I am ready for spring. This has been a weekend of planning. We are trying to figure out where we might like to have things (outside), garden, swing, conservatory, porch, fences, paths, flowers, etc. We are getting excited about planting things. Yes, I know it is way to early. I say this as we watch another 5 -8 inches of snow fall outside. But still I am thinking about it.

We have also taken two trips to the library to search for information on our house. We have not yet found anything. But we will keep looking. We really think our house had a front porch at one time. And we would like to know what it had looked like to help us plan the future porch.

I did a lot of searching on the internet. I found a couple of really cool looking conservatories. Right now we are not sure if we will have it attached to the house or separate. I was also looking for designs for the garage. We would like to make the garage a little bit wider, and have a second floor on it. Then there would be a bridge path connecting the second floor of the garage to the first floor kitchen. This bridge would also create a covered walkway from the ground level of the garage to the basement.

I am pretty sure about some of the flowers that I want to plant. Mostly I want to know where I want to put them. So I need to have an idea of where things should go. We also need to get the swings up for the kids and if we are lucky build a little Victorian playhouse for them. It would be nice to have these ready when the weather gets warmer.

Day 312

Well, here we go with some more fun. Jonathan and I were sitting in here near the fire. Merlin started to act like he could sense or hear something coming. Everytime we would make a noise he made a strange noise. He was continually looking at the ceiling. This is never a good sign. Bug, Bird, Bat... Well, it was once again a bat. It started flying around the room and Jonathan went for the gun. I guess it is a good thing we have a "warning cat."

Day 307 - 311

The past week has been pretty quiet around here. I day of sun a couple of days of clouds and a day of snow. Melinda did make a Valentine's party for us (more about that on my other blog).

Day 303 - 306

Well, we are still waiting for spring... There isn't a lot of things we can do right now, but plan. Hopefully it will start getting warm soon and melt all of this snow. :)

Happy Valentine's Day everyone.

Day 302

Treasure hunting:

After supper we went down into the crawl space to see what we could find with our new metal detector. If someone wanted to hide their money or treasure that would have been a good place to do it. Right now it has a lot of junk down there, screen doors, glass, pieces of wood and pipe. There are little pieces of wood, and can you believe it trash. ;) But after digging around in the cold for about an hour we found several old nails, some wire, pipe, some foil and a piece of copper pipe. We will keep on working down there at least until the ground outside isn't frozen. If we keep it up we will have the crawl space cleaned up. The girls thought this might be a fun place to have a playhouse. We will also be able to use this to help us clean up the yard as we know there are lots of nails and things out there. Plus we make actually find some treasure - or at least a few coins.


As we entered the crawl space...


Jonathan sweeping the ground with the metal detector..


What could it be?

Day 301

Well, this is not really some work we have done today. But it gives me something to write about during the cold, workless days of winter.

We have several things in mind for the outside of the house. We are not ready for it yet, but we are wondering what color we would like to paint the house and what the tower roof and the mansard part of the roof will look like.

We are also figuring out where we want our wrap around porch. The porch would wrap around from the east (front) to the south of the house. We want to put on a conservatory room so that we can have a nice sunny spot for growing things. The conservatory would be on the south side of the house probably connected to the wrap around porch, with a door into the parlor. In the conservatory I would like to have a koi pond. We have been wondering if we can make this area 2-stories. I have been (jokingly) trying to talk Jonathan into a 2-story cylinder of fish like they have at Henry Doyle Zoo. It would be really cool. But I am sure that we don't want to have to take care of that. So I will just stick with the koi pond. ;)

North of the house we are considering putting in a garden maze. The thought right now would be mostly stone wall maze, not a hedge maze.

In the back (west side) we would have the 2-story garage. The first floor of the garage would of course be for our cars. The 2nd floor of the garage is still in question. We are thinking of using it for storage. But there is the possibility of a 'guest house' up there as well. My parents have been teasing us that we already took away their 'apartment' when we knocked down some of the walls here on second floor and took out the extra kitchen and bathroom. So maybe we have need of a guest house. :D There would be a bridge-like cover walkway connecting the second floor of the garage to the first floor kitchen. The walkway would then be a covered path connecting the 1st floor of the garage to the basement. I was considering having a swing hanging under one of the arches in the path.

There would also be some sort of play structure for the kids in the back. We took down the "space station" we were building at the old house as well as the playground. Hopefully this summer we will find a way to put them together for the kids. I think we are going to do something a little different than what we had. But we haven't thought much about that yet.

We also want some kind of tall fence or hedge around the whole property. We are unsure of what we want yet. And in the front yard I thought a fountain would be very cool. Of course I also see beautiful paths lined with different flowers and plants all around.

For now I think that is about all we have thought of. Except for the TARDIS in the middle of my stone maze. I guess you could probably see the observatory up on the roof from the outside as well.

Day 300

Well we have owned the house for 300 days. I wonder what it is going to look like 300 days from now...