Front Door/Back Door

Kelli over at Sugar Creek Farm tagged her readers the other day on pictures of your front and back doors. How perfect for you other housebloggers. So if you haven't done it yet, your it!

The front door opens up onto the porch we rebuilt a few years ago. As you can see we have most of the painting done on it, but we need to door the floor yet. So far it's been a good thing we haven't because it's become a place to run saws so we don't have a mess in the now finished portions of the house.

Once we have a warm weekend when I am not so busy I will clean off the wood scraps you see and give it a good sweeping. Then I will venture out into the play house and retrieve our porch furniture.

The swing was just put back up last week. Last year Molly was terrified of the thing. This year is no different. She cried until we took her out. Hoping to inspire her to give it another try the best way we know how we placed Elsie in it. She loved it! Tim had her swinging as high as his head and she was shrieking and giggling. She's going to be my wild child.

This shot is out the back door to the left. I didn't want to open the door all the way because the cats were trying to escape and it's not cat chasing weather (when is it ever?).

It's hard to see, but where there is no grass is our pile of dirt that we have been using to landscape and fill in the last few years. I can't wait to be done with it and get rid of the weedy mess.

The little cream colored structure is Molly's play house. I don't think I've done a post on it yet. You'll have to wait until later this spring when we get it moved on to the pad we poured.

If I had taken the picture directly out the door you would have seen the spot where one day, hopefully, there will be a garage. Then this door, and the mudroom will get much more use as this will be the primary door the family uses. Someday I hope to have a lovely winding sidewalk to the garage and a herb/cutting garden planted around it.

As you can tell by the pictures it is raining here. Want to know why? Well because I chose today to pick up the trees forever plants. Yes, I'm having flash backs to Halloween when it seems to rain every year and mom always made me wear a coat over my costume. What's the point then?!? When I got up this morning I thought maybe I could get away with planting in what looked like a gentle mist, but by the time the girls and I got going it was a all out rain shower. So I stuck the plants in the wet hay covering the foundation of the playhouse, and will wait for the next sunny day.

Old Map Site

Thanks Gary,

So I was catching up on my regular houseblogs and I came across this link on This Old Crack House. It takes you to a site where you can see old maps of your area. Granted the ones they have don't go far enough back to give me any information I didn't already have (however I did learn the old school house down the road that was tore down that Gladys Cable went to was Number 4). But it's still fun to look.

The site is: Historic Map Works.

Real Estate Listing

On my last post it was noted the sad lack of detail that went into the realtor's on-line ad of the home. So I decided to do a little comparison shopping to see if that's just how the Realtors in this area worked. So here are some cool houses from competing Realtors for your viewing pleasure.

Parson Real Estate- Cool virtual tour, lots more details
http://parsonrealestate.com/list/res/B1/index.shtml

New Age is pretty low on the info too, and annoyingly they have a more picture button that doesn't have more pictures for the one i wanted to see
http://www.newage-realty.com/listingdisplay.php

Cedar Valley- lots more details and a nicely organized photo page.
http://www.cedarvalleyiowarealty.com/index.cfm?fa=listings.view&listingid=41016&propertytypeid=1

The house being sold by Cedar Valley is why it would be nice to have more photos up. I like the way it looked on the outside, but once I looked at the photos of the inside I knew it was a house I would never be interested in.

This is the first time I've really looked at houses on line. When we bought our first house we saw it in the local paper. Plus, back then we didn't have a lot of choice because our spending range was so limited.

Before we found this house we went with the approach of if we drove by something we like we'd find out who owned it and then take a look inside. Sometimes we'd use a realtor sometimes we wouldn't. After awhile it got out we were looking for a fixer-upper and Realtors started calling us. I've been meaning to do a post on the houses we looked at before we found this place. Especially since some of them are close to falling down now.

Seven Mile Road House

Seven Mile Road House

I've been driving by this house since before I could drive. It's been for sale now for awhile (I just keep forgetting to post about it). I think it is so beautiful. And it's set back far enough I don't think you'd notice you're on a fairly busy highway. I was all excited to look it up because I've always wondered what it might look like inside, but the realtor seems to think nature photos and bird tracks will sell the house better. I don't know how listing homes works, maybe they don't show inside shots if it's not vacant. Or maybe the inside is really, really hideous. But I can't really picture that because it's so well-kept on the outside.