Happy Anniversary House!

It was 8 years ago today that we moved in to the 1916 Portland Bungalow, so I thought I'd celebrate with a blog post!

You haven't heard much from me lately because I haven't been doing any house projects.  I got a little burnt out a couple years ago (when I finally gave-in and paid someone to finish painting the dining room).  Since then I've been spending my free time doing other techie stuff, not related to the house.

The top of our list for this spring has been to get the back yard in order so we can eat dinner outside during the summer months and have company over for backyard S'mores parties. ;-)

I started by taking a week off work for Spring Break, which involved 9-straight days of back-breaking work to get the yard tilled and the patio laid.  I ended up taking about 10 yards of topsoil out of the back yard, one wheelbarrow at a time!

Then I spend another few weeks breaking up the concrete footings from the old deck and leveling the yard out (there was about a 4" crown of dirt covering most of the yard).  I could tell when I got back to level because I found about 5 ancient sprinkler heads from the original sprinkler system that were buried by 4" of dirt).

Yesterday was the icing on the cake; it took me a whole two hours to lay all of the sod and have an insta-lawn!  Tonight was our first dinner on the patio, and it was fantastic!