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!

Back Steps

I had an unexpected project come up this weekend that had to be started and finished by today.  

When I tore down my deck two years ago, I never got around to building a new set of stairs coming off the back of the house.  We are in the middle of doing a refinance, and the appraiser made our appraisal contingent upon a set of stairs being built.  This weekend.  Crap; my normal process of spending weeks, if not months, planning something in my head was out the window.  I had to improvise.

Here's what I came up with.  Not bad for about 8 hours work, if I do say so myself. (and I do.)

New Back Steps

As you can see, the floor joists still need a little cleaning up.  I'll get to it, really.

Out Back

I dug up some photos of the backyard that I took last summer before I ripped out the deck and before the back stretch of fence was replaced

Here's what it looks like now. Not much of an improvement, but a blank slate at least.

This was taken from the corner of the yard looking back at where the old deck used to be on the back of the addition to the house. The garage is on the right. My short term plan is to level the yard, throw down some topsoil and grass seed, and build some simple steps for the back door. Eventually the addition will be transformed into a 3-season porch with divided-light casement windows all the way around. That project, however, is at the bottom of the list.