BIIIIG work in progress

We've been working all spring on a huuuge project that's partway finished... here's a few pics to finally reveal to you what it is! --We're in the process of fixing up a house which we will be moving into in a couple weeks. I recently lost my job (!), so we decided to find a cheaper place to live. It's in another neighborhood in the same town, so it's only a few miles away. It was a foreclosed property, had been empty for almost a year, and was sort of beat-up, tired, and run-down feeling, so it needs lots of help.

It's a two-story, which wasn't our first choice, but it's growing on us... the layout inside is really open, which is a big plus: 3 bedrooms upstairs, (one for my art studio, one for Tom's music room!!), an office, formal dining room space (which will be for the piano- we're not exactly formal dining room sort of people, so that space would be wasted otherwise), and a very open family room/kitchen space. (about the 2-story thing: Sedona remembers stairs, since we lived in a split-level house in Illinois when she was a puppy, but Bisbee has never seen stairs before and I think she'll need some "staircase special ed" --she managed to get up the steps, but absolutely refused to go down- I ended up having to carry her.) Above is the view into the kitchen from the family room the first time we saw it- this shows the open plan of the living area... it also shows the tiki torches the previous owners left behind, leaving lamp oil dripping down the wall and onto the carpet! (obviously, this pic is before we did any work on the place!) We got the whole place repainted (who uses flat paint on the walls in living spaces, anyway?? --there were smudges and smears everywhere, plus lots of staples, crayon marks, and tons of holes in the wall that we had to take care of); we also got new carpet, so we can start fresh with a stain-free, dirt-free, pet-hair free space. The backyard when we first saw it: this is another of the major projects that will take quite a while to complete!! It has irrigation already installed, so we may get the center area re-sodded eventually. So far, we took out the dead trees along the wall and pulled out a ton of weeds, and we've started adding some of our favorite desert plants to both the front and back yards. We took advantage of last week's heavy rain to dig up and move our Mediterranean fan palm to the new house. The rain helped soften the dirt to allow us to dig it up easily... it would have taken days of watering before we could have done it, otherwise! This tree didn't go quietly, though- the photo above shows the backwards-facing teeth these palm trees have on every stem... sort of like shark teeth!! (Tom and I both have plenty of scratches and battle scars from them, but we won the palm tree war.)

Here it is in the new backyard... it looks tons better than the dead palm tree, of course, and I think it will do well here with regular irrigation. (and minimal pruning, since I don't relish hurting myself again anytime soon!) I'm a bit ambivalent about moving- I will miss our house, but I'm excited to move forward from where we are now. I don't like the actual moving process, but I'm anxious to get it done, so we can start settling into the new house. (...and to set up my new art studio space, which I will show you when it gets completed, since that will be the one and only time it will be clean!)