Our First Month in Our New Home: The Month Of Bewilderment

So it has officially been 1 month since we moved into our new home, so I feel that I should give you an update. It has really been crazy for the past couple of weeks, especially every time that we come across an unexpected surprise, but everything has been (slowly but surely) getting finished. We have had a ton of family and friends help out, doing everything from washing windows to bringing fridges (yes, that is plural) to tilling our yard, and we are so grateful to all of the continued help that we have been receiving. Here is the past month for ya!

Week One

The first week was lots of moving and cleaning, followed by more cleaning. We started off by bombing the house for bugs the first day (which set off the smoke detectors and freaked us out that we would blow up the house before our first night!!). Then it was off to cleaning, painting, patching, primering, and then some more cleaning (it was a bit dirty!).

Two of the bedrooms had been painted a BRIGHT purple color, so we had to primer that, and there were over 100 holes that needed to be patched. Everyone got together and helped with all of the painting and cleaning, so that we could then move on to moving everything from our tiny apartment into our new home. The cleaning and painting lasted the whole weekend, at about 12 hours each day…exhausting! However, here is the result, this is my office once we started getting moved into our home:

Week Two

Now that we had moved into our home, it was time to get it cleaned up (yes, more cleaning). There was a tree hanging over from the neighbor’s yard that was in danger of falling onto our yard, and it was on the power lines in our backyard, so as a matter of safety, that had to go first. My father and husband were left unsupervised (kinda…you can tell I was poking through the blinds), and were very innovative in their techniques. However, they won, and the tree lost, so I suppose that is all that matters.

The backyard had been a “catch-all” for any random crap that did not have a home. We were planning on placing our garden on the side of the house, so all of that stuff had to leave. We are at 6 trashcans full, and are biding our time every week until trash day. After a couple of days of moving, I decided that the mountain was worth a photo, so this is what it looked like after hours of removing stuff from our garden-to-be. Does anyone know how long it takes bricks to grow roots???

Cleaning this up took a lot longer than we had thought it would take. We were able to find over 100 stones (bricks/pavers/flagstones/etc), an entire tree that had been chopped down, an old picket fence that we don’t know if it came from our house or not, and tons of rotten, infested plywood that everything was sitting on top of. Oh, and 6 black widows to top it off.

Week Three

This week we spent trying to finish removing everything from the garden, as well as planting some of our gifts from our housewarming party (more on Planting Adventures later). In addition to a giant concrete boulder over 2 feet in diameter, here is all of the wood pulled out of the lot, and all of the blocks removed, finally emptying the lot corner.

 

After we had finally removed everything, we could bring in a rototiller to break the ground up for the garden. Although we still need to level the garden at this point, what a difference this made! We will till in mulch and soil next time, but this was a great start…check out the difference!!

I get so excited just looking at this picture…it really shows how much you can change something with tons of work! Here, check out the side by side:

Week Four

Now that everything has been cleared, it is time to start planting (or so we thought!). Starting off the garden was easy enough, but the surprises really hit outside of the garden. The garden got some beautiful tomato plants and compost.

Then the famous digging excavation. We started digging to plant 3 trees, about 18 inches down, when we came across metal:

While digging this giant ditch, we also came across another huge amount of miscellaneous debris about the same depth down, but nothing that would prevent a tree to grow, so we just left it there. We also found a 20 foot long 2×4 that was just under the grass surface next to the other tree that had to be removed. It was apparently there from the owners before the people who we had purchased the house from, in order to separate the sand box from the trampoline (what???). Here is the wood as we started to remove it, and then the final amount of wood that had been removed from the center of the yard.

At the end of the month, we had finally removed the metal object from the pit. It was next to ANOTHER one, which we decided not to remove (as we had already spent a week on this as it was), and it was on top of several metal sign posts (which we just decided to cut out, rather than find out how large they were).

We also set up part of the garden with our flagstone pathway (thanks to the free stones!), as well as sectioned off our herb garden, mulched it, and prepared to plant. Now we get to start all of the planting and mulching. We don’t expect much out of this year, but all of this will turn our dirt into great soil to start harvesting in the years to come. All in all, a very exciting month!!