We live in a neighborhood in Washington State northeast of the city of Seattle. We are surrounded by new homes. Our home is the original home that was here by itself surrounded by trees and fields. It was part of a nursery. The owners of this home finally sold all the property around it to a developer who built many homes on small parcels. There used to be a dirt road access to our home from the main busy road. New roads were built when the neighborhood was developed and access to our home is more convoluted. We moved into this house in 1998.
These 4 photos are the road that comes to the back side of our house and then the drive you have to come up to get to the front side of our home. You could say we are the “sticks out like a sore thumb” house in the neighborhood. One of the major attractions we had to this old house was the detached garage/shop/barn. We have lots of extra junk and cars (projects and hobbies) that fit in this extra space nicely. Our chain link fence is another thing that is different than all the new wooden fences in the neighborhood!
We’ve made several improvements to this old house but are now reconsidering what we want to do. We have put new siding on 1/3 of the home so the front and one side of the home are different than the back of the house.
This is the front of our house that you can’t see from the street. You can see the new siding we’ve added here. We are now seriously considering the idea of demolishing the house and rebuilding on this property. We have some heating challenges because of how old the house is and the way things were added on over the years. We also have very uneven floors and some flooding issues when we get big storms. We can only make a wild guess as to when the original part of the house was built. We tend to think it was in the ’60’s. But it wouldn’t surprise us if the original little section of the house that’s been added on to over the years is a lot older than that. The last addition that there are county records on shows the ’70’s.
I decided to add this photo taken from the inside of my house looking out my stairwell window. A pretty view of my neighbor’s Maple tree in the late fall (all her leaves land in my yard!) 🙂
Head over to Kitten’s homeschool on Monday to see more Fun Monday participants.
Photobucket has blacked out all my photos I was storing on their site and they are holding them hostage. I am working on updating my more than 4000 posts.
Welcome to Christmas Tree Treasures hosted by Morning Glory at her blog 
There are so many Christmas traditions that we have enjoyed over the years. Today I’ll share a couple that have stayed with us since Dear and I were married. His Mother started the rich tradition of reading Luke 2: 1-20 at the Christmas Eve celebrations before everyone tore into their gifts. Over the years we tried different ways to incorporate this rich tradition. We started including it on my side of the families gatherings, too. One year while all the cousins were still young I made a very elementary coloring book with all these verses for each child in each family to color and help them to memorize this passage. At our Christmas Eve celebration I brought several rolls of quarters and each child that could recite any of the passage got a quarter for every verse they remembered! It was loads of fun. Recently my brother dared his nieces and nephews to recite these in Russian and to whoever could he’d give big bucks. Ha! One of my nephews met the challenge and my brother gave him $100 and my father was so pleased he kicked in an extra $50.
The Happy Wonderer ~ ellen b. 