Our House on the Hill

We moved into a new home last month but I’m only now able to give you a glimpse of where we live. Mostly, this post is for my mom. Hi, Mom!

We live on a hill, and most of the property is heavily wooded. Here’s the view from the bottom of the drive.

That’s Fur Child up on the right. He ran off after a cat and he’s in trouble. He’s slinking back up the drive hoping I don’t catch up with him.

Instead of flowers on this lot, we have flowering mushrooms. This one is about the size of a volleyball.

We also have shelf mushrooms growing out of tree stumps.

Further up the drive is the “back” of the house.

Once upon a time, there was a different driveway to the house and the front door of the house is now a door to nowhere. Since our boys walk up the drive from the bus, we need to cut some stairs into the hill so they can use this door after school.

The balcony area on the upper right part of the house is off of the master bedroom. It feels a bit like we’re living in a tree house.

After you circle around the house, you come to the “front” of the house, which again,  used to be the back.

Off to the right of the house is a detached garage.

The boxes under the tarps are now inside the garage. I currently refer to them as Mt. Boxmore. I don’t want to talk about it. However, Hubs just got the left side of the garage cleaned out enough that we can park the car there.

To the left of the house is a spot where there used to be an above ground pool way back when. We may dig this area out a bit and have a small pond here.

If you are looking out from the front of the house, there is an upper hill area.

There’s another building with a barn and an apartment. It’s back in the maples, behind the fir tree on the right.

On the back side of this building is the barn.

This looks a little rough, but we’ve been working on it for several days now. We’d just pulled the garage door area closed to see what we’d need to do to fix it. On the left side of the barn area, behind those big doors is my workshop.

This is standing just inside the big doors. To the right is the area behind the garage door space. This space is for the gardening tools and mowers.

The space through the door behind the mower is another work area, but we’re using it as a storage area.

From the back of the barn, looking out at the doors, you can see more of the space. It has a lot of room. The back part of the barn will be my paint booth.

Here it is with some of the stuff put back into it. I spent today putting up pegboard to hang my tools and Hubs installed some shop lights for me. I’ve swept down a LOT of bugs and webs and have killed several wasps nests.

If you’re standing outside looking at the barn, here is a 360 degree view, starting at the barn and turning clockwise.

Behind the very back tree line you can see on the right is a pond. It needs some cleaning out.

The barn is at the very top of the hill. From there, it starts to go back down. This is the back side of the hill.

Here is the campground area. It’s hard to tell from this shot, but in the very center of picture is a grassy area. There’s a volleyball court area down there.

On the right is an old horse barn that acts as a cooking/serving space. There’s a fire pit  and plenty of room for the scouts to set up tents. Good thing Hubs is the Scoutmaster of our troop.

Here’s an old rabbit hutch. The girls that used to live in the house raised rabbits for 4-H. One of the rabbits escaped the pen long ago and has lived on the property ever since.

Fur Child likes to chase the feral bunny, but he will never catch him.

It’s weird, though, because the other day I was driving down the driveway to run an errand and the bunny was hoping up the driveway as if he was on his way home.

And now we’re back looking at the barn.

We’ve cleaned up some of the evergreen trees along the property. Most of them were growing into the driveway and were very bushy. You can see the difference in the blue spruce on the right. I still need to trim that one.

I like that it opens up the view a bit and helps make the actual bushes stand out. The area on the far side of the driveway is all forest and is part of the property.

If we go back to the house area, to the right of the garage is another part of the upper hill. I’m at the top of the hill looking back at the house.

There’s a chicken coop just waiting for some chickens. There’s also some raised garden beds up here that I’m looking forward to planting next spring.

We have a burn pile up here. Since we’ve been cutting down a lot of limbs and scrap trees (there’s too many little trees going into the driveway) we need a burn area.

I asked Hubs to stand by the fire so you can see this is a good sized burn pile today.

Behind the burn area is the park area. Seriously, it’s the size of a park.

The pond area I mentioned is back in those trees in the center of the picture.

Turning clockwise, we see the other side of the apartment and barn. That fenced area was for a goat. I have no interest in having a goat. Ever.

Okay, that was a lot of pictures. We obviously have plenty to keep us busy.  I’m thinking the park area will make a great sledding hill in the winter.

I’m not really looking forward to dealing will all the leaves that are soon to be falling, either, but I’m betting it’s going to be very pretty here in a few weeks.

I just got the house set up to the point that I no longer feel like we are living in a storage unit. I have a lot of projects lined up and I’m happy that my life is settling back down. I started an actual creative project today and hope to have it finished this week to show you.

I hope you enjoyed the tour.

Suesan