Show and Tell Tuesday | Show Us Your Yard

I am linking up with Andrea at Momfessionals today to give you a little tour around our yard.

But I have a slight caveat - since we don't have much of a yard to speak of, I thought I would share just a little bit about our house and our front porch as we spend a lot of time out there.

Our house is just three years old, but it is the newest home in this section of town. A very old abandoned house used to stand on our lot until a few years ago when a local builder purchased it and razed it to build our current home - though we didn't know at the time that we would end up buying it. That's another story for another day!

So the house that used to sit on our lot, looked like this:

(Thank you, Google Maps and your historical data!)

And another view:

Totally creepy, right? I am pretty sure it was haunted.

From what we gather and the stories we have heard, the original house was falling down around itself and housed all sorts of interesting characters. We heard that the staircase would shimmy back and forth - that you could actually swing from it! And the basement was always flooded. 

Mike said we need to paint our front door red since this old house had a red door. I don't hate the idea.

We also don't have a back side entrance with porch which would have been kind of cool.

We started with zero landscaping. When we moved in, we had a sidewalk, some steps up to the porch and some grass. However, this is what the house looked like when we went through it the first time and fell in LOVE.

                                            

So cute, right? I love our house.

As a housewarming gift, my dad and mom purchased me this cute little grapevine tree. I have it lit with little white twinkle lights but somehow they turn on in the morning instead of at night now. I need to fix that. 

Then as part of a thank you for letting us live here while their house was being built, my parents got us a front storm door, the red Adirondacks and the little table. I was really excited to add some color to the front of our house since at the time we had no landscaping.

My mom and I made this pennant banner one afternoon. It didn't last very long. When it broke, it broke my heart and my will to ever make a pennant banner again. ;)

I don't have a picture of it for some reason, but our neighbor that lives behind us has taken Mike and me under her wing. She is a sweet lady I used to work with at the church. 

She has offered us a number of plants. Mike had purchased three little hostas from Walmart that barely made it through their first summer here. So we replaced some of them with hostas from her flowerbeds. She also gave us to seedums and a mint plant. Mike worked hard to install those plants and even ended up breaking our shovel on one of the seedums!

                                               

With the addition of two little boys, these two cute little green Adirondacks just ended up on our porch ;) Also a gift from my dad and mom.

                                              

I ended up buying this cool chalkboard at Hobby Lobby. I am not the best at chalk art though so it sat blank for weeks before I mustered up enough courage to make a statement with my Thin Blue Line Love. I am actually still a little apprehensive about it given the amount of traffic that comes past our house, but we haven't had any negative feedback from it - yet.

I do have a fear that THIS will happen though to Mike's cruiser.

                                                        

And my mom and I yet again tackled making a pennant banner - but I decided to use different colors of duct tape. It's smaller flags, but it looks great and has been hanging up for two months! Very durable.

We decided to move forward on having someone build us a porch railing with a baby gate to keep our kids on the porch. A local contractor ended up building it for us, and he did a great job! 

I took this last picture right after the contractor installed the baby gate. I moved all the furniture back on to it, but I haven't gotten a chance to take an updated picture.

Our next project will be fencing in our backyard - I hope! We have some interesting neighbors and you know good fences make good neighbors :) We don't own the back 20 some feet of our lot. That is still owned by the builder as he owns and rents out the house next door. He said we can do whatever we want on that space though. There once was a dilapidated chain link fence that Mike got rid of last year.

The downside to that is someone mistook our driveway for an alley and drove through our backyard and our neighbor's backyard when it snowed. Mike is convinced the person was drunk.

We do have a fun little playset that was given to us by friends of the family. Grayson has a ball playing on it :)

So that's our yard tour.