The bottom half and then some

Well, I planned to take pictures of the entire house before I posted, but I can't get the main level of the house to look the way I want and then remember to take pictures at the same time. That's okay, the main level has all our same old furniture and no pictures on the walls yet. So it wouldn't be anything new or exciting.

So let's get this party started with a tour of our basement. I know, you can hardly contain yourself.

Downstairs bathroom...Aaron put new lighting and mirror in here. It was pretty dungeony before. Now it's visitor friendly.

We have a wood burning stove in the basement. I don't want Carter to get used to climbing on it and so my play yard has come in very handy.

Our craigslist entertainment center with no tv (we have since improved this picture with a yard sale tv and two lounger camping chairs ;)

Olivia and Carter just love to play house and store in the basement.

Toy corner is underneath the stairs.

Storage room until we get some of it up in the attic.

Aaron did a great job improving this view. He painted the stairwell going down to the basement and put a new light fixture up.

Moving outside:

Some previous owners of the house put up a shed in the middle of the yard. They also had a compost pile behind it.

(I have missed our green grass & weeds...everything is dry and crispy now)

Moving the shed to the back corner of the yard was a big check mark on Aaron's to-do list. He enlisted the help of our neighbor, Gary (in picture) and another neighbor, Mark (behind the shed). Luckily we had two engineers thinking about how to get the job done inexpensively for three months and along with some prayers (by myself ;), it worked!

So now we have two big dirt spots in our back yard. One from the compost pile and one from where the shed was.

Front of the house.

Moving on to more precious things:

Olivia loves to "feed" Lucky through the fence. She feeds him leaves and then he just spits it out. Lucky actually used to live on our side of the fence.

Carter has seen Olivia up on this stool a lot. He now always has to have a turn too.

Such a big boy.

I do actually put shoes on him...sometimes.

We borrowed our neighbors wagon to move rocks from our dirt piles, and Olivia fell in love with it.

She is getting pretty good at riding her $2 bike! It's been fun to see Olivia get more comfortable on it and enjoy riding it.

Another thing we have to take care of...dirt and weeds. I would love for this to be grass next year. We'll see though. (like I said...everything is dry & crispy) In the mean time, Olivia and Carter love sprinking dirt on each other.

I wanted to have this post done earlier, but Aaron and I got looking around this website...I think I know what I'm getting people for Christmas this year!