Finally, Pictures of the House

I finally took some pictures of the new house (click on them for a more detailed view). I'll do a series of blog posts for you all. First up is the outside.

The front of the house:


As you can see I'm in the process of weeding the gardens. I've also planted some more seeds and bulbs to fill it in a bit more and plan to pick up some ground cover. But heck, look at those hostas! I have never had a garden like that with such big, beautiful plants. And everything seemed to come out a little early as well which leads me to think we have a bit of a micro-climate with this property.

The shingles are all cedar so I'm sort of planning to not paint them anymore and let them silver and blacken - a look I always loved and one that's sort of a classic Nova Scotia thing.

Here's the back:


The honeysuckle vine is climbing the porch off my master bath. Can you believe it? My own porch? Further on you can see the french doors off the dining room. It's there we watch the birds, deer and bear from. There's a ledger board installed for a big deck off the back but we're in no hurry to get that down anytime soon.

The pond:

You can see Catherine trying to catch frogs on the far side. It's pretty big, eh? We've also seen a turtle in the pond and in the evening the speckled trout in the pond leap out to catch the black flies and insects that gather above the pond's surface. We plan to build a little mini-wharf with a ladder for swimming and hope to pick up a little peddle boat at some point.

The backyard:
See the feeder? The first time I saw the black bear he was scooting between it and the house towards the woods. The second time we all saw it and it was sauntering across the lawn between the woods and the feeder. We got an absolutely beautiful view. But he was a timid soul and ran with either a dog bark or a yell from us. The feeder is also where we've been watching a large variety birds including purple and gold finches, warblers, sparrows, red polls, grackles, mourning doves, red wings blackbirds, evening grossbeaks and more. This winter our deer would come out to feed on the parsnip pile a few feet this side of the tree line. We've also had the usual squirrels and chipmunks. And all of it we can watch while sitting at our table.

If, in the backyard shot, you turned around 180 degrees you'd see this view, the land above the pond:

There's a big patch of rhubarb there and I'm thinking that would be the perfect place for a shade garden. The path goes down to a beautiful little frog pond that's on our neighbours property but the kids have permission to visit.

Here's the view from our front porch:
*sigh* I couldn't get the view out of my mind the whole time we were waiting for the sale on this house to close.

So there's the outside. I'll post some picture of the inside next.