First Week at the House

Our first week owning the house was basically spent doing a rough cleaning inside, meeting with contractors for upcoming work and my daytime task was to clean up the yard area closest to the house for the kids to play on while we are there. Our added bonus with this house is a really nice swingset in the backyard and a big built-in sandbox. Do these make up for the 14 month wait for this house?....well, I wouldn't go that far, but it is a nice perk.

Everything was filthy, however, so I did a lot of disinfecting, scrubbing, and replacing of parts. There's still some work to do next spring but since we only have a few more weeks of playing outside this season, everything is at least in clean, usable condition. Voila!

Here's Nate on one of the replacement swings I added to the swingset. He loves the swings!! Thank God one of my kids does since Ben doesn't like them too much and would rather climb , slide and build. Ben playing on the little build-in picnic table underneath the swingset. He loves little tables for lining his trucks up so this is a big source of entertainment for him. Hours of uninterrupted time for me...

Ben's enjoying the big sandbox here. I was able to salvage a handful of big trucks and other various sandtoys that were left in the sandbox and are in decent condition. So after a full round of scrubbing and disinfecting, they have now become part of our sandtoy collection. Many of these were ours from home already, though. Now we have someplace to put them!

Finally, here's Ben mowing his 6 acres of property. He also has a plastic ride-on Craftsman tractor that is just like the one his daddy will be buying to really mow the lawn. I'll have to get a photo of that next time...

Stay tuned for more photos this weekend as Andrew starts the demolition phase of construction in several rooms.