Our home received a makeover this Spring on both the inside and outside. We filed a claim with our home insurance company last Fall for soot damage and received an assessment from a home renovation/restoration company from Elizabethtown. So, when we were away on Spring break, they came in to repaint all our walls and ceiling, deep-cleaned the carpet and changed all the blinds. The soot wouldn’t come out of the edges of the carpet upstairs, so we are supposed to have our carpet replaced this Summer. It seems to us the new grey wall color is brighter than the old one, which produces a brighter effect inside the house. Or perhaps the whole house seems brighter because everything is no longer covered with a layer of soot. On the hardwood floors, this winter we have put colorful large rugs to help us not notice so much dirt. The overall effects are that the separated spaces look more connected and that we feel warmer and cozier walking on the floors these days.

Outside, we now have grass all over our front lawn for the first time since we moved into this house. Our big maple tree casts such a broad shadow on the front lawn that grass had never succeeded to grow there. According to one of our neighbors Jack, who has lived on this street for almost 30 years, no one had succeeded in making grass grow on our front lawn. Until now. Last Fall, Isaac, our lawn care man, tried sowing shade grass twice before we saw some results. Isaac and his company are still managing our lawn weekly to make sure the new grass stay healthy and to trouble-shoot. According to another of our neighbors Troy, it will take a few years for the newly-sown grass to stabilize.

Our upcoming house project is to decorate our front porch with flower baskets and to put flowers in our flower box. We won’t be doing any vegetable and flower planting in the backyard, as we usually do every year, because we are trying to focus our energy and money on improving the inside of our home this year.

Thank you for reading! We hope everyone enjoys their house and home as much as we do ours.