A Trip Down Memory Lane

**Before I forget, the pattern for the placemats is Cotton Ginny's My Chicken Kitchen.  Hope that helps!

I've been inside for a few days, as I've mentioned, and one of the things I've been doing is getting my sewing room together, which is no easy feat.  However, while doing this, I thought that having a room simply for sewing is lovely, but kind of a waste of space in our little house.  I truly need an office.  So, I've combined the two, and now my sewing room is becoming a combo of sewing room/office, which meant that the big computer that I do my office work on had to come up from the depths of the basement.  It wasn't being used down there, because the light is poor and it's cold, and I really need to use it.  Now it's here and getting much more use.

One of the things I keep on this computer are pictures, and since bringing the computer up from the basement, I've had a chance to sit and look at some of them.  There are tons and tons of them, and many of them are from our old house, which we fixed up really nicely, and which had beautiful gardens. 

This house was in a  very suburban development.  We were surrounded by neighbors, which I hated, because I need my space and privacy, which this house did not have.  To me the yard is just another room in the house, and I want to use it that way and not be seen by everyone while doing it.  So I wasn't very happy there.  However, the site had fantastic sunlight and nice dirt, and because I was a stay at home mom with two little kids, I spent a LOT of time either in my sewing room or in the gardens, trying to keep busy.  There were no gardens to speak of when we moved in.  I spent the nearly 3 years we lived in that house changing all of that.  Do you want to see how it all turned out?  Sit on down and let's take a trip, shall we?

This is what we started with.  A 1970's house with 1970's bushes.  Woo hoo!

Can you see the neighbor? UGH!  There's one on the other side, too.  And across the street one way, and the other way.  And I could see into everyone's backyards all around.  BLECH.

So it was pretty bad.  Ugly and outdated, no privacy.  I hated it.  I set about gardening, and didn't stop until we had to sell the house in 2009, due to a job loss.  It was the best/worst thing that ever happened to us, because we wound up here.  But that's another story.  Let's just enjoy the after pictures, shall we?

The house was improved...

The gardens were added...

Boundary gardens dug in (because it looked like one big lawn otherwise.  See the neighbor's driveway?  That drove me nuts).

Around the house

 This is our driveway's garden.  One of my favorites.



The end of the driveway.

Ditto.

We had a total of four trees.  Four.  Three of them were in the front yard.  I could still see all the neighbors.

And of course, the suburban shed.

And yes, I did have a vegetable garden, a very small one.  But it was lush.  Take a look...

That's my little boy and his Clifford sitting in the midst. 

Tomato jungle

Ah....memories.....

Ok, enough of that.

I did take some of the roses with me to this house (and the chickens like to eat them) and I did take some of the irises to this house as well (and the geese like to eat them).  They've been planted, but need protection from "predators".  I hope that one day the gardens here will be as beautiful as the gardens there, but I'm in no rush.  Except maybe to get a lush vegetable garden.  That would be a good thing.

Spring where are you????