Outside, Everybody, Outside!

Our old house was on a half acre lot which is a really nice size, but it was a pie slice shaped lot with most of the yard in the front and on the side.  We had a detached garage in the backyard, along with a deck off the house, and eventually we added a swing set for our son.  This ate up a lot of the space.  We also talked about adding a fence so that we could let our kids play outside but couldn't figure out a good way to add one that would still allow us to access our garage easily by car.  When we decided to move we knew we had to find a home on at least half an acre, preferably more.  When we looked at the house we now own I knew it was a strong contender for "the one" as soon as we stepped out the back door!

 

 Our current house is on just over an acre and has a good size front yard, and a really huge backyard.  We have grape vines, two orange trees, and some mature blueberry bushes.  It's our suburban homestead.  For our son's last birthday we had the party at our house and rented a HUGE bounce house for him.  At 60 feet long it was three train cars with different features in each one.  The kids had a blast on it and we still had plenty of room for other play and grilling space and eating space.

As we have lived with the space longer though we are starting to figure out what we should probably do to optimize the space for us in the future.  We have a patio on the back already but hope to expand it further and cover a portion with a pergola.  We know we need to fence the space in and hope to do some landscaping.  There is an oyster roast pit with a small slab in front of it that I would like to make into a feature with a pea gravel patio.  I think the kids would love a play house at some point and some day we really hope to add a pool.

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A lot of these are pipe dreams for now but I really hope that by next summer we can manage to fence the yard and make the patio by the house bigger.  One more pretty inspiration:

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