You Just Never Know What You'll Find...

I think most everyone who reads this knows that I live in an old house. Like, really old house... 100+ years old. It's not my dream home, but it was more ideal than my former home up in Fishers, for Eric and I, when we got married . It's a way better location and much bigger. It was also the one hobby Eric had going - working on an old house. This is his third.

Thankfully, he had most of it done before I ever brought one box down. He kind of had to, with the condition is was in when he bought it. It had been in the same family for decades, and it the later decades, it had been divided up from a single family home into three rental apartments. The plus side to that was nothing was ever painted, so most of the original woodwork just had to be cleaned up. The bad side of that was the fact that you had weird walls build and more kitchens then you needed. So that's what Eric spend the first few years doing - turning it back into a single family home. He had a few surprises along the way, both pleasant and unpleasant. For example, the original wood floors were still mostly intact... just buried under multiple layers of vinyl. Probably the coolest discovery was that he had a true parlor in the front of the house, complete with a knee wall and columns that had been enclosed into studs and drywall at some point. While they weren't pristine, he was able to restore them pretty well.

To date, not much had been done outside. He has redone/repainted about half of the siding, which is a feat on all it's own (I'm trying to convince him to hire someone to do the rest). The front porch was rebuilt by his old contractor, with a finish upgrade to the floor itself (from painted wood to stained wood). But the backyard... aside from putting in a vegetable garden, nada. We're working on getting a garage started, and knew there was a smaller garage or carriage house (literally) at some pint, since the foundation was still in place. But it didn't seem as if they did much else out back.

You may remember the backhoe we had to trench in utilities over the 4th of July weekend. That was fun. Well, we never fully filled in the trench because Eric wanted to make sure a few connections were made, first. With the impending winter upon us, we spent this past weekend filling it in by hand and, also by hand, leveling out the other remaining mounds of dirt so we could reseed and not have a huge mudpit all winter. Eric had just started throwing in dirt when I noticed some bricks along the edge of the trench. They were too perfectly straight to be remnants from the old cistern that was removed. So we did some exploratory dirt moving and found a brick path. At this point, I was excited, and took it upon myself to find out how far this thing went. Well, turns out it likely led from the back porch to the old garage, because we uncovered quite a length of it. Judging from the amount of dirt on top of it, I would say they just threw sod on top of it at some point. Why would you do that??

So now I have a solid path to walk on most of the way to my car (since I park out back). It still needs to be cleaned up a bit, but that's the easy part. Maybe. We also might explore some more and use it and/or modify it to use when our garage is done. Maybe. Since we still have no idea how we're going to finish off our backyard next year, this idea might not be feasible. But for now, I'm just excited to not have to walk through mud.