Spring Sprucing

Hello there friends!  I hope you had a blessed Easter and Passover holiday.  We were glad to see all of our family on Sunday, and it was a beautiful day here.  I've been absent from blogging for two weeks now -- not a planned break.  Everyday life and family matters have kept us very busy here.

I really made an effort to write a post last Friday; it was to be about Beatrix Potter.  I had pinned all these pictures of her home, Hilltop Farm, with wonderful interior shots.  Well...as I was looking over them again in order to provide links to my sources, I realized that over half of them were in some way linked to the National Trust, and the National Trust does not have a good sense of humor about people sharing images of their properties without express written permission.  Which I did not have.  So there went all that work down the drain.

I'm in an indecisive mood, folks.  I have some good stuff to share from Southport and Oak Island but didn't want to write about that right now, either.  So I'll just show you a little of what we worked on over the weekend.

Working on Curb Appeal

We've been working on improving curb appeal here at the homestead.  Our house is 42 years old this year; it's a child of the 70's.  :)  Now that we've gotten our son through college, we're focusing on making some improvements to our home.  Fortunately, we were able to have our kitchen renovated two summers ago -- what a difference that made!  Duncan is just about fully house-broken, so we're going to replace the carpet in our den and hallway after Christmas.

Currently though, we've been focusing on sprucing things up outside.  I thought I'd show you a comparison of our front porch and surrounding landscape from last winter versus now.  It's not a huge change, but it does look much better.