The Wind Chime House

Be Gone Demon Shrubs! Hello online shopping.

What do you get when you neglect your yard for 20 plus years? An overgrown mess! After many years of neglect the trees and bushes started getting a mind of their own and began taking over everything they could get their leafy paws on. As you will see from the pictures below, this house definitely needed some cleaning up!

Two years prior to buying this fixer-upper, we sold our house along with pretty much everything else we owned and moved into a small townhouse. The plan was to live in the townhouse for three to five years and then buy or build our dream home. However, plans quickly changed when we found this house. After only 9 months of living in the townhouse, we moved into the wind chime house. Problem was, because of the downsize, we had no tools to do any of the work. So we made our first trip to Home Depot to get the essentials: Lawn mower, weed wacker, hedge trimmer, and a chain saw. Little did we know, our first trip to Home Depot would lead to MANY trips to Home Depot. We are slowly getting smarter with each Home Depot trip and want to share what we have learned.

Lessons learned:

Home Depot is a great place to take your wife/husband for date nights! (NOT REALLY, but it has happened multiple times!)

If you’ve ever done a remodel project you know that it takes at least 4 trips to Home Depot before the project is finally finished. And from our experience it takes almost a full day for each trip. As soon as you get there, you will realize you need other things as well. And up and down the isles you will go. One way to fix this time waster is to shop online. They send you an email and a text when your order is ready to be picked up. This way you can order in the morning or the night before and have it ready to pick up when you’re ready. Hallelujah! It’s saved me oodles of time! Try it for yourself. Home Depot Online.

Having a big truck is not essential if you want to do a remodel. However, be prepared to get a lot of smirks and laughs out of people when they see you loading multiple sheets of sheetrock and the many other items you buy in your mini van. If you only have a mini van, save yourself multiple trips and order all the sheetrock and big items you need at one time and have Home Depot deliver it to your front door.

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!

When we first moved in anybody who came to the house would have to go out on a limb and venture through the jungle just to reach the front door. Instead of doing this, they would use the side door. The front yard was full of overgrown vines and bushes, but we noticed that it also had spectacular Japanese maple trees that were being hidden by these ugly vines and bushes. So…we cut down all of the vines and bushes using our trusty chain saw. The vines were so out of control that nobody could see the front of the house or the awesome details that came with it. After we cut down the bushes, our neighbor asked us when we hadput in the big picture window in the front. Ha Ha. He had lived there for over 40 years and he had never seen our front door.

In the backyard, a lot of space was wasted with the HUGE shrubs that wrapped around the house in a weird L shape. You seriously could get lost in the backyard. We were debating whether to keep them and prune them back to the original size, but later decided to chop them all down. All of these limbs had to go somewhere. We had huge piles all over the yard. Several of our new neighbors brought their trucks and trailers to help take the limbs away to the dump. We are so grateful they did! Can you imagine the looks we would have gotten at the dump if we pulled up in our mini van full of branches, shrubs, and vines??? In the end we filled 6 truck beds and 4 huge trailers full of debris. This made a small dent in the overgrown monstrosity that we call our yard.