A couple weeks ago we took advantage of a mild afternoon when it wasn’t raining for a short time, to try out our new firepit.

Our primary reason was to get rid of a whole box of old financial papers which we couldn’t recycle, and it would have taken forever to shred. The fire made short work of them, and also gave us an afternoon of entertainment.

Towards the end I brought the dogs out but kept them on leash. Navi isn’t as close tot he fire as it looks. Barclay actually just laid down in the grass and took a nap. It was quite relaxing to just sit and look into the coals and watch the flames dance around, and the red light as they burned from within was fascinating. I could sit and watch a campfire all evening.

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Our new house doesn’t really look like a big deal from the front. In fact it’s mostly hidden by the tall bushes along the curb.

But it has a pretty little area along the front, and a beautiful vine that will have big purple bunches of flowers on it in the spring.

The front room has a big fireplace, and a nice big window looking out on the front yard.

The dogs like that a lot!

It’s taken a few days, but they are starting to settle in. I think it helps that the furniture all smells like home.

We had a lot to do, cleaning, arranging, figuring out where everything goes in our new small house!

What a mess! I’ll get better pictures when it’s all cleaned up!

The inside is nice, but the real selling point of this house is out back. Check out that huge covered patio! And the back yard is terraced!

You walk off the patio, and follow a path down the stairs to the firepit.

I think we could get most of our friends around this giant firepit! I can’t wait to do some camp-cookin’ over it.

Step off the patio and go to the right, and there’s a sunken seating area.

This seating area is surrounded by peonies and all sorts of other flowers and bushes, I don’t even know what they all are yet.

Beyond the seating area is gardens – here is a section of chard, beets, and carrots.

Then towards the back fence is another huge garden, which had squash, beans, and tomatoes.

At the far end of the yard is another seating area on the end of the terrace.

Up close to the house is a big herb garden full of all sorts of herbs I recognize and a few I don’t.

And because the house backs up to the city water source, which is a fenced off area, there’s no one overlooking our backyard like there were on most of the houses we looked at in neighborhoods. In fact that white house off in the distance is the only house we can see from our backyard, except our immediate neighbors, who are hidden by trees. So it all feels very private.

Well, it’s all ours now. We’re just about all out of the old house. Closing is in a couple days. It’s weird to leave the farm after all these years, but this is a super nice place. We’ve met some of the neighbors and they all seem nice. The neighborhood is close to work and very walk-able. And of course it’s a lot less expensive than the farm, and will be a lot less stressful than trying to maintain 3 acres we really didn’t need. Change is always a little scary, but this is one case where we made a change for the better, all the way around.

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