New pad

Hooray for us, we finally found and moved into a rental house. Non-Silicon Valley readers are probably thinking, "big whoop, they found a rental house." But. . .the cost of living here is insane and with 3 kids and 1 income it's a big deal for us! Finding a house in our budget was a big challenge. Most of the houses we saw were total dumps. . .or too small. . .or in the ghetto. But a few months ago I saw a Craigslist ad about a house in our price range. There wasn't much detail--but what was there sounded too good to be true. I emailed the guy just in case. When he called back he said that the house was already rented out but that the neighboring house (that he also owned) would be vacated in March. The two houses were identical in layout except that the one that had just been rented out also had a laundry room/pantry. I asked to see that house so I could check out the layout and get a feel for how well he maintained things. The house was great. . .3 bed, two bath, living room and a Florida room. The condition was fine. Old house, little was updated, but it was in good shape. Then. . .he took us to the backyard of the house we'd try to rent. It was awesome. We were sold. We waited WEEKS and WEEKS for the renters to move out, the house to be cleaned, things to be repaired and finally this past weekend we moved in. We LOVE it. I think I didn't realize how much of my stress was due to our cramped living quarters. Here's the grand tour of the outside:

Here's our new palace. It needs help and luckily for us our landlord is very accommodating. We'll be re-installing shutters and removing those UGLY awnings. We have a sweet gardener (who lives down the street) and he'll be helping me spruce up the place. To the left of our van is an ugly dirt patch and he's installing sprinklers and putting new plants in. There are a couple of planter boxes under the windows that I'll put some cute flowers in, too. But, overall I think the yard is very decent.

Our street dead ends into this cul-de-sac. It's awesome. There's hardly any traffic and the kids LOVE riding their bikes around. And I can just sit on the lawn and holler when a car comes (though up to this point a car has never come while we've been out there:).

Here's the first backyard (yes, I said first). It's a pretty typical backyard for this area. Smallish but perfect for us. There are random pavers and flagstone everywhere. I have big plans for those. Our lawn is mostly weeds but, hey, they're green. There's also a cute lemon tree.

In the fence of the first backyard is a gate to. . .the SECOND backyard:).

In the second backyard is a mature mini-orchard with a plum tree, apricot tree, fig tree, peach tree, and mulberry tree. All of them are growing fruit right now except for the plum tree but hopefully that will start to bear fruit soon. As an added bonus our neighbor has a vineyard in his yard and bunches of grapes are growing over our fence. And. . .

there's a super creepy shed that hasn't been entered in 15 years. It's locked but you can see all kinds of junk (no bodies:) in there through the window. I think we might try to replace that bright blue tarp with a brown one.

Here are more random pavers and blocks. We want to make planter boxes and start a garden back here. I'll use the pavers and flagstone to create a path to and around the boxes.

That's it for the outside. We're pretty excited about the yards and will probably spending a LOT of time out there. I can't wait to try out the fruit. And if we get a lot I'll probably start canning, too. I'll post about the inside of the house soon.