Browsing Tag: new house

    Tri-Cities, WA

    The Only Thing I Miss About East Coast Living

    June 21, 2013

    Soil.

    That’s what I miss about living on the east coast. On the east coast (and obviously elsewhere in the country), the lawns grow in real soil.

    Not here.

    I love West Richland. I love our neighborhood. I love our house. But it’s darn near impossible to have a really beautiful and healthy lawn in this area because the homes are being built on sand and dirt.

    And rocks. Lots and lots and lots of rocks. There’s hardly any room for the grass roots to grow because of all the rocks just a couple inches below the surface.

    Have a look at this:

    rocks

    That’s the home currently being built right next to us. That’s where the front/side lawn will be. It’s all rocks.

    When we bring Sparky around to the front yard and tether him to a leash that’s stuck in the ground, it’s almost impossible to get the stake down into the ground because it hits rocks everywhere I try.

    Lesson of the story?

    If something causes us to build another house out here someday, we’re going to pay whatever it takes to get a solid foot of real, dark, high-quality soil laid down on the whole property before any grass is put down. Wish we’d done that with this house.

    But I can’t really complain too much. The lawn is fine and we’re blessed to live in this home. So I’ll tag this post with #firstworldproblems for sure. 🙂

    tri-cities-sunset
    Miscellany

    Sunset: Day 314

    January 14, 2013

    It’s hard to come by a good sunset in the dead of winter, but we sure lucked out with one tonight in the Tri-Cities. Holy cow, was this amazing to see — a panoply of colors!

    You can click for a much larger version, and I highly recommend it. 🙂

    tri-cities-sunset

    Tri-Cities, WA

    White Christmas 2012

    December 25, 2012

    It’s pretty cool when your first Christmas in a new house turns into a White Christmas. That’s what we’re having today. Snow’s been coming down for about 4-5 hours and is still falling now. Went outside for a bit with Sparky and took about a dozen photos.

    Merry Christmas to all our family and friends everywhere!

    christmas-lights
    Miscellany

    Our Minimalist Christmas Lighting

    November 29, 2012

    We don’t do outdoor Christmas lights at Casa McGee. At least not in the traditional, showy, make-the-house-bright-enough-to-be-seen-on-Mars way.

    It’s not that we don’t like Christmas lights; quite the contrary, and we drive around every Christmas eve and admire what other Tri-Cities homes have put on display. (Plus, we try to get over to Senske‘s amazing light production.)

    The reason we don’t do Christmas lights is that, several years ago, I was up on the roof at our old house and almost fell to my death while trying to connect a string of lights to the upper corner. And that was the end of me playing hero so we could have our house look like everyone else’s.

    What we do, instead, every year, is just change out the existing outdoor lamps from regular bulbs to colored bulbs. It looked nice at the old house, but I think it looks especially good this year at the new house. Don’t you?

    christmas-lights

    The more I look at it, the better it fits. I don’t think our new home would look right with the regular string of lights around the edges. But this minimalist look just feels perfect to me.

    Have I mentioned lately how much I love our new home?

    street-view-house
    Miscellany

    Our New House is on Google Street View

    October 21, 2012

    This is the first time I’ve ever seen Casa McGee on Street View. New house, or old house.

    Google drove some of the main streets in our area about two years ago, or maybe more, but it didn’t do a thorough photo shoot in our old neighborhood at the time. So the old house wasn’t there.

    I saw the Street View car driving through town back in the spring and it was here for a good 4-5 days, it seemed. I remember seeing lots of tweets from various Tri-City folks over the course of a week.

    And now, six months later, the new imagery is online and … BAM … there’s Casa McGee.

    street-view-house

    The fine print at the bottom says the imagery was taken in April 2012. Judging by the condition of our lawn, it looks like early April — the grass wasn’t high enough to need a cutting yet. So, that’s about a month after we moved in.

    What’s cool is that there are a lot of new homes still being built in the neighborhood and on our street, so this imagery is already wayyyyy outdated. But, a year or two from now, when the whole neighborhood is built out, these images will (probably) still be online and it’ll fun to look back and how things looked just after we got here.

    sunset-225
    Miscellany

    Sunset: Day 225

    October 18, 2012

    Wednesday was our 225th day in the new house* and wow, did we have a beautiful sunset, or what??!!??

    sunset-225

    That’s gotta be in the top five or 10 sunsets since we moved in. I had looked outside at around 5:30 or so and it wasn’t looking too good for a special sunset, then 45 minutes later or so, that.

    * No, I didn’t bust out a calendar and count the 225 days. I asked Wolfram Alpha.