In All Its Glory

It's ours. 

We closed on October 31, 2010.  It's a very strange little house - when we bought it it was two separate apartments - one on each floor.  But, we said, it is a strange house, on a great lot, in a great neighborhood.  We are five blocks south of the Atlas District (the home of DC's first light rail and DC's hipster bar scene), four blocks north of Lincoln Park (the center of life for baby and dog lovers in the city) and six blocks north of Eastern Market (DC's own European market)!

www.atlasdistrict.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Park_(Washington,_D.C.

www.easternmarket-dc.org

There it is.  See that green sign on the corner? We are literally the last house inside the historic district although our house has no historic distinction having been built in 1950.   That little sign is going to make my job a lot harder for the next few years.  It takes four months to get an exterior building permit (with visits to various neighborhood groups and hearings) in the historic district.  This is if everything goes smoothly which I am sure it will not since I have a taste for modern architecture.

Yep, two gates, two sidewalks, two doors and confusion of friends and postal workers.

 Here are pictures of the first floor apartment.  Luckily everything is coming out.

And the second floor apartment:

Besides the house, we are also the proud owners of a Japanese Maple, a peach tree, three mulberry trees, a fire escape, a beautiful rose bush, a rotted shed, not one but two wet vacs, and three birdbaths!

Seuss loves his yard, but it won't be long before he is the bane of our neighbors' existence as he goes nuts barking at every passerby both canine and human.   I also love this yard and I have BIG plans for it.  I am pretty sure the japanese maple is going to come out because it is blocking too much sun!  This weekend, to celebrate our one year anniversary (!) we are staying at a B&B in wine country of Virginia and we plan to stop off at this nursery http://www.ediblelandscaping.com/ to purchase some edibles that do well in our region.  In the future, I hope to have a hazlenut and/or hardy almonds privacy hedge, figs, plums, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and concord grapes.  This will be in addition to vegetables which we are trying out in a raised planter bed this year.  Chickens aren't illegal in DC, but Adrian isn't convinced yet.  I'll keep trying.

Our lives have been completely overwhelmed by this renovation for the past six months and so I will be writing the blog covering this first phase of the renovations after-the-fact.  So it begins...