The promised pictures

Here they are, current pictures of our new home. First, the wall that was partially taken out.

You can see down there on the floor how much wall was taken out. It does help to open up these rooms. This is looking from the doorway of the kitchen towards the front of the house.

Here is the wall from the other side. The idea is to eventually make these two rooms one large living room, and turn the back porch into mudroom/pantries/dining room. This will make one room, even though the wall sticks out a bit still, right? (If you look at the floor, you will see a bunch of books scattered across it. We took our first family visit to the library this morning.)

Here is the view of the house from the same spot as the earlier picture. 

And here is the front part of the property from our south-east border. Those are all silver maples.

This is the front drive that runs along the side of the house, 

and here it is further on, past the curve.

The front of the house, complete with two little girls who are playing.

The garden along the side. I cut down an awful lot of ornamental grass and found strawberries growing underneath.

This is the view from the back of our house. Those trees in the far background are the forest preserve.

There's a fire pit... people are looking forward to having a bonfire and cooking s'mores.

I walked out to the far south-west corner of our property and took a picture looking back towards the house. That is mostly all of our property that you are seeing.

Here I'm facing across our property to the north. Our land ends at that white fence in the far distance. More than enough room for a small stable (someday) and some pastures, right?

This is the view looking towards all those silver maples from the other side. All the grass you see is what J. spend several hours mowing yesterday. Now you can appreciate the size of the job.

And one more picture looking across the to few buildings behind our house. There is the shed and playhouse, and currently we are adding our huge family tent because some people thought it was more fun to sleep there than in the house without carpeting. We've had some rain, so are waiting for it to dry out a bit to take down.