I stopped over at the house on my way home from work yesterday and didn’t even recognize it!  It is AMAZING what a little tree trimming can do!!

No more overgrown bushes taking over the front of the house.  No more scraping your car on tree limbs when pulling into the driveway.  No more “hidden gem” from the street view.  Old girl is now shining in all of her glory!!  As our contractor and neighbor both put it, it looks like someone loves her now.

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s still plenty of work to be done.  But we are definitely seeing progress on a daily basis, and that makes this girl happy!  Speaking of progress…the porches are officially “jacked up” and even safe to walk on.  What a major change from 2 days ago!

(Sorry for the graininess in that last one.  Our contractor assures me that the upper porch is safe to walk on, but I’m just going to take his word for it and take pictures from behind the screen door for now!)

I got a call from our contractor yesterday afternoon and he told me that I would want to go by the house and check out the wall next to the fireplace in the dining room.  He said that there was a “surprise gem” waiting for me.  When I went over, this is what I found:

The painter and wallpaperer (I looked it up, it’s a real word!) signed and dated the wall before finishing it in June of 1954.  How cool is that!?  I can’t wait to see what other treasures we find during this process!!

Oh, and yayyyyyy for no more wallpaper in the dining room!  It’s almost unrecognizable.

I am leaving straight from work tomorrow to head to Greensboro to celebrate Charles graduating from law school (SOOOO proud of him, by the way!), so it will be a few days before I get another look at the house.  I can’t wait to see the progress!