Tour the Exterior of our Mansard House: The Before

Back in March I posted a tour of our current house and promised to take pictures of the exterior once everything was in bloom again. Well, now that it’s summer and everything is lush and green it’s about time I followed through on my promise.

As you may have read in prior posts, we moved into this house last October. This was a very exciting purchase because although I loved our last house and miss it dearly, this house is in one of my favorite neighborhoods filled with families, kids, and TREES! GLORIOUS TREES!

The look of the exterior of the house isn’t my favorite - I don’t love mansard roofs and I’m not a big fan of the colors - so it took a while for me to really start to feel like this was home. It definitely didn’t help that right when we moved in all the leaves fell and everything died. But now that the trees have leaves on them and flowers are blooming, it’s growing on me. At the same time, all the plants being in bloom is also pretty overwhelming when it comes to this yard of ours.

The front of the house doesn’t look too bad at a glance, but there are a lot of overgrown areas that we don’t really know what to do with. For instance, on the right-hand side of the picture above there’s a ton of green - but we have no clue what are weeds and what are plants and how to keep the weeds at bay once we figure it out.

I definitely don’t have the greenest of thumbs and I’m hesitant to spend money on plants that I might very likely kill. On the bright side, we have well-established boxwoods for days!

We’re trying to take advantage of the nice weather and get this yard in shape little by little, or at least accomplish as much as we can in a summer. So far in the front yard Lucius has rebuilt the rock wall in the picture above, filled in some uneven areas of the yard, and relocated the basketball hoop to a more practical spot (and leveled out the yard to do so).

Before we head to the back yard, I figured I’d show you the general layout of our house on the lot with a very quick and basic digital drawing. Looking through the pictures, I think it’s pretty tricky to get a good understanding of the layout without an overhead view, so hopefully this rudimentary drawing helps.

Alright, now that I’ve wowed you all with my drawing abilities, let’s take a stroll into the backyard, shall we?

Something worth noting is that while the front yard looks okay, the backyard is a hot mess. We don’t have any grass back there - just weeds and lots of rocks! We think that this yard probably had some pretty impressive landscaping at one point but it has since been neglected and left to run wild. Because we have so many giant, beautiful trees in this neighborhood, it’s likely that prior owners let the leaves fall and accumulate and eventually they killed the grass and decomposed to create mounds of dirt.

Coming through the gate on the right-hand side of the yard we’re greeted with this overgrown mess. Lucius has actually been spending quite a bit of time taking all these plants out and trying to level the dirt so we can have a nice, clean slate, but the picture below is what we started with.

If you continue walking, you’ll quickly turn the corner to see the rest of the yard.

There’s a pretty brick path that leads from the driveway, through the gate, and alongside the deck. As you can see in the picture above, we have lots of rocks and weeds, but very little grass.

The deck is a pretty great outdoor space and spans this whole side of the house. We’ve been told by several neighbors that it used to be an atrium kind of like the picture below.

Source unknown

It probably wasn’t quite that lavish, but you get the picture.

Apparently it was a sunken atrium that you would step down into from the house or the yard. Because of this, there was an entire drainage system built into the yard to prevent flooding. You can see some of the drains running parallel to the deck a couple pictures above.

To pump the drain water out, there was a cistern installed. Lucius is absolutely giddy that he got it working recently.

It’s a little bonkers because this thing is about 6 feet deep and probably 4-5 feet wide at its widest point and it’s just chillin’ in front of our shed in the backyard.

But back to the deck! It’s a great space, but needs some work. And let me show you why…

Yup… there’s a giant hole for a hot tub in our deck. We considered putting a hot tub in, and actually had a friend offer to give us theirs that they no longer use, but it was too small so we kabashed that idea altogether. Our plan now is to extend the deck to cover the hole and just make this an additional seating area.

And don’t worry, there’s a hole inside the hot tub hole that has a sump pump. Lucius has plumbed it to drain into one of our many backyard drains so this won’t turn into some kind of disgusting swimming pool every time it rains.

Once we cover up the hole, we’ll be painting the deck.

On the flip side, the part of the deck that doesn’t have a giant hole is functional! But we definitely need to upgrade our patio furniture and build a contraption so we can hang the tire swing from one of the trees instead of the pergola.

Heading around the other side of the deck you’ll see the brick path continued and more crazy, overgrown, weedy yard. And rocks! Yay… more rocks.

And lastly on the far side of the house we have our bocce ball court… or putting green… or whatever you do with a really long, narrow stretch of yard.

Once again, the green you see is most definitely not grass.

Next summer I might plant a garden in this area. Our older daughter has shown interest in starting a garden with me, but with a very clingy 1-year-old I don’t think it’s feasible this summer. But a garden will only take up a small section of this weird part of the yard so maybe the rest will end up being a bocce ball court….

Anywho, there you go! Our insanely overwhelming, in-need-of-so-much-love yard.

I’d love to hear suggestions on how you’d go about taming this beast - we sure could use them! And hopefully with some perseverance (and advice) we’ll make some progress over the next couple of months and I’ll be able to share our improvements at the end of the summer!