So we bought our first house in an area between North Kansas City and Gladstone, but in Kansas City city limits. There were a lot of really interesting older homes in the area, but we didn't buy one. I was afraid of older homes. It was a small raised (and I mean REALLY raised) ranch. You will see in the pictures below the steps from the middle of the driveway up to the front door number something like 17, plus the property still dropped another 6 or 8 feet to street level from the bottom of the stairs.
The house was about 50 years old at the time, in generally good condition but just needed a lot of updating. Original doors, 10 year old linoleum in the kitchen, no trim updates, original bathroom EVERYTHING. Well, almost original bathroom. They did paint the peach and rust-colored wall-tile beige with standard interior latex paint, which was peeling.
For a young, newly-wed couple this was an ideal first house, though. We could have left it mostly alone and it would have still been a comfortable place to live.
This was really my introduction to remodeling. I didn't attempt anything too terribly complex in this house, but at least challenged myself a bit. As you will see, I can't leave well-enough alone when it comes to my own home, so naturally I started to tap into those instincts once I was a home owner.
Landscaping
This was a fun project. Somehow I got Laura convinced to help me. Three pallets of blocks and a couple tons of dirt later, we had flower beds. I convinced the dirt guy to drop the dirt at the top of our hill on the left side of the house, but we carried all of the blocks up one at a time from the driveway. I actually fell off the 1st terrace of the concrete wall to the second terrace and fractured the top of my tibia during this project.
Overall this was a very pleasing project. It gave some curb appeal to what was an otherwise boring front-yard. Unfortunately the next owner(s) let it all go to weeds.
One more thing. As you can probably see, mowing this front lawn was not fun. We had a self-propelled mower for a while, but ended up buying a push mower because the self-propulsion wasn't strong enough to overcome the effects of the hill combined with the mower's own weight. Go figure.
This is how the house looked originally.
Notice the frost on the driveway...
and the fact that there is no car in it.
We literally parked sometimes a block or two away
because the hills around our home were that steep.
We added landscaping blocks to terrace the beds
inside the concrete walls
View from the other side
Beds to the left of the porch.
Bed to the right of the porch
Side of the house
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Off back patio into the yard. We constantly had dirt
washing down onto the patio, so this helped prevent
erosion in this area.
