I'm gonna bore you with old photos.

I'm still going through my old photo CD's, dating back to '97 (with pictures even further back), and I'm getting close to done. So, expect to see a few of them up. First up; the house. I found a great old cache of pictures of my house dating back to the mid 90's, showing pretty much the way it looked when I bought it. (If I ever find the original appraisal papers, you'll see it exactly that way). So, here's my house through the years:

The only change I had made before taking these first two was to cut down the bush in the middle of the lawn. You can see the stump in the picture, and it it still there now, just with a wagon wheel in front of it. You can, sort of, see the front porch is still just cement, you can't see how badly in need of repair it is. Because of the bush you can't tell, but there was no railing around it. These were taken sometime before 1997.

Here is the first iteration of the front porch. Instead of repairing the concrete, I just covered it with a wood porch, kind of like a redwood deck over it, and added the wood steps over the concrete ones. I also added a railing around it. This one was taken on April 24th, 1997.

Here the porch is the same, but you also can see the yard without the fence around it. I originally added the fence because people from the apartment next door liked using my front yard as a shortcut to the bus stop.

By 2003 I had addded the fence to the yard, and sort of a boardwalk over the front path, which you can't see because of the snow. I had also, by request of the post office, moved the mail box from the front porch to the fence right by the sidewalk. (They paid for the new mailbox and it's installation).

The big change happened in the summer of 2004. The boardwalk came out, the wood porch came off and the lawn got covered over with woodchips. My older brother helped me fix the cement on the porch and cover it with slate tiles. I also extended the front porch out, and between it and the wood chips, completely covered the old walkway. I also removed the bush blocking the front porch and most of the abundance of overgrown bushes in the corner of the yard. Oh, and in case you didn't notice, I painted the house a different color also. I took some redrock from the Moab area and had Home Depot scan the color and make paint for me. The color of the house didn't change between the two pictures, it's just the lighting.