Home Sweet Home

Jan requested I post some pics of my home. Here is the only picture I have of it. It is a picture from two years ago- our first spring here in PA. We had just dug out the shrubs planted on our front hill and put in ivy. As you can see, the ivy was still small. So was Claire. She had just turned two in that picture.



This is a typical home for our area, old, brick, and really small. But to us it is our little slice of heaven. It is our first home. Though we curse its smallness, lack of closet space, no a/c, and its general falling-apartness, it will always have that distinction and charm of being our first house. Therefore it is romantic. It was built in 1931. I love to imagine the first people who built the house, and how excited they were to be moving into something so new, so grand. Maybe it was their first house also. There is a cold storage room in the basement that use to be the coal room. You can see where they patched up foundation of the slot where the coal was dumped into the room. There is also a random toilet in our basement, set in a stall with no door. This is from back in the day, when the men would come home from the mills, so dirty, that they had to come in and get cleaned up in the basement before they could go upstairs.

Our home was newly remodeled when we bought it, so we haven't done much to the indoors. But the yard was a mess. It had just been neglected for years. It was mostly weeds and decrepit cement blocks. We had a good time fixing it up and landscaping it.


Here is last years flower garden. I have learned a lot about what grows here, how difficult it is working with clay for soil, and what plants I like and the ones I never want to plant again.

Here are the steps and the retaining wall that we put in. I also leveled half of the yard because it was on a slope. Everything in our town is on a slope. We supposedly have steepest street in the world in our neighborhood. Supposedly.

For those who don't know Jan, she is one of the funniest people you will ever meet. She is just so happy to be around, and she is extremely kind. When I was 11, they divided the ward that I had been in my whole life, with all my friends in it. We were one of the few families who were moved to a different ward. I was heartbroken. Jan was my Merry Miss teacher. There was only one other in my class, and I felt pretty lonely. But Jan was incredible. She reached out to me and made me feel like I was her friend. She will give you the shirt off her back if you needed it. Literally. I remember she had a white jean jacket she let me use once for an activity, and she told me after I was done, that I could keep it, since I liked it. That means a lot to an 11 year old .
After that she was called to Young Women's, where she rocked! Me and my sisters still talk about the activity where she planned all the prizes- salt n pepper tape (piece of tape with salt and pepper on it), trip to see the stars (a walk outside, and look up), etc. She made everything so fun, so creative. She is amazing. She is one of the many people who made that ward AWESOME. I loved my time in that ward and I know Heavenly Father knew what he was doing when he put our family there. It was a blessing for each and everyone of us. And it still continues to be a blessing for me to keep in touch with someone as wonderful as Jan.