When I started this blog there was a lot going on in a short amount of time.  After the first year or year and a half we settled into life in our mansion and continued working on small projects.  We learned to just live with a lot of the things like green paint and ugly light fixtures, bathrooms without working faucets or dripping faucets, occasional water leaks inside the roof when the rain is heavy and the wind is blowing a certain way, frozen washing machine pipes and cold rooms.  As I’m thinking about it the list is pretty long!  The quirky things have become just part of the adventure.

Matt has been prodding me for some time to get back to my blog.  For several reasons the time seemed right now. 2017 and 2018 saw a few projects get completed. In no particular order, some things we did:

• Added air conditioning to the first floor
• installed mini split system to provide heat and ac to the kitchen and laundry room
• repaired three of the flat roofs
• replaced some bathroom fixtures
• improved the landscaping
• redid the room that was the chapel and made it into Matt’s pub
• painted the garage
• stained the back stairs

I’ll try to add some before and after photos soon.

We also hosted many events and had a lot of overnight guests. We have had Christmas parties, porch parties, parade brunches, an engagement party, hosted a mini tour for about 100 people after they had gone to Woodlawn cemetery for a tour of famous Toledoans gravesites, had several team dinners for our kids, hosted 70 kids for dinner before a date dance, birthday parties, were the first stop for OWE porch crawl last summer just to name a few.

In January we were approached about opening our home for the OWE festival the first weekend in June. After some back and forth negotiating between the two of us we agreed. We have made a wish list of things we would like to complete before then and Matt has already started on it. So if all goes as planned, we will have lots of projects to share with you soon.