A Tour of The Red House Yard

We’re breaking down the preliminary steps we’re taking to ‘baseline’ the yard area of the Red House’s property.

For the last 15 months, our efforts at the Red House have been almost entirely focused on the interior. We allowed the yard, which is tucked away from the main street by a long driveway, to re-wild itself and let nature take over. But now that the kitchen is ready to be installed and the interior is nearing a stage of usability, we’re ready to get started on the initial steps outside. This post also serves as the ‘debut’ of most of the home’s yard, since we haven’t shown much of it before. It’s pretty rough around the edges at this point, but plans are in the works! Here’s where we stand:

The Front Yard

The space that we’re referring to as the ‘front’ yard of the property encompasses the front of the house and the area to the right where a grass ‘driveway’ leads to the back yard and the barn. More on the barn later, promise!

This area will receive the most immediate attention, as its the home’s first impression. We’ll preserve the healthy trees and remove the dead, dying and invasive ones to really open up the space! This will help provide a healthy baseline for an eventual patio/deck at the front of the home and more intentional landscape design.

The trees that remain will be professionally trimmed and cleaned up to preserve their long-term health and the overall health of the yard. We have big plans for a very specific climbing tree for Lucy and her friends and we’d also like to add a tree swing (and a zipline!) down the road. We’re scoping out the exact placement as we speak!

The ring of rocks that somehow became a makeshift fire pit/burn pile throughout the construction process will be cleared to make way for whatever comes next. We’re working with our favorite landscape designer to formulate a plan, but for now we’re only concerning ourselves with addition by subtraction!

The Side Yard

Around the left side of the house is the side yard. It’s the smallest of the areas as it backs up directly to the woods behind the house. The concrete slab will likely remain in place and serve as a space for less attractive necessities like the AC condenser, venting and maybe a bike wash station now that we have our Aquor hot/cold water spigot up and running!

All of that unattractive stuff has to go somewhere, so it might as well be at the back of the house tucked completely out of sight!

The Back Yard

Around the back of the house, we’ve got more big structural plans. We’re envisioning a composite deck just outside the huge double sliding doors, but that’s a project for another day. For now, we’ll once again clear the space of weed trees, stumps and bird baths and limb up the trees that remain. There are some beauties back here as well and we can’t wait to see them properly shaped up to ensure long, healthy lives.

The door below leads out from the basement workshop and the little path that Catfish and I are walking down leads back to the front of the house. We’ll likely put down a thin gravel path or a series of stepping stones to define what’s already there, and the established Vinca ground cover will remain in place for now.

Below, you get a better idea of the big clearing at the back of the home. We envision a huge wood fire pit back here somewhere, along with a big patch of clover surrounded by wildflowers to keep our local pollinators happy!

As you can see, there’s an absolutely endless amount of work to tackle here, so we’ll hire out the huge jobs and DIY whenever we’re able. Much like down the hill at Tree House, we’ll be as hands-on as possible, but we know when it makes sense to bring in the teams with heavy equipment.

The Barn

Yes, there’s a barn! As you can see below, our Tree House shares a property line with the Red House and the barn is very, very visible from over there. Down the road, we’d like to give it a full transformation into a Party Barn with an attached screen room, but time will tell how quickly we’re able to tackle that project.

Unfortunately, the cluster of trees in the center of the photo below is completely dead after years of being choked out by vines, so they’ll all be coming down. In their place, we’ll plant a ‘legacy tree’ or two that will serve as a reminder of where we started.

So there it is! The first peek at the Red House’s yard. It’s sprawling and wild and unruly and intimidating, but we love it and we’re thrilled to get started. This funny little house packs so much function into a tiny footprint, but the yard is just the opposite. There is so much space with so little defined function that it’ll be our job to determine how we’d like it to work for us. One thing is for sure though; we’re going to have fun figuring it out!