An Abundance of Blessings: 4 Moms Open House: Yard and Entry

I know I'm late on this but I just ran across this Open House Tour on Raising Olives blog and thought it was a neat idea. The 4 Moms are doing a month long Open House posted each Thursday and the first one is Yard and Entry. You can visit their pics back to the 4 mom’s here for Kimberly at Raising Olives, here for the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room, here for Connie at Smockity Frocks, and here for KimC at Life in a Shoe.

We are a family of 10 that live in a 7 bedroom house (that sounds grander than it actually is, believe me) that was built in 1978. When we purchased the house in 1994, it only contained 3 bedroom. Since then we've made a number of renovations, the biggest of which was the addition over the garage that gave us another 3 bedrooms and a bathroom. Only 5 of the rooms are currently being used as a bedroom...one is a playroom and another is a den/office. We have 5 boys and 3 girls...the girls are all in one room, two boys (twins) in a second, our 2 oldest boys in the 3rd, the baby (he'll be 2 soon so not much of a baby anymore) in the 4th and us in the 5th.

The tour begins with a view of our house from the road...

and a side view. This is usually where our garden is at this time of year but the last couple of years have been so miserable and that combined with all the rain we had at the beginning of planting season, prompted us not to put one in this year.

Continuing around this side of the house brings you to our back yard. It includes a lovely pool for cooling off on the hot days that we have...

a trampoline to try and wear the kids out although at the moment it needs some repair work done to it before the kids can jump on it, a soccer goal and a small playground for the younger kids...

and a lovely chicken coop that houses some really sweet chicken and a crazy looking rooster. I should have taken a pic of him as he looks like he stuck his claw in an electric socket...he has feathers on his head that stick out in every direction...

This is a view of the back yard from our deck...

This is our deck, which is not nearly big enough for all the people we have running around on it. One of these days I would love to extend it to the other end of the house...

and last but not least, our entryway. This is the front entrance to our house. If you go up the stairs, you end up in our living room. That's our cat, Oscar, coming down the stairs. The doorway you can just make out in the upper right of the pic leads into our kitchen. If you go down the stairs, you end up in a rec room...