Last week we celebrated seven years in our cozy, green, love nest. This is the longest I have ever lived in one place, and I’m my home with Christopher gets to have that title.

When we moved in we had so many ideas for changes and house projects. We made spreadsheets, we looked at Pinterest. Then we did like three projects, and realized how exhausting they were and scaled the list WAYYY back.

With help from Josh, we built this giant buffet for our dining room. It stores so much stuff, is perfect for parties, is fun to decorate, and makes me so happy.

Lucy loves chasing lizards, especially in our gigantic Bird of Paradise.

Two summers in a row, we hosted a family of bats in our porch umbrella. They were so cute and squeaky, but the poop was out of control. Now we bring the umbrella inside when we aren’t using it. Sorry bats.

The tiniest little snake visited us. I thought it was a worm, but after watching it and googling, we determined it was some kind of snake, I don’t remember the specifics though.

We see all kinds of cool birds in our neighborhood, including these darling ducklings that were living on our street for a few days before they moved to the pond.

We have perfected Halloween decorating. We made these wooden signs for our yard, then we crack our garage door a little and have a fog machine and a bubble machine that blow fog and bubbles out. We have magnetic glittery spiders on the front door, and of course a Halloween doormat and wreath. We always hand out candy and little trinkets for kids that either don’t like or can’t have candy.

We’re really lucky that we have plenty of space for big, fat, perfect Christmas trees, and that Lucy generally doesn’t care about the tree until we put out her Christmas stocking filled with bones and toys.

We have survived a few Tropical Storms, and thankfully the only time we lost power my parents were out of town and we could use their generator to keep our fridge and internet on.

While we may have killed a garden and a couple of fruit trees (including the one pictured above), we have kept a handful of other plants alive, and our Sycamore (we think) tree, that was basically a twig in the ground when we moved in, is now huge!

We replaced the all of the carpet with laminate flooring and Lucy was pissed. She loves rugs, so now she basically treats the solid floors like lava.

Finally, we love that our neighborhood has a large community pool. A lot of the homes have private pools, so there aren’t a ton of people that use it, so it stays quiet and mostly clean. About half the time we go to the pool we are the only ones there and it is glorious. We didn’t even realize there was a community pool when we decided to buy this house. We found out at the closing when they gave us all the keys and one of them was to the pool. We were both like, Say WHAAAAAT? Pool? Hell yes! We love to come float at night in the summer when it’s super hot, and look at the stars. Or run and get Slurpees from 7-eleven or cherry limeades from Sonic and flat around during the day. It’s a great way to cool down in the summer and because the pool isn’t in our backyard we don’t have to clean it. Even though if I’m honest, I really really really want my own pool. Maybe one day.

This house is so good to us. We have plenty of room for the two of us humans and our cutie dog, our neighbors are all so nice, and I have really loved living here so far.