Living and Learning: Home Ownership

I have never owned a home before, and neither has my husband. Thus, many of the aspects of homeownership have proved to be a surprise to us - unfortunately, mostly unpleasant.

Isn't it cute? This is when our house as it was when it was first on the market, probably 2 years before we bought it! 

Our property was left abandoned for several years prior to us purchasing it. In south Florida, as I may have mentioned, that means the vegetation exerts every effort to reclaim the land and draw it back into the wilderness. We have made slow progress in fighting off the marauding hordes, but we finally had to call in big guns. We had several trees that needed to be trimmed, and a couple more that needed to come out. Unfortunately, many homeowners plant trees without checking with a landscape architect or even as much as a garden book. The guy who owned the house before we did planted some beautiful trees...right next to the house. They became huge hurricane hazards.

Today, while grinding the stump of a huge tree, the workers hit our an irrigation pipe. I got a call at work, saying they had to turn our water off, because they didn't know how to turn the irrigation system off. To be honest, neither did we! We've never messed with the sprinkler system at all. So when we got home at 9pm tonight after choir, we discovered the water in our house was turned off, we had no idea how to turn off the sprinkler system so we could turn it back on, and several of my favorite plants were killed because they were too close to the stump and must've got sucked into the grinder.

So here's in the future, I will certainly remember to 1) remove any and all plants from anywhere near the trees to be removed; and 2) I will ask for information about any systems in place (irrigation, alarm) before I buy so that I know how to fix/work things!