Missing siding

Chris noticed this a few months ago as well.  We were sort of ignoring it, but now with winter coming and all the rain from Sandy, we figured we should get it fixed.

Bathroom fan

A couple months ago, the cover on our master bathroom fan loosened up and slid down the ceiling a bit.  We finally got around to fixing it last weekend.  Stupid contractors only bracketed one sode of the fan so of course it jiggled off.  :P  Easy fix, and now it'll probably never move cuz Chris put in six wood screws.  :)

Trees

Even though our cherry tree wasn't dead, the landscaper did say it was dying and probably wouldn't last more than a couple years.  So we had him take it out and replaced it with two new ones - a zelkova for shade and a crape myrtle for color.  I've always wanted one of those! 

The crape myrtle is really tiny right now, but they do grow a lot more.  The zelkova (top picture) is just skinny.  Apparently there are a lot of zelkovas in our neighborhood but I'm not good at trees.

Landscaping

We hired a landscaper from Angie's List to fix the problems our other contractor left in the backyard.  This was connected to the county inspection, but it's not like we were planning to leave a giant rock pile in our backyard indefinitely.  Stupid neighbors.  :P  Anyway, the owner of the company came out and did an estimate and they started work the last week of September.  It only took them a couple days to clear out and level the backyard, put down a patio (which will probably be increase in size once our deck goes in next summer), replace the front walkway (my favorite new thing), and reseed the front and back yards.

Goodbye Stucco!

What do you do during a hurricane snow day?  Update your blogs!  :)  I actually did this home improvement project in August.  Someone in our neighborhood filed a complaint with the county that our backyard had a dying tree so when the inspector came, they made a list of EVERYTHING "wrong" with our property while admitting that our tree wasn't actually dying.  Don't get me started.  Anyway, they said the stucco on our porch roof was peeling off so it had to be completed scraped off.  Not sure how peeling stucco affects the county or our neighbors in any way, since you can't see it unless you're standing under it, but whatever.  I've been meaning to scrape it off for a while.  It didn't take too long - rocked out to my mp3 player and tried to avoid getting stucco in my nose.  :)