You never truly appreciate what it takes to run and maintain a house until you own one. Or at least I never did.
Word of advice, hit the ground running. It is a lot easier to maintain current standards with intention to improve, than to let things get out of hand and then try to fix them. I’ll give you an example.
Those who know me personally know that there has been a lot, and I mean A LOT of issues with the back garden. The latest of which being that an experiment in neglect has forced our garden to become a wild ground for brambles.
I feel like Br’er Rabbit in his Briar Patch. On the upside we have a decent crop of blackberries, however this wasn’t quite the aesthetic my family was aiming for. The brambles have taken over the side window of the conservatory and have now started to inconvenience our neighbors.
As such, about a week ago, I went out on a whim to try and make the bramble situation a little bit better, I had an hour free after all. I wasn’t going to get all of the lawn care tools from the shed, I was just going to try and make a dent in preparation for a full-frontal attack that weekend.
What I found were brambles that had become two to three inches thick.
In the end, I wound up beating the brambles with a length of pipe, like a medieval knight swinging a mace. Not the most elegant method but it definitely worked.
But the point is, If I had just kept the garden reasonably controlled, I wouldn’t have had to adopt the persona of Sir Thorn-Slayer. And I still never made it out that weekend. Sigh.