When you live in a house that is more than 40 years old you begin to notice some sags here and there.  The front steps to our house were once made of brick, but over time they sank until the top step was a full two bricks taller than the other steps.  Needless to say, this was not safe, so we took them out--about five years ago!  Finally, they have been replaced. 

As you can imagine, it is impossible to match brick that old, so we had it done in stacked stone and while we were at it we had the teeny, tiny porch widened a smidge.  Pretty soon we'll put the banisters up and when we reroof the house sometime this year (or the next, or the next, or the next...) we will also extend it out over the new portion of the porch.  Right now, I'm just glad to have a usable front door again. 

Of course, now I have to clean out the foyer behind that door because it kind of sort of became a bit of a storage area over the last few years.  I also have some work to do on the lawn because of the heavy equipment needed to do this job kind of tore up the yard a bit.

What I'm most looking forward to, however, is finally putting back shrubbery in front of the house.  When you drive down the street, our house looks like it has two eyes (the windows) and a long green nose (the hose) and if one of the windows has its shades down, then it looks like our house is winking!