Our Home In El Paso, Texas

One of the biggest benefits of moving back to the US for my wife and I was the collapse of the housing market.  We had been thinking about getting into the housing market for years and we have decided to hold off because we had figured the housing market was inflated.  We considered buying a home a few years back in Washington State and we actually came very close to buying a home in Australia as well as an investment property, but by doing our research we felt both housing markets were inflated, so we held off.  When the housing collapse happened both my wife and I were greatly relieved because if we had bought a house in the area we were looking at back in Washington State for example we would have been hammered by the loss of value in the home.  Since we held off from buying we had saved up a very large down payment for a home when we moved to El Paso:

It is great being a home owner and my wife and I are really enjoying our home that we got at a great price from the seller who we talked down by $20,000 because he was so desperate to sell his home.  We have so far been enjoying our new life here in West Texas, which neither of us are from. We have lived outside the US for so long now that everything here actually feels new and fresh now.

Here is a quick tour around the outside of my house.  As can be seen in the above picture my front yard has no grass and is composed of all rock which is about the norm in El Paso since this is the desert.  I do have in my front yard a number of small trees and this very large bush with beautiful flowers that I have to keep trimming because of its non-stop growth:

I have another couple of nice bush along the fence line with my neighbor that also has some very nice colorful flowers on them as well:

These trees and bushes at least add some nice color to my front yard that would otherwise look pretty plain if it was just composed of rock.  I have some ideas to make improvements on my front yard, but right now I am focused solely on my back yard because it is composed of nothing, rocks.  However, as can be seen in this picture I have an ongoing landscaping project I have been working on:

I have slowly but surely shoveling up the rock and installing stone path ways.  The open area you see in the above photo is where a artificial lawn is to be installed.  In future postings once I complete the work in my backyard, I will show everyone the progress of the landscape work I have been doing.  But, I can tell everyone that it sure is nice to be able to make home improvements to your own property instead of someone else’s.