I took a week or so of leave from the Academy that summer before my house was completed. When I returned, they'd painted the exterior. I suppose I was surprised because I did not realize that the colors that it looked like in the first couple of photos were not the colors the house was going to have when they were done.
The little girl in front and the little boy standing on the patio in back were children of the Fedrizzi's.
It would never be easy to mow the lawn. That first year my next door neighbor Gina Martin and I hired a lawn care service to mow. But after that first year, it got to be too expensive, so I finally bought a lawn mower and did the work myself.
It took a lot of effort to not only mow but water and fertilize the lawn, too. Plus, for a few years, I could not afford to install the rocks to keep the soil from erodiing when we had terrific summer thundershowers from the west.
Eventually, the subsequent set of neighbors who moved in on the right of the top photo, pushed me to finally install rocks and railroad ties. We even built a support wall toward the bottom so that the slope was not so severe. Rock was also place around the house itself and the bottom and side fences.
The house itself commanded a spectacular view, as you will later see. I could look outside and gaze far to the south, or at airliners landing at the Colorado Springs airport. Even from the basement window, just visible in the bottom photo, a couple of yards to the right of the back door, you could see Pikes Peak.
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