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Recently, we have been having some really warm weather for November! The highs have been between 50’s – 70’s, and the lows have been between 50’s – 30’s. That’s crazy considering it’s normally snowing by now!!!

It’s like, Mother Nature can’t decide if she wants winter to start now or wait until January!

With the warmer weather, we have been putting up Christmas decorations outside and getting the property ready for our first winter in this house!

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The first thing we did was put up Christmas decorations outside (obviously)!

We have opted for simple decorations for Christmas this year. I found these solar lights online for super cheap and wrapped them around the two trees in the front yard.

The house was also decorated with solar Christmas lights, which saves us money on the electric bill and is easy to pack up at the end of the year! These decorations are so cheerful to come home to after a long night at work, and it’s fun to see the house all lit up!

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The next task to be done was digging the trench in the front yard!

This year was horrible with storms and flooding! I think we had a total of four tornado warnings and double the flash floods! This caused us to see where the water goes when there is nowhere for it to flow, and the answer is: inside the house!

Quite a bit of the water pools in the front of the house and gets high enough to almost come through the front door! We quickly decided to make some sort of runoff so that future floods had someplace to drain to, but we didn’t have the time to dig it out until now!

My brother had kept his eye out for discounted rocks at work, and the boys quickly went to work digging a moat (that’s what I called it at least) in the front yard this week. Of course, there were sadly no drawbridges or alligators in the building of this moat, but it’s a start! 😉

While digging, hubby discovered that our front patio was actually bigger than we thought! He pretty much doubled the size of our patio by scraping off the dirt and grass that had grown over the top of it throughout the years!

We are hopeful that when the snow melts next spring, this little runoff the boys have built will help keep the water AWAY from the front door and allow it more places to go besides inside!

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We wrapped the chicken pen for the winter!

This morning, my brother helped me wrap the chicken pen in tarps for the upcoming winter storms. We had it wrapped already, but only to keep out the wind. It needed to be redone, however, as we had put the top tarp on first and THEN put the side tarps around it. This caused all of the leaves to go down into the pen. So, this morning, we took off all of the tarps and redid it properly for the winter!

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Winter is very slowly approaching this year, and we’ve been lucky with the warm weather and no snow (as of yet). We are trying to get stuff done before the upcoming holidays so that we may relax and enjoy it with family! ❤

I hope the rest of you are getting ready for the holiday season as well! Whether that be preparing for winter, or sowing seeds in the gardens (for those of you in the other half of the world)!

As always, my lovely readers.. Smile, have an amazing day, and enjoy the changing seasons!