We’ve been living in our house for almost two years, a fact I was reminded of when our neighbors started setting up their Halloween decorations in mid September. When we first saw our house two years ago, the neighbors had skeletons perched on the shrubs in their front yard and a giant spiderweb over their driveway. When the skeletons and spider reappeared this year, it brought back so many memories of our house search two years ago.
The Search
Soon after we started dating, Chris started talking about selling his house. He lived on the northwest side of Las Vegas in Centennial Hills and I lived in the southeast side of the valley in Henderson. It was about a 40 minute drive between my apartment and his house, and driving back and forth got old pretty quick. A few times a week, Chris would drive 25 minutes home from work during his lunch break to check on Bailey, then drive to my apartment after work to go for a run, have dinner, and hang out, and then drive home. We made it work, but wasting money on gas and leaving Bailey alone for hours was not ideal. In August, we went camping with the dogs in Utah and were out on a hike when Chris brought up that he was thinking of selling his house and looking for one in Henderson. A few deep conversations, lots of paperwork, and some stressful negotiations later, we were signing our names to become co-owners of a new 2400 square foot split level house.
We originally started looking at used houses rather than new ones, and were hoping for something less than 2000 square feet and one story. But after lots of touring and searching, we walked into the house that became ours and were surprised by how right it felt.
The House
Our house is on the south side of Henderson, in an area with nice neighborhoods, schools, and access to a trail system. It is on a quiet private street in a small development. There are about 25 houses including ours, and a small park with a grassy area and some benches. The lots are typical small Vegas lots, but the space between houses is large enough and the walls around the backyard are tall enough to feel private.
The house has a small front yard with low water landscaping and a couple of trees. The driveway and steps to the door are made of pavers, which gives the house a nice finished look. To get inside, you go up a half staircase to the covered porch and front door. Inside, there is an entryway that leads either up to the main floor with the living room, kitchen, office, half bath, and master bedroom, or downstairs to the first floor with another living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, the laundry area, and the “craft room” or “dog room” as we have come to call it. Downstairs also has a giant closet under the stairs, plus the sliding glass door to the back yard and a door to the garage.
The split level layout was a total surprise for us. When we looked at the plans online before going to see the house, we were both pretty skeptical, but when we walked in, the openness and light of being on the second floor changed our minds.
New kitchen 
Bathroom
My favorite room in the house is the kitchen. I’ve always loved to cook, and this kitchen has plenty of room and a great layout for creating all types of meals. The cabinets are sleek modern dark wood, and the appliances are stainless steel. The countertops are black, gray, and white granite with flecks of silver. Before moving to Las Vegas, I’d never had a gas stove, but now after having one, I love the way it works. Even doing dishes is nice, because we have a window that faces out across the Las Vegas Valley with a view of the mountains. In the morning the sunrises are bright and cheerful, and in the evening the sunsets light up the room with a reddish glow.
The Yard
The backyard is another of my favorite parts of the house. After living in dorms and apartments for most of my twenties, I was excited to have a yard for gardening and getting outside. It was a completely blank slate when we moved in, with nothing but dirt and a small paver pad by the back door. We lived with it like that for a few months, but as our first winter turned towards spring, we started planning what we were going to do. The first thing we did was have a patio and patio cover put in. This is Vegas, and summers are blistering hot, so we knew we needed some shade to make it livable. We went with a simple alumawood solid cover in a dark brown color. For the patio, we considered pavers and stamped or colored concrete, but ended up going with a traditional concrete patio for a smooth, low maintenance surface. After the patio, we mapped out our plan for raised planters, trees, and a small lawn. A visit to Moon Valley nursery for ideas turned into a shopping trip and design session. We picked out the bricks for the planter walls and spent an exhausting weekend hauling them from the car to the back yard and then building the walls. A couple weeks later, Moon Valley installed the trees and the drip irrigation system, plus 150 square feet of grass. After that, it was up to us to fill in the rest with plants and shrubs. We headed to Star Nursery and picked out a couple of huge cart fulls of plants, plus two more trees. The jeep looked like a jungle and we had to drive on the back roads to get home. By the time we got done planting, all the planters and beds were filled with new decorative plants, as well as tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and herbs. After that was furniture. We had the barbecue and a propane fire pit from Chris’s first house, and we bought a couple of plastic Adirondack chairs. In midsummer we added a high top bistro table, and at the end of summer, we found a large dining table set on sale and brought that home to fill out the space. The finishing touches are still in progress. The summer got too hot to install the gravel groundcover, so we raked the dirt smooth and called it good while we planned our wedding.
Home
This summer we planted a few more decorative plants, along with some new tomato plants, cucumbers, peppers, and eggplants, plus a pumpkin plant. The pumpkin didn’t make it, although it did have some baby pumpkins before it succumbed to the oven-like temperatures in August. Everything else did well, some too well, overtaking the planter and having to be cut back multiple times. This fall we’ve harvested lots of cucumbers, peppers, and eggplants, and have been enjoying spending time outside in the cooler weather. We still have a few tasks left to do, but two years in, our house truly feels like our home.