When we were first looking at moving back to the East Coast from Minnesota, I told Jeff I would have to have a pool if we were moving somewhere with hot, muggy summers.  I didn’t mean that we had to have a backyard pool, but I at least wanted access to one through a neighborhood membership or something.  I just melt in the heat and being able to jump in a pool would help me enjoy the summers more.  When we narrowed down our search to Washington County, Maryland, I primarily picked out homes with pools.  Again, it wasn’t a must-have, but I felt like it was a huge perk, especially with two teenage boys.  We ended up looking at an as-is home built in 1970 with a backyard pool that hadn’t been used as a pool in over 15 years.  We have never owned a pool and didn’t know

When we live in a house for a while, it’s easy to become blind to things that should be obvious eyesores.  Something that bothered us initially becomes something we don’t even notice.  Such was the case with the basketball pole off our driveway.  We walk past it almost every day and, occasionally, I would recognize it and comment that we need to remove it and then we would go about working on other things. We considered putting a new backboard and net up to make it functional, but we learned that it would have to be either customized or custom-made since the mounting hardware on the pole no longer matches up with modern backboards.  We then questioned if anyone in our house would use it enough to make it worth the trouble and expense and decided it would be best to just remove it.  We mentioned that it was going