Happy Anniversary F&P

Happy 8th Anniversary –The Frog & PenguINN

It was 8 years ago in early January 2003 that we first saw the house that was to become our permanent home, 2 years later. Although we purchased the house in 2003, we didn’t relocate until 2005.

We were living in NJ and both Grenville and myself were taking college courses. We had decided to move when our courses were done. Thanks to online listings, we would check out homes for sale online and then make the 5+ hour drive to look at some whenever we had a free weekend. We lost count of the trips and the houses we looked at for well over a year.

Ironically, we saw our future home on the last day of a weekend visit – it was a FSBO – for sale by owner. Below is a photo of how it looked when we first saw it on a drive around. Many eastern shore homes here have the same color scheme – white house with black shutters. Makes you wonder if they ever heard of other colors, then we found out that folks here favored white as it was thought to be cooler in hot weather.

Note that the shutters were missing on the second floor windows. (They were around, but just not on the house.)

We called the number that you can’t see on that sign and – talk about timing – got a return call an hour before we were to head back to NJ. Within a half hour, we met the owner and a half hour later had agreed to buy the house – on a handshake. Once back in NJ, the details were handled by phone calls and mail exchanges. We returned to sign the paperwork and complete the purchase in late January 2003 on Lee-Jackson Day.

You are definitely not a native Virginian if you don’t know about this holiday. And, being northern Yankees, we had never heard of it either. After all, our side won the Civil War.

Lee–Jackson Day is a holiday celebrated in the Commonwealth of Virginia to celebrate the birthdays of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. The original holiday, created in 1889, celebrated Lee's birthday. Jackson's name was added in 1904. Lee–Jackson Day is observed on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is the third Monday in January.

From 2003 to 2005, we spent holidays, vacations, and summers, working on the house, until we sold our NJ home and moved in the summer of 2005 and christened it The F&P.

Here’s a view of the house front taken the summer after we moved in. Notice that the front hedges on both sides are gone. They met a chain on the back of Grenville’s pickup truck.

The house is still white, but with all its shutters back in place.

A few years ago, we changed the colors to ivory with blue shutters and coordinating blue trim.

We enjoy our home and, YES, it features LOTS of frogs and penguins. More about the frogs and penguins in future posts.

If you are ever in the neighborhood, y’all stop on in and “set a spell.” As the sign says . . .