The menagerie in the yard

Not only does the inside of the Urban Farmhouse need a ton of work, so does the yard. There are at least 10 blog posts I could make about the things that need to be cleaned/removed/trimmed up on the property, but I will start with the peculiar collection of animals in the yard. You may be thinking that I just need to call pest control to get rid of them, but they are not *those* kinds of animals. They are yard art.

The Urban Farmhouse ended up with the current owner as the result of a divorce. I guess she held on to it, and eventually her dad and his wife moved in to it for several years. I've met him a few times, and he is quite a character. I think he is originally from South Africa but has been in America for a long time. He has a handlebar moustache, for real. And he sells Rainbow vacuum cleaners.

He also apparently loves to garden. More than once, I've had to be nice and let him walk me through the property and show me all of the things he built/planted/installed in his garden. He's got hoses strung everywhere, fountains, wagon wheels, a butterfly garden, millions of cacti that he personally planted. He's even got some sort of electrical wire, that I'm pretty sure is not up to code and might possibly burn the whole house down, strung everywhere for landscape lighting. (You should have seen the home inspector's face when he was pointing it out to me during the inspection. I thought he was going to have a stroke!) All I can think is that I hope he doesn't plan to drop back by, because all of that is marked for demo.

The most peculiar to me is the collection of the animal figurines scattered throughout the yard. I will share some of them with you:

Now I am not up on my saints trivia, but a quick google tells me that St. Francis is the one who cared for animals. And apparently wasn't scared of gigantic scale cardinals that are sneaking up on him. I know there's a Catholic joke in there somewhere, but I'm not up on my Catholic trivia either.

Someone needs to rescue Bully, it seems he's gotten into some quicksand.

I like to call this one Three Drunk Cats.

Who doesn't want a life-size fake deer family in their yard? That one on the end is watching you.

I guess this is St. Francis again. He really does not mind gigantic scale animals right next to him. And on the rock we have Two Drunk Frogs. And Singin' In the Rain Frog on the ground below them.

You can never have to many wagon wheels, y'all.