So....Wanna See My House?!

Since you've all been obsessively checking my blog this week to see pictures of my house, I'll post them as promised.
Okay, so, probably I'm the only one that obsessively checks blogs to see pictures of people's new houses. I'll still post some pictures for you.

First, you should meet my best friend of the neighborhood, thus far. His name is Cooper.


I'm pretty sure he's obsessed with me. I'm ok with it though. He's pretty adorable.

Best friends. My other neighbors are pretty awesome too.

Ok, ok. I'll show you pictures of the house. Please observe:
Kitchen (obviously):

Main floor sitting area:

Stairs (I'm in love. I have a thing for cool stairs. Don't judge.):

Landing/nook on top of stairs (again, love):

Spare Bedroom:

Master bedroom (please ignore gross carpet, it will be replaced):

Upstairs bathroom:

Basement Family Room (Please ignore the even more yucky carpet. We're hoping to get this replaced within the next few days):

Another bedroom:

So, there you have it. What do you think?!

A lot of people have been asking me how repairs are going, and I'll be honest, they're going a lot slower than we anticipated. We've had a few setbacks. It took us a couple of days longer than we thought it would to get the water turned on and it's pretty hard to do anything without that. Patching the walls for painting also took longer than we anticipated, so it's been a bit frustrating. Let me give you an example. Wednesday night we were SO close to being ready to have the water turned on. We were replacing the very last plumbing thing we needed to replace and the seal of the hose bib got melted during soldering and it was 9:45 at night. Then we couldn't get it figured out Thursday either, BUT we finally got it today and we FINALLY have water. So, we're a couple of days behind, but such is life.

However, I'm actually having a lot of fun learning how to do all of this stuff. So far I've learned how to caulk corners, patch big and small holes before painting, sand, re-texture with mud, and better paint techniques. I have to give a special shout out to my dad, who taught me all of this. Have I ever told you that my dad is the coolest EVER? Well, he is. Seriously, he's so talented with this stuff. Seriously, I knew he was good at it, but this past week I have been absolutely blown away by his knowledge of all of this. He's also the hardest worker I've ever seen. Monday, right after we closed, he pulled up, took out his Little Giant Ladder (ok, seriously, have you ever seen one of these? They AMAZING) and starts fixing our gutter. So cool. So far, with his help, we've done the following:

• changed out locks


• fixing a droopy gutter


• killed ants (we did this one on our own, not to hard..)


• fixed a few plumbing things, which entails fixing two hose bibs, re-soldering the main water valve and getting it a new handle, replacing downstairs cold water stop and upstairs shower valve, fixing a bad drain, and one other small leak where on the hose hook up.


• paint prep for the basement family room (we're basically done, thankfully!), which entails: spackling and re mudding holdes, re texturing with mud, taping, and caulking corners.


• my step dad and my mom also came over and helped us clean and dig up some chain link in our back yard, which needs to go back up as a fence where it belongs.

Wanna see some pictures of us working?

Taping

caulking

mudding

cutting a hole to get to the hose bib

So, I always thought cutting into a wall would be fairly hard. It's not.

I mean, you can't just go around cutting into walls, right? Wrong. The above picture transformed into the below picture in like ten minutes.

Before we move in we'd really like to get the painting and carpet done in the basement family room. We really really hope!!!! We were originally planning on getting more done before moving in, but since we ended up closing a full two weeks after our original closing date, we got set back quite a bit and then we got set back again with the plumbing stuff, we're going to just have to move in before everything is done. But, I think this will actually be kind of nice, because we won't have to drive all the way back to our apartment every night after we're doing working, which will save us time and we'll get more sleep. We've devised a plan to not have furniture in our way.

So, wanna know what else we're going to do? (In the near future anyway. There are always projects for a house, no matter how long you've lived there, right?)

• paint the basement famly room


• tear our old carpet from family room


• put new carpet in the basement family room


• get rid of the textured walls on the main level (this may turn out to be the biggest project yet)


• paint main level


• clean carpets in the bedrooms


• re-fram door downstairs


• hang two new outside doors


• put up a few small sections of fence


• get rid of hand rail on stairs that is cheap, ugly, and uncessecary


• kill weeds in the yard


• maybe replant the yard?


• maybe haul lots of dirt out of the yard?


• fix gutter


• put ice shield on roof


• take swamp cooler off roof


• go to home depo about thirty times


• and, the very best of all...DECORATE!!!!

Well, I hope that didn't bore you to tears. I hope you at least liked the pictures. We sure are in for a lot of work, and even though it's not going as fast as we'd like, it will be so worth it in the end.

Also, I picked out my accent wall color for the basement family room. It's called Pale Jade. I'm aboslutely in love with it.