House

It's probably high time I post a picture or two about our house. We've been here about 8 months exactly and have had the house for 9 months. We did a lot of work the first month and I was going to post stuff then but there were still some projects that I thought we needed to get done before I really could do before and after. 9 months later some of those still aren't done and I'm really realizing there will always be stuff on the list so I might as well post some stuff :) We decided we needed new carpet. The old stuff in the rooms was really white and not conducive to our style or dogs or kids. So we ended up tearing out ALL the flooring up here basically the day we got keys. We ended up putting new tile down and new carpet and we painted the kids rooms and did new baseboards and trims. It was so much work. We tore apart one bathroom and after some time got that one repainted (it's the bathroom off the laundry and it's painted now and we have sink and toilet in the garage just need to put them in and do the mirror and lights, etc). So basically the point of the story is it's time to just throw these main renovation pics in and really the rest probably isn't blog worthy...at this time anyway. There's a huge long list of things we'd like to do and eventually will whittle more away at it, but ultimately, we really like the house and the space and the location and my commute to work, etc etc etc. It might not be our retirement home but it's perfect for us for now. I will still wish home-ownership came with less responsibility and project lists and malfunctions, etc, though!

This was the night we got the keys. We had gone to a pumpkin patch and didn't get back in time to take a lighted picture of the front, so we are in front of the fireplace. Which I LOVE having. And we had a fire that first night and it made me really happy.

My parents took the kids home and we got to tearing out the wood floor. We got all the wood up and the carpet up that night. The next day we started on tile. My parents came up and helped and we had treats and lunch. This has been awhile so I'm not entirely sure of timeline, but it took us about a month to get it ready to move in. So I'll just dump a bunch of pictures here...

Laura was my painting helper. Oh my gosh she helped SOOO much! We painted Harvey's room a bright blue that Tanner hates and is brighter than I expected but I actually really like it now and Harvey likes it so I suppose that's an important part. Greta's is gray and I love it.

 

I also spent a ton of time painting baseboards and trim - Tanner hung them all up. This is just one pic I have of it.

Next step was carpet...we LOVE our carpet. We got the squishiest, best pad and the carpet is also really soft. It's dreamy!

We basically moved in after that...we had lots of help from family and some new neighbors too! We made great time and got tons done that first day.

We didn't have doors on for a few months. We had someone pain them for us which was nice to not do but he did a crappy job and took FOREVER and I would never have him paint anything again. Oh well. We got new doorknobs which I actually don't have a picture of. We also switched out the hardware on our cabinets, which made a big difference. We still want to do new cabinets and counters and back splash but that's a bit away from now.

Tanner tore out the laundry bathroom like I said and put up some bead board. I got that painted awhile ago and I love the color. We just need to put the rest of it together and add a couple more doors on for that room and the laundry.

We did some big projects outside too. I was bad and didn't get any before pictures outside so I stole some from google maps. They had a big rock waterfall feature in front of the house and TONS of big areas of flowers and such. Neither of which did we like. Neither of us are interested in spending lots of time on the yard right now. So our first spring project was to get rid of the waterfall. Much later we finally got everything weeded and prepped and put sod down so our yard is much more user friendly. The backyard is another story and we have plenty of work to do back there too.

It was a hard day! We pulled out all the curbing too and tons of other small - biggish rocks that we moved by hand. So sore and tired after that! And Greta snoozed through it all, well at least some of it.

 We dug out a lot of the flower beds when we had the digger but then I left them alone and this mound became very weedy again. So I spent a few days weeding it and then took like 30 wheelbarrow bucket fulls of dirt to the backyard to level it out and make it much smaller so we could put grass there for most of it. Again, so much work! But it's done now and so so nice. We still need to plant a bush around the electrical thing and some flowers in front of the house but that might be a next spring project. The goals for the backyard are to weed and turn a large garden area into a putting green :) I'm learning that as much as I like the idea of gardening, I'm not in a stage of life that can handle or wants to handle a big garden. I planted 2 tomato plants this year and can barely remember they exist most days.

Little sod helpers that actually weren't tons of help, so the fact that my dad came up to really help was essential and so appreciated. They got it done so fast and I was on kid duty.

 So yeah, we have some big backyard projects, we want to clean out and organize and paint the garage. We need to finish up the bathroom inside and do doors. The next big money project will be to pain the whole upstairs. The paint color is ugly and it's a horrible paint job. We also have dreams of kitchen stuff, as mentioned earlier and re-doing our bathroom and the basement bathroom and kitchen area (also we had a flood so the big spare room that we wanted to redo anyway is kind of torn apart. So, there's a plenty long list, that when I think about too much I get really overwhelmed. So we'll do things one step at a time I guess and as finances allow :) And as we check things off we will add new things. It seems like that's the life of a homeowner. I LOVE having a house and we love our neighborhood and I really actually do love our house. We actually still need couches upstairs...oops. So slowly but surely it's starting to feel a lot more like home.