House photos, finally!

I am still trying to find the camera to computer cable in our pile of boxes, but I remembered last night that I could put my memory card directly into my computer. Yay, photos! These were taken during our final walkthrough.

Living room. This was the wood floor that was covered by a floating pergo floor. We were happy to see the room back in its original state. The second photo was taken looking down from the second floor "catwalk".

Kitchen, when standing in the living room.

 Front room. Can you guess where this is in relationship to the rest of the house?

Dining room, from front room. The kitchen is in the background. Yup, that's pinkish striped wallpaper.

Slaughtered salmon bathroom! The shower curtain was left by the previous owners and will stay until we can find something else to put there (such as another shower curtain).

Guest bedroom, aka the dorm room.

Master bedroom, with a view of the alcove-like area that leads into the bathroom. The wallpaper in the alcove is slightly nostalgic, as my parents had this in their house as one point. The odd thing was that we couldn't remember exactly where...

Master bath. It is sort of a beige-y color.

 

That's the general gist of our house. Here are a few random photos...

 

First home repair. The chain fell off the floaty thing in the toilet in the half bath. (I don't mind the blue wallpaper, except for the fact that it has odd faded stripes. It's almost like the paper wasn't printed correctly.)

This is Murphy voting for his favorite paint color in the half bath. Does anyone know how to rotate a video in blogger?

All the small things

She left me roses by the stairs....Was that Greenday? I'm drawing a blank.

Yesterday I (re)discovered the magic of spray paint. I had this gold basket sitting in the closet of our rental that I had "borrowed" from a former job a few years ago to use for a volunteer event. Really, who at work was in need of gold gift basket after the treats had been consumed? Anyway, the basket received a coat of white spray paint yesterday and is now back in the category of things I might actually use. (The in between-y look of white with a little gold showing through looked kind of cool, but I eventually went for all white.) It probably needs a little touching up, but it will eventually go in the guest a.k.a. slaughtered salmon bathroom.

Later, after my brother-in-law took a tour of our yard and pointed out the pile-o-dead-grasses, I went to Tar-jay to buy a pruner (and cat food and toothpaste and ant traps - to protect the cat food from intruders!). I spent about a half hour quite happily hacking at the pile-o-dead-grasses (I am excited to see if they grow back as not-dead-ornamental grass) and taking down dead branches from nearby trees, while the husband tended to the brisket and chicken he was smoking. Did I mention that this weekend started with him saying, "We should smoke something this weekend!" on Friday night? We own a smoker. It smokes meat.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned yesterday that my husband has no interest in landscaping. I therefore told my slightly-overzealous-new-homeowner-brother-in-law that I may be the representative of our household who would be accompanying him to the garden store in the months to come. Based on these findings, I told my husband that I could respect his distaste of yard work, as long he continued to cook.  And yes, there was smoked meat for all.

Das big wish list

Time to get organized! All this stuff has been floating in my head since, well, the first day we saw the house. Here is the project wish list (for now):

First and foremost
Finish unpacking
Deck furniture
New grill!
Kitchen table and chairs
Plant herbs, etc
Hide cables in walls
Soap dispensers/toothbrush holders/etc for baths
Get rid of mailbox magnet wrapper-thing
Start to make design plans!
Hang some art

First big project
Strip dining room wallpaper and paint

Projects: Years 1-10 (haha)
Front room
Furniture (would be good)
Good cleaning/repaint built-ins

Living room
Repaint
Pillows
Area rug

Dining room
Curtains

Half bath
Replace hardware (just say no to pineapples)
Strip wallpaper and paint

Kitchen
Replace paper towel holder
New cabinet knobs
Fix cracked kitchen tiles
Curtains
Replace light fixture

Master bed/bath
Strip alcove wallpaper and paint
Repaint?
Move mirror to half bath and find one for master

Dorm room
Lighting
New bedding
Curtains

Dorm room bath
Paint (Yikes, what is that color anyway? "Slaughtered salmon" perhaps?)
Paint mirror frame
Shower curtain
(Window) curtains

Office
Lighting?
Potential trip hazard!
 
Basement
Triage shelving
Paint floor

Outside
Paint/stain deck
Reshape bushes (crazy hack job)
Motion sensor light for deck
Motion senor light for walkout

Low priority
What to do about the wall color in open areas?
New front door
Finish basement
Stain cabinets
Kitchen counter top

Maybe, maybe
Solar power!
Bath renovations
Garage door

And...I'm exhausted already. Can you imagine what this would look like if we bought a house that needed major renovations?

Welcome to Boxland

This weekend marked the official end of week 1 in the new house. I am still wandering around asking myself, "Do we really live here?" Somehow I still feel like we're staying in a vacation rental, except for the fact that we have to get up and go to work each morning. Particularly amazing was the fact that the flowering trees in our neighborhood (flowering pear or apple trees maybe?) bloomed about 3 days after we moved in. It was a nice welcome to the neighborhood from mom nature (we even have a few blooms visible from our bathroom skylight). I was sad that we were moving out before the crabapple in front of our rental was going to do its thing this spring, so getting to see multiple flowering trees on my drive home has been sweet.

I keep looking around the house feeling frustrated with all the boxes, but then I remind myself how long it took to pack. Thus far, unpacking the boxes has gone much faster than packing them, and we made major progress this weekend in boxland. As an aside, I arrived later than I had hoped to my sister's shower on Saturday, because I just could not find pants! I eventually won that battle with the boxes.

Speaking of boxes, I have started a rather random list of things that the boxes are still holding hostage. It is a very odd, the things that we feel slightly lost without:
-Pepper grinder (salt shaker is missing too, but the box of kosher salt has been found!)
-Bathroom clock
-Coasters (where to put the glasses in the living room?)
-Candles for giant candleholder (in front of fireplace)
-Charger for camera battery (This makes me sad. There are a lot of house photos that are currently just stuck in my camera.)

Can't Help Myself

Does the world really need another blog about a house and the humans who live in it? Perhaps not. The thing is, I do. There are ton a DIY/home improvement/decorating sites out there, but none of them include any of my ideas. This is a place to store ideas and memories of our new adventure in home-ownership.

We closed on our house on March 23rd and moved in April 1st-3rd, and the fact that we actually have a home of our own still a bit of a surprise to me. My anti-house-buying husband put up a bit of a challenge, although I don't think either of us recognized it at the time. He was always against buying, although he eventually disclosed enough information to provide me with a mental picture of a home he would consider. After only about a month of "active" house-hunting, I found a house that made him stop and take notice. Our house is "us", as best as we can probably visually define us at this point in our lives.

And then there's me. Did I mention that this was a big deal? I've always been frugal and have been saving for a house longer than I'd like to admit (although non-profit employement and paying for grad school the past couple of years has made things a little interesting in the savings department). I've been squirreling money away in drawers, boxes, and bank accounts since I was somewhere in the neighborhood of age eight; when packing up our rental, I discovered that I still have my tooth fairy money (packaged all together mind you), because I could never bring myself to spend it. You never know when you may need a few silver dollars.

This is to be a journal of our lives in our new house, along with all of the related joys and pains of home-ownership.