a home

At long last, a house update! We moved in the weekend of June 6 (a feat we could never have accomplished without the help of our awesome friends), and thus began the crazy 4-month long process of getting the house in order. When we bought the house we knew that it had great bones, but that we would need to do some work on the inside in order to get it looking exactly how we wanted it to look.

Because of travel, school, work, and life in general, we got off to a somewhat slow start, and we drove ourselves crazy for a couple of months living in a state of half-settled-in-ness. Then Bob and Cheryl decided to visit us at the beginning of September, and this served as the kick in the pants we needed to get us to finish whipping this place into shape (Labor Day weekend was an insane scramble!). Little did we know all that the process of personalizing our home would entail. Here is a list of just some of the updates/changes we've made to the house since moving in:

1). Bought a new fridge to replace the 15-year-old one that was in the house when we bought it, and which was leaking oil all over the wood floor beneath it. Also, if you know me, you can imagine the disgusted look on my face at the thought of having to use someone else's old fridge.

2). Kev removed the ugly bracket shelving around the fridge and patched all the holes in the wall left by the old shelves, sanded it all down, and repainted it. He also added a beautiful new shelf for our cook books (he's become so handy!).

3). We ripped up the burgundy carpet in the living room, and the hunter green carpet in the front bedroom, removed the mind-blowingly heavy faux fireplace that used to take center stage in the living room, and then had the wood floors in the entire house (main floor only) refinished. Expensive, but absolutely worth the cost - the floors are beautiful! Also a great learning experience in terms of learning to work with service providers (let's just say our floor guy was less than wonderful).

4). Had the carpet in the basement (which used to smell like a humid little doggy urinal) replaced. No more pet smells! Also, when Bob and Cheryl visited they bought us a dehumidifier, so the humidity situation in the basement is now under control and we can actually hang clothes to dry in the laundry room without them smelling moldy after a day.

5). Painted the living room and dining room (which used to be two shades of mustard yellow with dark blue trim), and the two main floor bedrooms. Painting is a serious pain the neck (oh the prep work!), but the immediate impact on the look of a house is so gratifying. It took forever to paint those four rooms (heck, it took about a year just to get the trim-work done), not to mention how long it took to even choose colors (nothing like a late-night trip to Home Depot when it's about to close to make you decide on a color in a hurry), but we're glad we did it because we LOVE how the rooms turned out.

6). Kevin learned to remove 87 year old windows and replace their broken sashes. Awesome!

7). Changed our minds about making the teeny front bedroom our master bedroom, so...we moved the huge mattress upstairs, painted over the stenciled rocket ships and planets that were on the ceiling (some day we'll muster the courage to paint the entire room), and installed "closets" to make it a bedroom for grownups. It's a huge space with four big skylights, and we are loving sleeping in it (and yes, Kevin misses the rocket ships).

8). Ripped up the astro turf-style carpet (oh boy) in the front porch, and, after getting a ridiculous quote for the cost of having new carpet put in, and, after realizing that any normal carpet in an enclosed porch would just get dirty, we decided to buy a $30 gallon of Behr's "Pebbled Path" porch paint, and two coats later it was a brand new space. Added a wooden porch swing, a couple of wicker chairs, some rugs, a couple of potted plants, and a chinese paper lantern, and it's a beautiful area!

9).Accumulated the following tools/homeowner gadgets, after about eleventy-billion trips to the Home Depot, Target, Lowe's, and Menards (a Midwestern Home Depot): a lawn mower (the old-fashioned manual kind), a drill, an edge trimmer, a shovel, a rake, an "outdoor" broom, a stud finder, a grill (a happy Kevin), a ladder, a hose and hose reel cart thing, and probably some other stuff that I am forgetting about right now.

10). Spent six hours in the yard (again, Kev), which included: mowing, trimming, pruning, weeding, sowing (new grass that is), sweeping, raking.

11).Assembled a lot of new furniture (I give credit to Kev for most of the furniture assembly, though I did help a little), searched high and low for non-ugly curtains that didn't cost a small fortune (hooray for West Elm!), picked out a new couch at the Room and Board outlet, got ourselves a patio set, bought a television (Kevin's new love), hung pictures, put books on bookshelves, hung pots on pot racks, put out vases full of fresh flowers, organized closets, and, voilà - a home!

We know that we'll never really be "done" (woohoo for weekend home-improvement projects), but we're okay with that because that's what being a homeowner is all about. We are really happy with how the house has turned out thus far, and we are enjoying living in it. The best part about being in our new house is sharing it with our friends and family, so come visit us, the guest room is waiting.

Here are some of the most recent pictures of the house (for a complete set of pictures - from the signing of papers to the last set of curtains hung, and everything in between - go here).