Monday, August 31, 2009

Pictures of Our New House!




Yesterday I forged through the office to find the cord that connects my camera to the computer. It was quite the feat, because Friday Dave was inspired to unpack his share of the office. He has it all out of the boxes, but not quite put away yet... so it was an obstacle course to get to my desk and rummage through the drawers to find the right one. BUT we succeeded! So here are some before and after pictures of the house!

This is our new home! It's a 1963 house, but the upstairs was remodeled three years ago, so it feels brand new. There's a LOT of work to be done with the front yard, but we'll get there!


Look! We've already gotten a lot of weeding done, and I shaped that bush in the far right corner! It was looking pretty harry when we moved in.


 This is the side of our front yard. I love how shaded it is, just perfect for laying out a blanket and reading a book. You can see the Elementary School right across the street from us. It will be nice to have it close by! The Middle School is a few streets over too, so when we have kids they will be able to walk to both.



Also I took a picture of the covered porch / gazebo that's on the side of our driveway. it's right behind that white brick wall in the first picture. It has electricity and will be perfect for family gatherings / bbq's as soon as we get a picnic table and a bbq...


This is the little kids play house and water fall in the back yard! They're so cute... but Dave wants to get rid of the play house and build a real tree fort. I'm trying to convince him to wait until we have kids old enough to not fall out of the fort.


Our front door steps up to the main floor. I love the stained glass on the door, and want to change the front screen eventually so you can actually see it from outside. Right now the bars really block it from view.


This is the nasty yellow of before! In real life the color was far more intense, I swear! It didn't even match the green and tan carpet.


Here's the after! We painted it a green that matched the carpet, and it looks absolutely great now. I love this color more than any other color in the house.


This is our kitchen. The counter tops are marble, and the cabinets and tile are new. It's bigger than this picture makes it seem, and there's a huge pantry around the left corner.


So the Green chairs were our first furniture purchase for the house! I found them at DI for $8 a piece and they match our other two chairs. Eventually I will probably sand them all down and re-finish them, but they work for now.

 

Now I'll take you down the hallway to the bedrooms and bathrooms. Left side bathroom, master. Right side two bedrooms and a closet. I love the wood floors! They were added in the renovation. I don't love how much the prior owner loved yellow! Yellow living room, yellow hallway, two yellow bedrooms, and one orange-ish yellow bedroom.


We didn't change anything about the bath, just added our stuff. I'm looking for a large silver frame at DI or Ross to put on the right hand side in here. I think that will finish off the room nicely. We'll see what I can find under $10.


This is the master bedroom. Love the orange-ish yellow of before?


We painted it a light blue to match our bedding and love it so much better!


This is currently the library, but will one day be the baby room. I found the crib leaning against the wall at a garage sale down the street for $30! It was the grandparents of one grand child that had the crib in their house for sleepovers. It matches the wood bookshelves and rocking chair we've acquired over the years so the price was SOOO right!


This is the office that Dave is working on unpacking! It's a mess, but I don't have a before picture of this room (because I was ok with the white walls), so this is what you get!


Now we head downstairs to what we're turning into the basement apartment for Dave's Brother and Sister-inlaw. The base of the stairs used to open up to both the living room and the kitchen, but we've closed off the kitchen entrance, knocked out a wall that used to hold a pantry, and will put a door on the left hand side of the base so we can close off the apartment and give each of us privacy.


This is from the entry way from the stairs. I love the fire place, but hate the wood panel. It was so much work taking it off of the bedroom wall, that it will be a little while before we remove it from this wall too.


The downstairs family room is the entire length of the house! in the same amount of space upstairs we have our living room, two bedrooms and a closet! So the eventual plan will be to make a big bedroom at the far end and a storage closet for our camping stuff. We can't add two bedrooms, because Utah code requires a closet and a window for each bedroom, and there's only one window in this area.Through the door on the left you'll find the downstairs bathroom and another yellow bedroom!


The bathroom is a full, but it's really small, so hard to take pictures of. The corner sink makes me smile, as does the blue tile (NOT yellow).


Here's the downstairs yellow bedroom. It's a more calm yellow, except this is the room that had the wood panel on the one wall. Blaine and Angela have requested a blue color for this one, so after we tear out the drywall that was under the wood paneling (Dad said that would be less work than trying to sand it), we will paint it blue.


This is what our future downstairs kitchen started out as. We were hoping we could just drop down the pipes and add a sink and stove... unfortunately the wall behind the cabinets wasn't thick enough to hold the pipes, so we tore out the cabinets and the wall. We figured while we were at it we should do the tile too... So this is what it now looks like:


That bucket is right below the sewer pipe we installed. It's capped off, but JUST in case, we want something there to catch it. The mudding has taken far longer than I expected, but we figure with one more coat we'll be done and ready to sand. I'll have to post more pictures as soon as it's done!

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

New Family, New Home, New Blog!

Dave and I celebrated our one year anniversary a month ago by purchasing a home! With the market down, the $8,000 tax credit, and the money we've been saving up for a down payment now was definitely the time for us to buy. We are SO glad to be done with the insanity known as renting!

It’s the perfect house for us! There's a gazebo on the side of the house, and it's right across the street from the elementary school. It has a kitchen, living room, three bedrooms and a bath upstairs, then a MONSTER family room down stairs (the size of the upstairs living room and two bedrooms), a bedroom, bathroom and a huge laundry room. The upstairs was remodeled about 3 years ago so we have new marble counter, and everything. 
We’re in the process of converting the laundry room into a second kitchen so we can rent out the basement. The two of us really don't NEED a whole house, so might as well put someone's rent towards our principal for a few years. Dave’s brother Blaine and his fiancĂ© Angela plan to move in when they get married in October, so they have set our deadline. They’re fun and I’m excited to have them move closer.


It’s been quite the process! We had to tear out cabinets, tile and a wall, but we’re now into the building phase. We had to extend the depth of the back wall a bit so the plumbing and electric could be run behind where the sink will be. Just last night we finished dry walling the new wall and we’re ready to start taping and mudding! I’m pretty excited, but everyone keeps telling me how messy and not fun mudding is… We’ll see how it goes.

Last night while Dave was cutting 2 by 4’s I headed into the basement bedroom to see how much work tearing out the wood paneling on one wall would be. Side note, I don’t understand even in the 60’s why anyone thought wood paneling looked good! SERIOUSLY! This specimen is particularly heinous, because it was sanded down and refinished at some point in the 30(?) years it’s been in the house. To compliment this beauty the other 3 walls are a BRIGHT yellow color. I think the previous owner had a thing for yellow. She had two of the bedrooms painted this color, and the living room painted a mustard/baby-puke green color.  Anyway, I found there was drywall underneath the wood panel, so I pulled out the crow bar and went to town!

The wood panel was glued on and now the drywall paper is peeling off. I’m wondering if we can just sand it down and Kilz over it, if we should do a thin layer of mud over it, if we could just texture-ize over it, or if we should scrap it and buy new drywall. No matter what we do it will be better than having to look at that wood paneling! Not that we use the room, but I have complete sympathy being a recent renter myself. I even told Blaine and Angela they could help pick out the color of the new walls. We’ll see what comes of this project and if we actually make our October 9th deadline.