There's No Place Like Home

I didn’t intend to abandon this blog for months, but things have been very busy! We have been doing lots of things to our house and taking photos to document it. I will get them up as soon as I can. But until then, here is one the one first family pictures Owen drew of us when he started school this year (click on photos to enlarge):

And is it any wonder when most our house looked like this for a very long time:

I’m happy to say we have made a lot of progress since this photo!

We have been very busy at our new house the past few weeks. We also did not have internet so I didn’t get to updating this blog. But, on August 26th we closed on our house. Here is us walking into our new house for the first time as the owners of it.

But lets just go back a bit to the evening of August 25th when we had our final walk through. We weren’t happy to see that one of the items the homeowner agreed to fix was not done. Then we thought it was rather nice of him to leave the large carpet in the living room over the hard wood floor… until I pulled it back and spotted a very large stained and water damaged section of the floor:

Our realtor met the homeowner at the home the next morning, but he was unwilling to do anything about the damage and claimed he knew nothing about it. We didn’t like the situation, but he had already fixed quite a few items, including the roof, so we just let these two things go so as not to delay the closing. The house was priced really well as it was and we had just gotten a bran new roof, so we figured beggars shouldn’t be choosers.

Closings are very odd. Up until that day they try to keep the home owner and the buyer away from each other until the last minute when you finally sit down and sign papers. There were a lot of people at the closing and we had to bring the kids so it got pretty loud and crazy for a bit. We finally shook hands with the home owner, got the keys, and learned that he had spent 30 years in the house and raised his family there. After signing an insane amount of papers, the house was ours!

The house had been neglected for some months as the home owner had already moved out so we met up with a great deal more cleaning then we had anticipated. There are so many cabinets in the house too, which made the job slow and tedious. The photo above shows how overgrown the ivy had become. It had grown over three windows and the living room was very dark because of it. Trimming this off the windows was one of our first projects. I wanted it completely gone, but James likes it. I have pulled quite a bit more though and I hope to get it all off soon if James will let me.

Here is a good shot of the living room. One of the first things we did was take down all the curtains in the house.

Here is the master bedroom with more ugly curtains. We took those things down immediately. That tiny little door leads to the only closet in the room, so an armoire will be one of the first things we buy once we sell off the closet organizers that currently take up all of Isla’s room.

I lived in two places for awhile. Almost every day with the kids, and then almost every night after dinner I would make trips to the new house to bring boxes and do more cleaning. I had ambitions of getting Owen’s room totally painted and organized before we moved in, but that never came to fruition. There was just too much work to be done and with kids underfoot it’s like walking through molasses trying to do it. The photo above shows a rare day when Isla actually fell asleep for her nap in the new house.

This is our most urgent project. We really want to rent this workshop out to someone who can make good (and quiet) use of it. It is about 90% done, but needs some electrical work and some insulation and some wood walls like those pictured to finish it off. It would be nice to get some kind of heater for the space too so we can say it is heated.

And here is the ugliest part of our new house. This will be a big ongoing job. For some reason the previous home owner thought it was a good idea to put sheetrock up over moist old basement walls and then not run a dehumidifier. As a result mold grew. We need to tear out all of the sheetrock and 2 x 4′s, kill the mold, adjust the landscaping where needed to ensure that water runs away from the house and not into it, and then fill any cracks in the wall or floor with concrete, and then paint the walls and floor with a moisture barrier, and then replace the old windows with glass blocked windows (which the home owner purchased and left behind). The only thing we are leaving in the basement is the bathroom which appears to have been built in a dry spot. Ugh, I hate old basements! We were looking for a nice dry basement, but it’s a 50/50 split in this city (at least in our price range) it seems and we lucked out on that. But, it is fixable, and I’d rather have a fireplace and whirlpool tub than a perfect basement.

Stay tooned for moving day and some photos of the first projects we’ve done on the place.

We are all set to close at 10 am tomorrow morning if everything goes as planned. Things got kind of crazy when our loan guy made a mistake and we fired him. He wouldn’t leave us alone for awhile, but we did finally get rid of him. We got a new loan person, locked in at the same interest rate of 4.25%, and we found out we qualified for a program that pays 2.5% of our closing costs if we simply take a one day class. I got a waiver for the class since Isla was sick and she is not used to being left for 9 hours straight, and so only James had to attend.

We had our final walk through tonight. There were a couple things that were not perfect, like he didn’t fix one of the items we asked him to that he said he did, and when we pulled back the rug in the living room there was a large water damaged spot on the wood floor. Neither of those things are deal breakers, just a little annoying to deal with at the last minute. I think everything should go through anyway though.

We are not going to move our big stuff for a couple weeks. We are going to focus on cleaning and painting the new house these next couple weeks and we will start moving boxes over there whenever we go. I think I finally made some decisions on paint. For Owens room we picked out these colors:

The theme of his room will be retro rockets and robots. Of course they don’t look right on here, but the top one is a pinkish purple, the middle one is a greenish blue, and the bottom is a nice yellowish green. They are supposed to be retroish. They should look good together. I have no idea where each color will go in his room, but at least I have the colors picked out. We also want to incorporate some kind of metal, so we’ll see what we can come up with.

Here are the colors for Isla’s room:

Her theme is nature and trees and maybe a couple tree fairies too. I want to paint her walls green and use the brown to paint something sort of like this tree picture on her wall (the top picture on this page). I’m still wondering if I should do a much lighter brown so the tree is more muted, or stick with the richer color so the tree stands out. Not sure where the purple will come in. Maybe fairy wings? Or leaves. Can you do purple leaves? I guess we’ll see what happens!

We are all very excited for tomorrow!!!

We have locked in at 4.25% and we close on August 26th. That is only three weeks away. We will either have our apartment until September 15th or the end of September depending on when it rents out for. We are getting excited to move! Here are some more pictures of the house. I took these the day we went to look at it for a second time before making an offer.

See that nice new roof? Turns out it’s put on wrong. This is why you should always hire an inspector. We amended our purchase agreement to ask for a new roof, as well as a variety of other items that were done wrong. The homeowner agreed to most of the items and we are getting a new roof before we move in. I even got to pick the new shingle color, so it is going from green to gray.

This is the side of the house. The house is a corner house so this side also faces a street. Those are roses planted right there, which I have no idea how to care for. And the vines are pretty, but the inspector said they’ve got to go. I guess it isn’t good for a house to have vines growing on it.

Here is Isla and James looking at the back yard. We need to get all those bricks out of there so Isla doesn’t end up with a concussion. I think the kids would appreciate some more grass to play on too.

A gazebo! Can you believe it? …and yeah, we’re gonna need a privacy fence eventually.

This is the kitchen. That peninsula is hiding a radiator. These are all custom made cherry cabinets. The homeowner is a woodworker.

The refrigerator and the dishwasher have cherry doors over them. That’s kind of weird.

The dining room. So much cabinetry! We are going to get a modern chandelier, a modern table, take down the two oddly placed cabinets beside the windows, and take the curtains down. That should make this room a bit more to our liking.

The converted to gas fireplace. Any suggestions on what to do with this thing? It’s just so… traditional. I thought of painting it a glossy white to modern it up a bit, but I’m not sure that would match the wood on the ceilings. Also, a lot of people are telling me not to. Apparently fireplaces are sacred.

This will be my favorite place. It’s decked out in traditional decor, but we are leaving it. It reminds me of a fancy hotel

Look at those jets!

These shelves are in Owen’s room. I’m not sure what to do with them. They really weigh the room down, but he does have a lot of stuff that could find a home here. I might knock the scrolly stuff off and paint them.

Here is how we all felt about looking at houses for months. Poor Isla still had to sit through an hour or so of us signing papers to make an offer. But hopefully all the suffering will have been worth it.

After looking for months and months we finally found a house that we both thought would work for our family. This is a 2 bedroom home built in 1923. There are actually 3 bedrooms, but one was converted to a closet, so we just need to convert it back. Aside from that, the home is in move in condition, but we already have big plans to make it our own!

This blog will document our moving in and all of our home projects. I will strive to make it heavy on pictures and light on words for a change See the pictures of our new house below courtesy of the MLS: