So…an update! Someone applied to move in to our apartment. They wanted to move in December 1, so we realized we needed to MOVE out over the Thanksgiving holiday. We scrambled to move into our basement at the house and out of the apartment. And then we got the lovely news that the person backed out. Sigh. It was a lot of work to do it so quickly and that isn’t what I would have chosen, but its good that at least that part is over. Now we just have to keep showing the apartment until someone takes it. It looks worse without all of our furnishings and artwork, but I am just trying to keep the faith for right now that we will find someone interested soon. Like before January when our first mortgage payment is due…

We haven’t gotten much more done on the house besides getting our living area set up and organizing the rest of our possessions in our garage. I managed to pick out a bunch of paint colors, we purchased the hardwood flooring that we are going to install throughout the entire main floor, and we put together a cabinet design at Lowe’s. I still want to get a second quote for cabinets from a local place, but we may buy those and have them install sometime at the beginning of the year.

So the tasks we have planned for this weekend include:

• Painting the bathroom – the bathroom is in decent shape, though it is by no means new. I think a coat of paint will do a world of good in there. Sometime next year I also plan to update all of the fixtures, including the lights and towel racks, which will really make it nice and livable for a few years at least.
• Painting and finishing the pantry – as you may have seen on Instagram, the mudroom has a pantry closet that was in need of a major update when we moved in. We smashed out the old shelves and B cut new melamine shelves to replace them. However, the inside also needs a good coat of paint. Once we paint the inside and replace the shelves, this will be our food storage while we renovate the kitchen.
• Pulling up flooring and the rest of the baseboards – this is one of the most frightening tasks, because we are unsure what the condition of the sub floor will be. Under the small patches we have pulled up things look fine, but it would be good to find out sooner rather than later if there are and major issues anywhere, since the cost of repairs may delay our other renovation tasks.
• Possibly pulling out the base cabinets in the kitchen? – I am not sure about this, since I don’t love the idea of giving up the kitchen sink yet. Also, when we tore out the upper cabinets the drywall looked so ancient, I started fearing that there could be asbestos in it. So I think we might try to get an asbestos inspection before we do much more wall smashing ourselves. Because taking out the upper cabinets resulting in busting up parts of the drywall, I think one wall and maybe even the ceiling drywall in the kitchen may need to be replaced. Something B could do, if we can confirm that its not full of asbestos.

I think that is all I dare to task us with for this weekend! Will post more pictures soon.

We got the go ahead to take possession of the house today, a bit earlier than originally expected. We didn’t get there until after dark, so I didn’t get to take a lot of amazing photos yet. But we did inspect everything and boy do we have our work cut out for us in there…

One of the first things we did when we got in there was pull up the carpet in the living room and second bedroom to find hardwood underneath, but its all cheap and in rough shape. I was originally considering trying to refinish what is already there, but it is two different types of wood on the main floor and its beat up and looks like it was cheap to begin with (short planks!). I don’t want to pay big bucks to refinish wood that was cheap to begin with! I also fell in love with some light colored ash hardwood from Lumber Liquidators, and now that I am so attached to it, I can’t imagine leaving the gross old floors there.

Besides replacing the flooring, which Brad is planning to do himself, the entire house needs paint. I think the only freshly painted room in the house is the mudroom…so that will keep us busy. I generally am in support of light airy paint colors, especially because our rooms are small and the bedrooms have LOW ceilings. But I haven’t nailed down the official colors yet and Brad isn’t as much of a fan as white walls as I am. Planning to figure that out on Wednesday since I am off of work.

The third thing we are probably going to focus on is the weird, cheap tile on the living room and kitchen ceiling, which majorly need to be torn down. I don’t know how that will go exactly, but Brad thinks it will be easy.

Well, that’s all for tonight, more to come soon – with pictures!

We closed on the house after work today! Yippee!

During the inspection we found that there was hail damage to the roof that the seller’s home insurance would repair. We thought that the roof was going to be replaced last week, but only just found out today that it wasn’t. So I guess there was some last minute changes where the seller had to add more money to the escrow account to cover the cost of the repairs since they weren’t done in time…but in the end it didn’t cause us that much of an issue. We will have to schedule the roof repair ourselves now though.

Before closing everyone warned us to get our fingers ready for a long process of signing endless documents. I played that up in my head to excess, because I didn’t think it was that bad. It took nearly 2 hours to get everything done and wait for the final loan disbursement approval. Now I just can’t wait to get to go inside again! There is a chance the seller will move out early, which is what I am hoping for right now. I’d love the chance to go there this weekend. I will keep you appraised of whatever happens.

Tomorrow Brad and I close on our first house. It has a porch swing out front. 🙂

We have been saving and dreaming about a home for years with no firm understanding of the home buying process. When our friends bought their first property, it inspired me to take the first step and start talking to realtors and lenders. Thankfully those people are experts at guiding the young and inexperienced, and next thing we knew we plummeting down the rabbit hole that is house hunting. After many long days and last minute evenings out to see newly listed homes (and a few heart breaking losses), we landed on this beauty, which seemed like the perfect starter home for us. It has 2 tiny bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a finished basement, front and back porches, a huge garage, and a spacious, flat yard. This purchase is so many dreams coming true, I can’t even put it into words.

We have so many plans swirling around between us. We will put so much love into this house that I don’t know how we will ever leave it. It was over six years ago now the first time Brad played me the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song that instantly became “ours” and for which I have named this blog. We would later dance to it at our wedding reception, but that first time he put it on, for some reason it meant so much to me that I was nearly in tears. We had only been dating a few months, but I already knew that I wanted this life with him and that some day we would be singing this song in our own house. We have already achieved so many dreams together, this next step can’t come soon enough.

We gave the current owner a week after closing to move out, so we wont get to go inside again until November 21. We are going to go that day and assess whether all of the appliances are still working well and get quotes for laying down new hardwood (probably engineered hardwood) in the entire main floor. Then there will be painting and renovating…the entire kitchen needs to be redone eventually and we have big plans for the garage and basement. We will try to catalog the process here and see where that takes us. Welcome to our new adventure. 🙂