Welcome To Our Home

Hello, and welcome to "the new house". We closed on it tonight, and then headed over to look it over. Snug and Little Monkey Man will give you the full tour. Or at least show up in many of the pictures because they were running around the empty house like crazy.

There are two closets as you walk in the front door, and this one is really neat. Snug is standing in it and you can see how big it is!

To the left of where Snug was standing is MORE storage space.

Here is one of two bathrooms. It isn't surprising Little Monkey is in this picture as he loves bathrooms. L O V E S them. They hold SO many fun things. Water...potties...toilet brushes...yeah, they are so fun. This bathroom won't have anything done to it as the paint and everything are in good condition. The curtains? They gotta go.

Here is the boys' room. It will be the smallest room they have ever been in...even smaller than the rental. That is the one thing I don't really like about the house is the bedroom sizes, but we really couldn't find a 3 bedroom with bigger rooms that we could afford-found lots of houses with bedrooms smaller than these. This room will get a coat of paint, curtains, and it looks like a new set of blinds.

Ignore the white spots all over this picture, something was on my lens. This is our room. It is also pretty small, but the curtains and the paint-oh my. The paint actually looks OK in this picture, but it isn't. Three walls are a dirty off white color and dirty. The fourth wall is yellow. The trim also looks pretty good in this shot, but it has been painted dark brown, and not painted well. I actually made #1 take down the curtains tonight-they were just GAG.

Anyone who had been to our old house will recognize this floor :o) It is the SAME flooring we had at our old house. This room won't have to have any paint. #1 is thankful for that!

Eventually I'd love to replace the cabinets and take out that wall oven, along with converting the "eat in kitchen" (maybe for a family of 2) you see on the right side of the picture into more cabinets/counter tops.

This is me standing in the dining room looking out to the living room. The kitchen is on the left, the bedrooms on the right.

Now I am standing by the fireplace looking at the entrance. You can see Snug in the closet I love, and the coat closet. This room needs to be painted also. You can see the top right part of the picture where they had things hung on the wall and the paint has actually faded. On the top left of the picture you can see where the garage comes in...to the right is the basement stairs, to the left another bathroom (didn't take pictures of it).

And this is looking into the dining room. To the right is the kitchen and straight ahead goes out to the backyard.

This is the basement as seen from the bottom of the stairs. They left this lovely couch for us, but I think if we vacuum, disinfect, and wash it we will use it. The fireplace can be used (the upstairs one must be cleaned and the chimney cleaned) but we think we are going to save for an insert in this one and heat the basement with it. We love a wood burning fireplace, and want the one upstaires to stay that way.

More shots of the basement. It has a great high ceiling so eventually a drop ceiling will be in order.

This is looking at the basement stairs. The wooden part is built in under stair storage. The walls are painted...but won't look like that forever. This area isn't our top priority.

Seriously, the spots are awful on my camera. I even cleaned the lens when I took this one. I hope my camera isn't on the fritz. This is another area of the basement. They were nice enough to leave lots of interesting things and even some garbage for us.

So we have lots of work to do. We have nearly 2 months to do it in before our lease is up on the rental. We want to be in this house by the first of April, but don't have to be. Mostly cleaning and painting. We have a huge list of "we'd like to..." but the down payment on this one pretty much wiped out "we'd like to..." for awhile. Paint, paint paint. That is our goal.

I didn't get any pictures of the backyard because it was dark out and we are in the middle of a snowstorm. The house has a 2 car garage with a garage door opener (we didn't have that before*). The backyard is twice the size of our old one, and they left the swing set and a Little Tykes play set climbing thing. It also has a really nice deck. We spend lots of time outside so that was a trade off for small bedrooms. Really we spend most of our time in the living areas of the house and backyard, not in our rooms.

I hope you enjoyed your tour. I realize I didn't take a picture of Hannah's room, but it needs a lot of work. I'll try to remember to photograph it next time and then you can see how our makeover progresses. We're hoping a good cleaning and coat of paint, along with working on the sockets (all 2 prong, no 3 prong) will get us where we need to be to move in. We plan on being in this house for many many years, so we can slowly do things as we get the money and as we get the dream. Right now we are just tired!

*When we pulled into the garage tonight, something Snug has never had happen before, he said "Oh look at the big room for our van!!!"