We're Home!

On March 11, we closed on the house from a few posts down.  The next afternoon, we took possession.  What an adventure!  We've been sleeping on an air-mattress since then and eating on a folding table.  Stuff is piled in random nooks and crannies, waiting for us to bring the shelves and drawers that would normally store it.  But I'm making myself wait for the full move-in until we've completed a few projects.  (What I miss having near the most are my books, though I did bring all my Jane Austens along.)

To date, we've cleaned the house from top to bottom (somehow when it's "your" dirt it's okay, but not when it's someone else's, haha), repainted the basement den, and torn out the walls in the basement pantry.  We weren't counting on having to do that last one, but we discovered that the master shower was dripping into the pantry ceiling and walls.  Much mold ensued.  So Trevvor had fun being a small-scale demolition man for an evening (he discovered some crazy 70's linoleum under the carpet and a dead mouse in the wall), and now we're about to seal the leak in the shower before re-walling the pantry with something a little more water-proof (especially since that's where our laundry hook-up is).

Other projects we'll do before fully moving in are:

1. Tile the basement
2. Repaint the master bedroom
3. Put hardwood/bamboo/laminate floors in the living room, hallway, and master
4. Add some crown molding in the living room and master

Once we've moved into the main rooms that we use, we'll repaint the two extra bedrooms and re-floor them as well.  In the long-run, we'd like to re-do the kitchen walls & floor and take out the wallpaper in the hall bath & just paint it a solid color in order to mute the fun gold-yellow tile.

We'd saved quite a bit more than we needed for our down-payment, and Trevvor and I will be doing all the labor ourselves, but we're trying to be pretty tight-fisted so we can do all these things before furniture and kids come along (though if God decided to send me a baby before we got done, I'd be more than thrilled).  Looks like I need to visit "Money Saving Mom" a bit more frequently....