I Spy....

So for fun, I am posting the first of our pictures as a kind of game. If you can spot the differences, you win.... my appreciation? Hee hee! It's probably not that interesting to you, but it helps me to see that we have already made progress.

Before the appraiser would sign off on this house, he had a list of things that needed to be done. Add that to the list of getting the utilities in working order, it became quite a bit of work for "Mr. Ireland." The house was originally a repo, and the bank that owned the house is in the lower-48, so that meant the work had to be done by someone! The furnace is over 50 years old, the plumbing turned into a sprinkler system when it was first turned on, and there were so many safety concerns listed in the appraisal! "Mr. Ireland" put a lot of time into making sure this house would pass the appraisal and it really paid off because most of the things required were already on his list for after closing! Way to get a head start, honey.

Okay, for your viewing pleasure, here is the first round of pictures:
















Front porch area, phase one. Not much is left to be done with the porch, aside from paint and replacing the trellis! The bathroom is also a phase one project, meaning that there will be a MAJOR overhaul after we get everything else done. This is MY bathroom. Im so excited to have my own bathroom! Living with 5 boys sometimes makes for an interesting midnight trip to the bathroom!

More later....

We're Home Owners!

After months and months of waiting, we finally closed on our first house! We are so thrilled! I have already taken tons of before pictures, so this might be the easiest blog to start ever. Here is what our house looked like at the time of our offer:

Beauty, eh? We have a LOT of work to do on this house, but it's ours! It's big, it's old, it's solid and it's ours! The real work begins after Memorial Day. The list is long and our time frame continues to get shorter, if only because my husband wants to move up the move-in date by over a month! It might kill us, but it is ours!

This year we agreed to focus on the inside of the house, as much as we detest the color of the exterior. It is far more important that it be ready to accommodate our family before the end of summer. I might be able to talk him into hiring someone to paint the outside this year, since we can agree that we both really dislike the color outside! We'll see.

Keep checking back to see where we are on renovations! We won't be having a housewarming party until it is completely finished. We're both kind of perfectionists, so things have to be done before we will reveal it to someone else's scrutiny!