Saturday, April 30, 2016

We did a thing!

I know it's been a while. Life has been hectic! But we did something that has been in the works for months and months. We finally bought our first house! It was such a long process, but we were finally able to close on it this past Thursday. We're so excited! Not one bit of this process has gone smoothly, and we're still in the throes of those rough waters, but it is finally ours! We have yet to stay there still; we're still working on moving out of our rental. All of our planned moving help bailed on us, the days that Nate was able to get off of work were based on an earlier closing date (I lost count of how many times closing was delayed), and so we've been having to move by ourselves, without help, with Nate still having to work long hours. Which is hard on its own without having a three year old and a one year old to "help." But, it's getting to the point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Today we dropped off our first load of stuff and walked through the house for the first time since we closed. When we first looked at it, it was in February and was snowing. Such a difference from how it looked today! Everything is in full bloom, all the trees are super lush and green, and to us it's just beautiful. The house came with a little over two acres of land and is located in a nice quiet cul de sac.  We're already day dreaming about how much fun the kids are going to have growing up there!

Anyway, as the house is currently, the decor is really not our cup of tea. We have so many plans of what we plan to do to make it our own. I thought it'd be fun to blog about the transformation! Today while we were there I made sure to take a ton of "before" photos so I could share them in the first blog of the series. Without further ado, the photos!

Here is the outside of the home. I didn't go through all the land to take photos, since we were in a time crunch (Nate had to work). This is from the front, standing in the cul de sac:




And from the back deck:





This is our garage:





Once you walk in from the garage, the first thing you see is the kitchen. 






Right in front of the kitchen is the living room. 





To the right of the living room will be the kids' playroom:





The playroom flows into the dining room:






The dining room is attached to a short hallway that holds the pantry and a small half bath. The hall leads back into the kitchen, essentially making a loop around the stairs.






And really that's it for downstairs. So now for the stairs. The tread on these stairs is so narrow! It was almost a deal breaker for me, but we plan to make it wider eventually, and we liked so much more about the place than we disliked, so I figured it was something I would get used to and live with. So here are the stairs as they are now and the small, tiled entryway:






Which leads you to the landing area at the top of the stairs.






To the right of the linen closet is the kids' room. For now they're just sharing since they refuse to sleep alone and we bed share anyway. Down the road we will probably make the playroom an office and then the office a second bedroom. But for now, being able to close off breakable office things (and whatever else) is important to us!






And then to the left of the linen closet is the office.






Pretty much right in front of the stairs is a full bathroom.








And lastly, we have the master bedroom with the master bathroom inside.






And that's it! I feel like we have our work cut out for ourselves as far as everything we plan on doing, but I seriously can't wait to start posting "after" photos! Stay tuned for lots of those. 
smile emoticon:)