Basement Construction Zone

We are hard at work (periodically) finishing our basement!  A few weeks ago we bought a whole bunch of material and my dad helped us get started!  Mostly my dad and Aaron were doing the work, but my mom and I came down when we could and helped too.

We are basically cutting the basement into four rooms, and in that one weekend, we have two rooms framed and drywalled!  I'm excited that this will soon be useable space.

We are making progress!  One more room to go (the fourth is utilities and storage space) and I need to start thinking about finishes- flooring, paint, etc.

Things on the Walls!

So for a long time, we had blank walls.  You can see this in the house tour.  Not that we didn't have anything to put up- just that I didn't know where to put everything in the new house!  Plus, I didn't want to put anything up until we had painted, and that took forever to do.  (You know, like how we bought the paint for our bedroom back in... September... and just painted it last week...)

Anyway.

We've made a lot of progress lately!  I had been looking for curtains for a while.  Let me tell you, I had no idea what I was even looking for.  I needed something that went with the blueish walls, but I didn't want just a neutral because pretty much all of our furniture on the main floor is neutral and I didn't want it to be boring.  I found lots of colorful curtains that I liked, but they all seemed like too much when the walls were already colored.  Guys.  I had no idea what I was doing!  Finally I found these curtains and immediately loved them.  The yellow accent goes perfectly with the blue walls, and the print really softens the whole area.  I still may not know what I'm doing but at least I found something I love!

And then I finally put together the new photo gallery wall in the dining room.  I painted the K knowing that we were getting those curtains with the yellow flowers, so it all coordinates really well.  Now we need to get new family pictures taken so we can get Andrew in the gallery!

So we're making progress, finally!

House Tour

Now that we've lived here for over 3 months, I'm finally getting around to posting again about the house!

Fair warning: this blog post contains pictures, but hey, I'm raising a one-year-old and a husband- nothing is as clean as it should be :)

So to start out- THE MAIN FLOOR:

When you walk in the front door, you immediately see the living room to the left, dining room to the right, and the stairs straight ahead. We painted this whole area the same color. We picked out a grey-blue paint but it definitely looks more blue than grey now that it's on the walls.

The living room layout doesn't work with our current furniture (the sectional is split and acting as two separate couches right now), so we'll be couch shopping soon. 

The dining room has a little nook we're going to use for shoes and coats since there's no closet right by the front door. 

The bookcase isn't staying there- soon we'll put coat hooks there with the shoe rack underneath.

In the back of the house is the kitchen and half bath/laundry room. The kitchen has an eating area with a bay window and sliding doors to the back yard. 

Around the corner (behind the dining room) is the half bath and coat closet, and the area we're using as a pantry.  The half bath has a laundry area behind closet doors.

UPSTAIRS:

Upstairs we have 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. Our room has a walk-in closet and a bathroom with a big soaker tub.  The bedroom is also serving as my piano room right now- that will eventually go in either the living room or the (finished) basement.

LOVE this tub.

Lots of natural light, double sinks, separate shower

Andrew's room is a good size, with room for an air mattress when we have visitors. 

The office is the smallest bedroom. When we finish the basement, all of this will move down there so this can be used as an actual bedroom. (Excuse the mess in here- obviously I let Andrew play in here when I want to use the computer, so it's usually a disaster.)

Andrew's bathroom needs serious redecorating. At least the previous owners removed the lighthouse wallpaper border for us!

Yes, these will have to go.

THE BASEMENT:

We're using this as storage right now, but eventually we'll finish it and it will have an office/sewing/craft area, living space, and a storage/utility room.

THE YARD:

We have a good sized, though irregularly shaped, back yard. We need to do some work on the grass and possibly replace some of the trees, but it'll be great for Andrew to play in once he's a little older and the weather is warmer. 

The front yard has a pretty big slope to it, so we probably won't hang out there much. But it will look great once we do some landscaping in the spring!

Picture from the day we got the keys- excuse the car door :)

So that's the house!  We are loving it so far.  We haven't completed all the projects we had hoped to have done by now, but oh well.  No rush- we'll be here a while :)

Moving In: The Clean-Up

I freely admit that I am way behind in posting about my new house.  I have a few good reasons excuses for this:

• I have been super busy unpacking, cleaning, and otherwise moving in.
• Andrew.
• Our computer mouse was not functioning properly so I pretty much avoided using the computer for more than two minutes at a time.
• The computer isn't on the main level, where Andrew and I spend most of our day.

But now we're pretty much unpacked (though not completely organized), Andrew is sleeping, we bought a new mouse, and I'm upstairs.  So here we are.

So this house had been vacant for about 2 1/2 years before we moved in.  As I understand it, the previous owner lost his job and found a new one in Florida.  So they had to move out there pretty much right away.  They had two mortgages (with two different banks) on the house, and thus owed more than it was worth, which is why it was being sold as a short sale.

So I figure they had to move pretty quickly.  This meant they missed some things.

The Kitchen:

We had opened a couple kitchen cabinets during each of our walkthroughs before closing, but apparently not this big corner cabinet.  So the day we settled, I went to wipe all the cabinets out and found this:

Gross.

Fortunately there were no live bugs in there, but still.  The contents of this cabinet filled a whole trash bag- you know, one of those giant black garbage bags.

And here's what it looked like after I cleaned it out and put in the shelf paper:

Much better, yes?

This was the nastiest thing I had to deal with as far as cleaning up the house.  Thank goodness.  Aaron, however, had to deal with the basement.

The Basement:

When we were at the house a month before closing, there was standing water on the floor (as there had been every time we had seen it).  Some water had evaporated up into the insulation on the ceiling.  And we even found a few mushrooms growing on the cement floor!  Yuck!  We removed the shrooms that same day.  Fortunately when the house was finally ours, we found that the water on the floor had all dried up!  But Aaron spent the next day or two downstairs- ripping out the wet insulation, removing the mold-covered drywall, and cleaning every surface with a mold killing cleaner.  I don't have any pictures from the cleaning process, but here's what it looked like before:

And here's what it looks like now:

So now our basement is dry and clean, and it's already starting to get pretty full of our storage stuff.  We're looking forward to finishing it at some point.

The Carpet:

The carpet (especially in the living room) had a lot of stains on it.  I'm not totally sure whether the previous owners just didn't bother to keep things clean or if someone got into the house while it was vacant and messed things up, but either way the carpet needed help.

We had bought carpet cleaner before and weren't super impressed.  Within the past year I discovered the cleaning power of vinegar so when I discovered a recipe on Pinterest for homemade carpet cleaner I figured I'd try it.  I tweaked it a bit (and eyeballed all the measurements) and it worked great!  The recipe calls for one tablespoon clear dishwashing liquid and one tablespoon white vinegar with two cups of warm water.  My dishwashing detergent is green so I substituted clear laundry detergent.  Seriously- never buy carpet cleaner from the store again!

I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of it before.  Here's what it looked like after using my homemade cleaner (you can still see the wet spots where the stains used to be):

And here it is after we had a steam cleaning done:

Outside:

Aaron has been working a little at a time doing some power washing.  It's starting to look really good!  Still a work in progress but we're getting there!

So yeah, this is some of what we've been up to for the past month!  Stage one of moving in is complete!

Our First House

We bought a house!

It was a short sale, so it's been in the works for a while now, but it's finally done. The house is ours!

(By the way, "short sale" is just about the worst name they could have come up with for this process. Just saying...). 

So be prepared for some before and after photos- I'm no interior decorator but this house has been vacant for a while and is in need of some love.

So I'm off to get started!