Back again!!

And we bought a HOUSE. So I'll attempt to keep this blog updated to keep you lovely people updated.

We just bought a brand-new house. Well, brand new to us. Not so much to anyone else. In fact, it's pretty not brand-new... it was/is quite a mess. But it has such potential to be an adorable little starter home for us. So I don't have a picture of the front of it.. yet. For some reason in my documentation of our re-hab, I keep forgetting to take one. It will be done

. No worries.

I have to be honest, my first impression of this house was not great. I thought t

he outside was weird, and that despite the work, it would be an odd little house. But after some prayer and pondering and reading tons of back issues of Atomic Ranch, I'm on board. Plus, I'm completely enamored with the DIY lifestyle, and this house is like one big DIY project. The previous owners were foreclosed on so they decided to trash the place. Fun, I know. So this is what we MUST do to the place to get it live-able: refinish all floors (I mean ALL except bathrooms), replace hot water heater (or just water heater if you're being PC), paint everything with Kilz primer and then paint, fix some dangerous electrical issues, and get a new HVAC system.

Those are "musts". We also have a lot of "not entirely necessary but it would be nice" ideas. We don't plan on being in this house long, so we want to make it appealing to a possible buyer. This means I have to tone down on my paint choices (sob!), and keep everything pretty neutral. We've already painted. Let's get onto some pics and I'll explain along the way!

This is the living room:

At the time this pic was taken, it had been primed, painted, and half the carpet ripped up. Check out our hardwood! Awesome!! I absolutely love the big window and how much natural light it lets in. It's not exactly energy efficient, but my gracious friend gave me some lined curtains that should block some of the more powerful rays during the day to keep it relatively cool. If you look on the walls, you can see the color Joe picked. It's called Mint Frost by Valspar. I was leery of anything with "mint" or "frost" in the title.. so leery in fact that I believe I hung up when Joe told me the color that he had just purchased. But apologies were made, because it's not too bad. It's a great neutral color for the space. We may paint it later... but we'll see:-)

To the right is the view from the living room to the hallway. Check out that carpet. No, that's not a trick of the shadows. That is disgusting stains all the way down the hallway. After ripping up the carpet here, this is going to be the main trouble spot in the hardwood, since it bled through. We're praying most of it comes up! If it doesn't, we'll get a carpet runner so it's all good. Notice our taped up intake vent on the bottom right. So 3 days after closing, our AC unit decides it's th

rough with life and putters out. We planned on replacing it eventually. So eventually turned into immediately. The HVAC guys are coming out on Tuesday to put in a Gaspack. We decided on gas heat because if we went with a heat pump, we would have had to update the electrical system to 200amps from 100. After discussing it with the electrician and comparing prices, getting a heat pump would be cost prohibitive. Plus, we can do everything we need to do with 100amps. So natural gas it is!

Let's take a look at the kitchen.

Tada! Yeah, it's nothing special right now. This is a view of the right side where the wall oven, cooktop, and fridge will be. We took off the cabinet doors and are in the process of painting them white. They were a golden red maple-y color that when combined with wood paneling walls completely overwhelmed the space. There's only one window and it's overlooking the enclosed garage, so not a lot of natural light gets in. We painted the walls a cheery yellow and are getting light gray countertops from Ikea to try and brighten things up. Speaking of the yellow, what do you think? What about from this angle?

Holy mess, it's bright. Definitely didn't see that coming when I was picking paint chips out. (I'm really, REALLY bad that btw... someone should give me a tutorial on picking out paint). This is the wall to your left as you walk into the kitchen. Unfortunately, only a small table will fit here and as there is no dining room, we'll have to make it fit our (now) family of 4. We'll update later on that. The ugly linoleum is on full display here. We plan on tiling over that with a delightful dark gray porcelain tile. I'm so stinking excited about that. I think it will make the kitchen look so much more modern and cool.

So we started sanding tonight. Let's check on how that's going:

Great!! I think it's going to look really good. Joe is taking charge of the sander while Joe's dad and I did a lot of the edging today. My dad will pick back up with edging tomorrow since I have you know, babies to feed and bathe and love on. But although sanding is hard work, when you do it yourself you save a TON of money. Like, we're going to save about $1k. I'm okay getting my hands a little dirty to save that much. If you're not very handy, or you're not a fan of sawdust on and in every pore of your being, then it might not be in your best interest to sand floors yourself. We're using a drum sander and apparently if you hover in one spot for too long, you can create a serious dent in the floor. Since my husband is amazing at most things handy, he is doing a fabulous job at keeping it all even and looking great. I can't wait to see the finished product!

That's all for now. Next time, I'll hopefully be posting about the finished hardwood. We're going to try and get the kitchen cabinets done while we wait for the polyurethane to dry on the hardwood. So look forward to seeing the finished product of that too!