It's happening! Progress!
There are people working on our basement as we speak! Which is a great surprise, since we didn't think work would start for another month, to a month and a half. It's so much fun to come home each day and see the progress.
One More Thing to Cross off the List
Slowly but surely, it's happening. We're moving in a bit more, decorating and making things feel like home. For a while now, I've had a stack of picture frames littering the office floor. Waiting to be put somewhere or hung up.
Finally I found myself with a free day, and decided to start hanging them on the wall by our stairs. Originally I had a plan to map out where everything was going to go, but I realized that was causing me to delay starting the project since I wasn't sure how to do it. In the end I just grabbed the drill and started hanging things.
The Nursery Round I
I wish I had a better 'before' picture of this room for you. Something more than a half painted wall to show you what it looked like. I don't even have one from the walk through I don't think - it was the previous owner's daughter's room, and they didn't post any pictures of it on the listing, and I never took any. Once we moved in, it was always just an empty room, so we never went in there. The walls were a dusty rose (or as I call it, dirty pink) and the only room of the entire house where I hated the paint color.
I think in the back of our mind we always knew it would be a future baby's room, whenever that happened to be. In fact I often referred to it as the baby's room. It was better than "the extra bedroom that isn't the guest room, and isn't the craft room, you know the ugly one with the gross pink walls?"
#Adulting
Basement Update
There's a reason you're always supposed to get multiple quotes when you're having anyone do work on your house. One of those reasons is, you never know when the first company you talk to is insane, even if they seem like the most well know and popular choice.
Two weeks ago we had Brian from Total Basement Finishing/Black Dog Builders come by to look at our basement. Brian's was a contractor, not just some creepy sales guy there to make us spend the most possible. I told him from the beginning that Tom and I were numbers people, and that was what was going to be important to us.
How Not to Finish Your Basement
Does your house have a basement? How much time do you spend thinking about it? I guarantee it's not as much time as Tom and I have spent on our basement since moving into this house. It's not very big, or very useful (yet), but boy does it take up a lot of our time.
If you were to eavesdrop on us randomly, there's a pretty good chance you'd here us debating basement flooring options, or radon levels, or something else basement related. Mostly, we just want to get it to a point where we can put our shoes and coats there. It doesn't seem like much, but boy is it taking us a while!
Have a Seat
If you've been to our house recently, you've already seen the end result of this project, but I figured it was about time I shared the journey of how we got here. After all, I only started this project back in July!
As I said before, we needed a lot of new furniture to fill up our house, including a dining room table and chairs. I spent a day shopping with Nicole and found a table I liked (as did Tom when I brought him back later to look at it) but no one really liked the chairs that went with it. So we bought the tables and started the search for chairs. At some point I got the idea that I wanted the chairs to be blue. Of course I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere, so shortly after, I decided that I'd paint the chairs myself.
Our Office: A Transformation
I'm not going to lie, there are still a lot of unopened boxes in our house. There are entire rooms that are either empty or just full of things waiting to be unpacked. It's not easy to furnish and decorate a whole house!
Lately we've decided to turn our focus on our office. At some point we decided that if only our office was set up, we'd be able to unpack a majority of our boxes. All of the books could come out, computer equipment, important papers... they could all find a spot.
Meet My New Co-Worker
Someone is Way Too Excited Over a Closet
And that someone is me. (You probably guessed that already, right?)
We have a spare room in our house that really can't be a bedroom, since you have to walk through it to get to another part of our house. I think it's meant to be a small office, but it wouldn't work for Tom and I to share, and we've already set our office up in another room.
That left a craft room as the next obvious option. If you know me at all, you know that the amount of craft related items I own is ridiculous. They needed a spot. The best part about this room, is that it has an okay sized closet. Not big, but okay. So it quickly became a fun challenge to figure out how we could maximize the space in there.
An Update on Ms. Door
The Best Door to Ever Door
From the minute I saw our house, I knew it needed one thing - a painted front door.
The house is beautiful, but the light color of the siding combined with a stark white door was too washed out. I'd been watching the trend of brightly painted front doors for a while now, and been waiting until I could follow suit. I'd had dreams about a bright cherry red door, or maybe a happy turquoise. Unfortunately neither of those colors would look great with our house. Instead, another color was screaming out to be chosen.
Meet My New Friend
Owning a home means you get excited about really weird stuff. Like programmable thermostats. And I'm not talking "Oh that's kind of nice" excited, I'm talking highlight of your week.
This probably has something to do with the fact that Tom and I are both pretty bad at remembering to turn the thermostat down when we're not home. Which means we are often mistakenly are heating or cooling our empty house. There's nothing more annoying (okay maybe I'm exaggerating a bit) than coming home to an excessively hot/cold house, and realizing all the money you've just wasted getting it like that.
Yard Work and the Story Behind This Picture...
Lately the turkeys around here can breathe a little bit easier, because Tom has a new nemesis he's been focused on (and no, it's not me):
PEBBLES!
Yes, that's right... tiny, itty, bitty, rocks. Our back yard is full of them, and while they may look pretty, they don't play well with our lawn mower. We've found that over time, especially after it rains, the migrate from where they're supposed to be, to all over our lawn.
