Our House: Part One

I apologize for the length of this post. If you are easily bored, you might just want to skip down to the pictures :-)

As I mentioned in my first post, Luke and I recently bought a house. There is a big apartment downstairs which was very nice when we bought it. There is a studio apartment in the back, which is extremely small, but very nice as it is the newest addition to the house. Then there is the top floor. That's the floor we live on, and it's the apartment that needed lots and lots of work! We would have rather lived on the first floor, but there were already renters there when we bought it, and why mess up a good thing? We didn't want to have to find all new renters. Plus we knew it might be easier to live in the top one and fix it up while we live there.

So that's what we did. It only took us about 2 or 3 months to fix up the whole thing. But let me tell you, our whole lives revolved around this project for those months. We had no lives, and no time for lives! We're so glad that we're finally finished.

I decided to post about my house in multiple posts. Otherwise it would be way too long and overwhelming. So this post will be about the outside of the house and the kitchen (the room where I probably spend the most time!)

So before I show pictures, I must explain how much I loathe the whole applying-for-a-loan process. It's just so long and stressful! And we finally thought we had all the kinks worked out and were expecting to close in the next week or two when we got the news: the inspector said we had to paint the house before we could close. I wasn't aware that they could add stipulations like that, but I've learned a lot since then!

Thank God for good friends and family! We had about 15 friends and family who helped us two weekends in a row at the beginning of October. Somehow we finished the entire project in two measly weeks. It was a blessing, and we FINALLY closed about a month after the painting was finished. The bank sure wasn't in any sort of hurry :-P

Here are some pictures of the house. These were taken during the "painting parties" as they came to be known :-)

Here is the front of the house. You can tell it's very old. I like old houses since they have character, but our dream house will definitely not be this old if I have anything to say about it...too much work :-)

And this is the back of the house. You can see the studio apartment addition jutting out there in the back. This is where my grandma will eventually be living, but more about that later. That's a whole other post :-)

And this is the side of the apartment. That's Luke up there about to walk into the entrance to our top floor apartment.
And finally, the opposite side.

A lot of work went into painting the house, but it didn't even come close to the amount of work the inside needed. The kitchen was our biggest project, and is now my pride and joy. I don't even have any pictures of the room before we started working on it, but I have a few that were taken early in the process.

First of all, you must appreciate the amount of "ugly" that was in this room before. Here is a close up of the old flooring. A few decades old, if you can't tell ;-)

Here is the best "before" picture I could find. However, this was actually after we had torn out all the ugly cabinets, flooring, and counter tops. So picture it about 10 times worse than this! (You can tell my hubby was working very hard:-))
And here we are after. I am so proud of this room, because we (and our families) did everything ourselves. I love it!
I know, it looks like a totally different room, right? I love how the white has brightened it up in there! The rest of the walls are painted the same green as the tiles.

Here is a list of renovations that we did in this room alone (because I love lists!):
1. Tore out 4 layers of flooring
2. painted all cabinets
3. Added new hardware to cabinets
4. Installed a new counter top and sink
5. Added a new tile backsplash
6. Sanded and varnished floors.
7. painted old wood paneling white, and painted the rest of the walls green.
8. Added a new oven
9. Patched up chipped paint on ceiling
10. Painted ceiling

So there you have it. By the way, I picked out all the colors and decor in the entire house, since that isn't really Luke's thing (well, except in the attic, but we'll get to that later). This was my first adventure in interior decorating.

Wow, second day of blogging and I think I just brought out the longest post ever :-)