Let's Take a Tour

Technically we are all moved into our new place….technically.  All the furniture and boxes have been moved in almost all the bills have been switched over to our name (fingers cross that our electricity or heat keeps working), but somehow I feel like the bulk of moving in has yet to come. 

We spent the first night in our new place pinching ourselves and asking “is this really ours” and “you mean we can actually paint this a color”?  I feel like that reality hasn’t hit us yet and we are still tip toeing around waiting for someone to take this all away from us.  The majority of our things are still in boxes waiting for a designated space to be created for them to live, the walls are empty, and there is a chaotic mess that has taken over our house.  I think this is the reality of moving and as piece by piece our belongings navigate themselves to their proper places it will eventually start to feel like ours. 

In this post I talked about how to make moving a smoother experience for everyone.  I think that although those things can help, you can’t escape the ultimate cluster f*$% (don’t you like how I masked the expletive for a more PG post?) of moving and all the split second decisions of “where does this go” and “but where are you going to put these if that goes there”?  We were fortunate enough to have the help of many family members, 3 trucks, 1 trailer, and a partridge in a pear tree to help us in the move.  That meant a high volume of stuff coming into our house at one time, meaning a higher volume of these decisions. 

Now that everything is in we have been spending a lot of time finding, organizing, and deciding where things should go.  We are looking at paint colors, which is surprisingly harder than I anticipated, and identifying a whole heaping list of projects.  Being the organized anal person I am it is hard to think about the ratio of projects to the actual amount of extra money we have to dedicate to those projects without feeling hopeless that I would ever get enough dough saved up to start in on any of the big stuff.  But that feeling has gradually changed when I think about all the little quick fixes that are begging to be DIY’ed.  Also I have become more optimistic by thinking about DIYing in stages – start one project when you have the money and gradually add to it. 

So before we began the chaos that is moving I snapped some pictures of the house so we would have some “before” pictures to our hopefully stellar “after” projects.  This is a disclaimer that I am not an established photographer, just an armature with a point and click camera so bare with me as I begin the tour of our new house! (I am also going to withhold all the projects on my to-do list to keep this post from getting out of control!)

This is the view you get when you enter the house.  I assure you it is more impressive in person and maybe you will see that when my photography skills improve.  The living room is to the right hand side and you can see straight into the dining room.  The wood floors are original to the house so I am giddy with joy at all the character they bring to the house. 

This is the view of the living room with the fireplace.  The hubby and I both grew up in a wood burning households as a source of heat so we were more than excited to get to use this method to cut down on our outrageous heating bills from the cold Minnesota winters.  Note the weird corner shelf thingy….ya that has to go.

If you continue walking forward on the first floor you hit the dining room.  I absolutely fell in love with the corner shelf that I suspect is original to the house.  It is so beautiful and adds just the right amount of charm.   

This is the view you get from the hallway into the kitchen and dining room.

This is our kitchen.  I like how it flows into the dining room and has more space than our galley kitchen in our rental.  I also enjoy all the natural light that comes into the house via the many windows!  I am so excited to start cooking with our gas stove, but anticipate that I will burn a ton of stuff before I get the hang of it.

Here is the bedroom we will call our own initially on the main floor, which also has wood floors and lots of natural light.

The other bedroom on the main floor we will use for a guest bedroom, where we happened stashed all our stuff so we could have the rest of the house clutter free for the photo shoot!  Notice the overwhelming boldness of the orange...

And rounding out the main floor is the bathroom that includes the sunken in medicine cabinet and 3 towel bars.  Interesting.

If you head upstairs you get this little beauty that right now is going to become my craft-a-palloza room, but eventually will turn into our master bedroom.  We initially wanted it to be our master and had moved all our bedroom furniture up into this little oasis, only to find that the box spring did not fit.  After some shoving, breaking out the math (that I left to the others because math is not my thing), and letting out a few swears we decided it just was not possible.  Then we moved all the furniture down the stairs again.

Then if you head downstairs you go into the walk out basement with yet another interesting corner shelf.  There is also a bar with a refrigerator (both red) for our entertaining needs.  Just looking at that and realizing there is a section in our house dedicated to alcohol (and throw in my hutch filled with my wine glass collection) I start to feel like an alcoholic.  But there is no need to stage an intervention – I assure you I’m not. 

Then you get this rectangle L-shaped room on the other side of the basement that is equipped with a walk in closet.  And behind curtain number one there is…..water pipes – yay! Also the color is Salmon, another yay!  I will have to get creative to find a solution to some of the eccentricity of the house. 

Lastly, there is another full bathroom downstairs and a big laundry room that is begging for a renovation that will make it a classified laundry heaven, which I forgot to snap a picture of.

And that rounds out the tour of our new place! I feel like we dated our house before we decided to purchase.  It initially had almost everything on our wish list and we fell in lust with it to the point we couldn’t stop thinking about it and dreaming it was ours.  Then the rational side kicked in and we thought…this is too good to be true, so we distanced like a traditional commit-a-phobe.  Then we looked at and flirted with some other options, that didn’t nearly measure up.  Then our rational side (aka me going anal and crazy with worry that someone was going to snatch up our dream house) decided that the house had what we wanted both on the inside, but also on the outside, with a price that wasn’t too shabby either, so we pounced!   

Here is how it adds up to our wish list from this post:

Musts:

• 3+ bedrooms – Check – three bedrooms and one weird L shaped room in the basement.
• 1.5+ baths – Check – 2 full baths
• 3+ car garage – Half check…2 ½ stall with upstairs workshop
• 2,000 square feet – 1700 square feet – a little less than we hoped but the floor plan makes it very spacious
• Structurally sound – A home inspection deemed this bad boy good to go!
• Spacious lot where your neighbors can’t see into your bathroom – Check! ½ acre with neighbors spaced far apart
• Oodles of CHARM! – Check!

Wants:

• Wood floors - Check!
• Deck - Check!
• Walk out basement - Check!

So all in all we walked away with most of our musts and all of our wants, in a place that is livable for right now, but still has a lot of DIY potential!