Under Construction

The First two pictures were taken about a week ago.

 Above: Old dining room-The windows were shortened as this is now part of the kitchen and there will be cupboards there.  The drywall was added to fill in the doorway.  There will be two tall pantries there.
Below: Isn't the kitchen beautiful?!  We made the ceiling 8ft to match the family room ceiling.  In doing so we blocked off the skylight-it was in a really strange spot to begin with.  Now the skylight will light up the attic space there.  From one of the upstairs rooms there's an attic entrance to the space above the kitchen.

Yesterday Connor helped grandma sand down the door so it could be painted.  

He's such a helpful little guy.

Our kitchen cabinets have been ordered...now we wait 4 weeks for them to arrive.

Poison Oak

Well I've had a wonderful day today!  About a week ago I noticed what looked like bug bites on my arms.  Yesterday those bug bites started to really itch.  Last night I woke up and couldn't stop itching.  Then today at work it looked more like a rash that was spreading.  So this evening Peter took me to urgent care.  I have poison oak...lucky me.  Apparently there's poison oak in the backyard of our new house.  Remember those 12 cans my aunt and uncle and I filled with greenery?  I was wearing short sleeves, they had long sleeves on.  Note to self-wear long sleeves when dealing with unfamiliar greenery.

Moving Day

Saturday morning bright and early we started to move our stuff out.  Peter picked up the rental truck at 7am.  By 8am they started filling it up.  At 8:30 people from the ward came to help.  It all disappeared so quickly.  I ran to the store and picked up doughnuts (apparently a must have for moving) and popsicles because it was just so darn hot!  The popsicles were a major hit!  Then just about everyone ventured over to the new house to help unload the truck.  From what I heard, they had a great assembly line leading from the truck to the garage and had the truck empty in very little time.  I stayed back and Rebecca and I loaded boxes with the odds and ends stuff that got left behind.  The condo is now 99% empty.  All that remains is some laundry soap, mops and a few pans that we forgot to pack up.

We'd like to send out a HUGE THANK YOU to all that helped us move.  We really appreciated it!

In the move we only broke one frame-a small casualty.  Though today Peter went to church with sneakers on as he forgot to pack dress shoes, and he borrowed a tie from my dad.  We also have no idea where our cell phone charger is.  But thankfully my brother had an old one that fit perfectly.

Pre-Moving Day

I'm exhausted!  Peter returned home from a trip to Home Depot and then to the new house to drop stuff off and finish scraping the old tile up at 11:30pm last night.  He then informed me that we needed to get out of the condo as soon as possible in order to have a chance at getting it rented before school starts.  Which meant that today we finished packing up our condo.  Peter and Chris made several trips over to the house with several van loads full of boxes.  Tomorrow morning we're getting the U-haul to take the big stuff and the boxes that got left behind after 4 trips to the house. 

Where is all our stuff going?  After all the kitchen is still a mess and the bedroom has no carpet or really anything.  Well, our stuff is going to the garage or the living room and we'll stay with my parents for a week until our bedroom gets finished and then we'll head over to the house.  While packing up stuff we found our emergency stove, so we could even make food :)  Too bad we don't have a fridge yet though. 

So I know this is all last second and all, but if anyone has spare time, or more importantly a spare hubby :) tomorrow morning we would love the help.

Things Never Go As Planned!

Yesterday I was supposed to go shopping for kitchen appliances with my mom.  I was at Home Depot picking up new locks for the door when Peter calls.  "Plan has changed, Do Not buy appliances.  We have major water problems in the kitchen, it must be gutted first."  I arrive back at the house to find this:  All of the lower cabinets were filled with mold, the floor buckled because of water damage.  There were multiple leaks from multiple sources. 

 This is what the kitchen looked like while there were still people living in it.  The pictures really look much nicer than it was in person.

 

 

I told Frank-our guy doing the fixing-to remove the upper cabinets too.  I want everything in my kitchen to match, and I really didn't like the cabinets in the first place, I was just going to make them work for me...and now I don't have to.

This is the dining room...or at least this was the dining room.  It was also a very small room right next to the kitchen, but since we were remodeling the kitchen we decided to make it larger.

So we told Frank to take out the wall.

 

Here's Frank taking out the upper cabinets.  You can also see how small the kitchen was from this viewpoint.

Did I mention there was water damage in the walls-up 4 feet!  Isn't the kitchen just lovely?

The black stuff on the wall is smoke damage, so there was also a fire at some point that they tried to cover with ugly appliances.  The stove and microwave were there.

I am standing in the dining room taking a picture of the kitchen.

And now I'm standing in the kitchen taking a picture of the dining room.  I told you they were both small.

So since we are turning the dining room into the kitchen, we are knocking out another wall-the one on the left is going too and the area between the window and the other wall is going to have a wall.  And if you can imagine it...there will be two pantries there.  The windows are going to be shorter, but up higher and there will be cabinets under them.
This is what the windows looked like this morning.  They don't look like that now though...I'll take more pictures tomorrow.  Frank hopes to have the support beams in, the windows redone and the walls done.

Everyone has been working really hard the last two days and there have been great improvements already.  The backyard is looking much better as we took out A LOT of ivy and cut back many plants that were overgrown.  We filled up all 7 of our trashcans.  Then I borrowed four from the neighbor (they're super nice) and filled those up as well.  We still have bushes that have been cut, but no more cans.  I might ask the other neighbor too.

The house is being tented on Monday so work will stop tomorrow afternoon and resume Thursday.

BIG NEWS!

We bought a house!

Back in March Peter suggested we should look into buying a house.  With interest rates so low was it better to buy now, or wait a year or so when we have more money and buy later with the chances of a higher interest rate by then?  Well, our lender said to buy now.  So we did!  We put in an offer on this short-sale in May and it was accepted.

We wanted the ugliest house in the nicest neighborhood....and that's basically what we got.  This beauty ;) is most definitely a fixer upper.  She's also located in PQ 2nd ward boundaries.  This is the only picture I bothered to take today as we picked up the key.  This house and one other on the street have an awful curb appeal and the rest all have manicured lawns, well kept fronts and homes look brand new. 

Walking up you'll see two dead trees, a dead lawn along with dog droppings-how lovely.  Inside the living/dining area isn't too bad, there's skylights so that's nice and vaulted ceilings.  The family room is doable as well.  Then walking into the kitchen...well if you can avoid the kitchen that would be the best thing.  It's UGLY and DISGUSTING and well we'll fix what we can and clean A LOT and in a few years we'll gut it and replace it.  The master bedroom is located on the first floor and it is HUGE!!!!  The closets need a bit of help and the carpet is yucky, but all the carpet in the house will be replaced.  The bathroom-eh-well a baby lizard went running into it, we just left it.  Oh the seller took the shower heads in both bathrooms...lovely.  This bathroom needs a bit of help.  Then we go upstairs and there are 4 more bedrooms up there.  All of the bedrooms need a bit of help and then the upstairs bathroom is DISGUSTING!  There's mold all over the baseboards, the water was on in the tub-we tried to turn it off, but couldn't.  We plan on gutting that bathroom.  So yeah we have our work cut out for us.

We'll post pictures as we fix things up, cause right now the pictures would be a bit depressing.  "You bought that?" 

It has a lot of potential...it's a diamond in the rough.