Our New House!!!!!!

Well, we are finally moved into our new house. We're mostly unpacked and actually have internet now (yay!). All in all, I love this little house. It definitely needs some work, but I'm excited to be able to work on it.

Ta-da!

Ok, so it's not so great from the outside.... yet. We're thinking of adding the look of bricks or stonework to the bottom cinder-block portion. And maybe repainting the shutters and door. And cutting back that plant that is taking over the entrance...

It gets pretty flowers, but it might eat visitors.

No garage, but we might put one in. Or at least a car port. That door goes to the basement and the hill goes up to the deck and backyard.

Our living room. Notice the window a/c unit and floorboard heater. Not so good to have with a toddler around. Hopefully we'll be getting rid of those soon and putting in central air and heat. 

And if you noticed the piece of extra carpet in the corner it's covering this:

an open vent for a wood burning fireplace that is no longer attached downstairs. (The black things are squished bugs. Apparently the guy who sold us the house didn't feel the need to clean once he packed up.)

The other half of the living room/entry way. The tiles are cracked and the grout in between them is rotten. This morning I covered them over with a dirty piece of carpet I found downstairs because Ellie wouldn't leave them alone. I decided it was the lesser of two evils.

If you look very closely at the picture above, you might notice this:

Not only did the guy not clean (at all), he was kind enough to only paint random portions of the house. Including half of this door frame.

Dining room. It's actually bigger than it looks here. We put our table in with the extra leaf in it and it fits just fine. The windows are triple-paned, which is nice because it keeps out traffic noise (but lets in bird-song). The sliding door goes onto the deck.

 

The dining room is attached to the kitchen, which has more usable workspace than any of the 3 kitchens I've had (combined). I love it! The cabinets are all new and a good hard wood. And the countertops are not marble or granite (which break my plates) and that's good enough for me.

It gives it a very cottage-like feel. (Once again, I was amazed at the work the guy did himself to make it look nice, and then left it absolutely disgusting. There were dead bugs in the refrigerator. It took me like 6 hours to clean this kitchen before we even had anything in it.)

There are 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. I only took a picture of one bedroom. They're all similar. The bathrooms are small, but the master bathroom is ridiculously tiny. Like, you can barely turn around in it. And it's kinda gross. That's mostly why I didn't get a picture.

Here is the most exciting room:

It's exciting because it's our extra room, and because it is brightly colored. I must say, I've never seen anyone so devoted to a college football/basketball team. And that's saying something in this town. The wall paper didn't come off as well as I would have liked. I'll have to work on that. So I can paint it. Not orange and blue.

This is our laundry room. It currently has no laundry because there is no washer/dryer. But they should be coming tomorrow. I hope. We're running out of clean clothes. I'm hoping that someday we can move the laundry downstairs and turn this into a pantry. A huge pantry that's right off the kitchen. The door goes out onto the deck.

This is our basement. 1200 square feet of unfinishedness. With whatever random stuff the guy felt that he had to leave behind. The stairs scare me a little. There is also an old-school pencil sharpener stuck to them. We have big plans for the basement, including a good-sized family room, a couple bedrooms, and a new bathroom (and laundry). We'll see how much of it we get done while we're here. 

Now this is all very exciting, but some of the best parts are yet to come. Don't get too bored already.

`

This is our deck. It's a nice sized deck with some carpenter bees living in it. They've been nice to us so far. They should die soon though, because the pest inspector charged us to get rid of them.

The house is on a double lot, with almost a full acre of land (.86 acres, if you must know).

 

Our property goes all the way back to the very long grass that you can't really see in the picture. See that big pile of dead branches way back there? It's past that. 

On our last-minute walk-through before we signed all the papers, our realtor pointed something out to us:

 WE HAVE A PEAR TREE! We were super excited because we'd had no idea it was on our property. There was no mention of it by the owner or on any paperwork anywhere. Pretty cool huh?

After we signed the papers and moved out of our hotel, Will suggested that we take another good walk around the backyard to see what exactly we'd gotten ourselves into. This might be my favorite memory of this house.

We found:

 3 (possibly 4) apples trees

1 peach tree

4 blueberry bushes

2 blackberry bushes

tons of what we think are wild strawberries

None of them had been taken care of, so the fruit was all bad. We'll have to figure out how to take care of them so we can have good fruit next year!

We did manage to get some good blueberries though.

Ellie LOVES them.

We also have some other fun, but less edible stuff back there.

So we've met one neighbor, a nice old lady who brought us brownies (I didn't know people actually did that...) and our ward is pretty cool. 

I love this house so much and I'm so excited to be living here!

So I guess I'll update with more pictures and things once we really get moved in and settled. We have awesome plans for this house!