At the beginning of this year, my Mom had casually mentioned something about how great it would be to take a trip together for my birthday. We would head to San Diego and visit my cousins. On a whim, I took a week off work for that trip and the way the weekends fell, I had about ten days off in a row. Funny how things just seem to fall into place.My cousins ended up being out of town and I closed on the house during that time off! Everything lined up as if it was meant to be. I had plenty of time to purge, pack, clean, paint, move and unpack. I can't imagine having to do all that while still working every day!
I was so excited to close on the house, even more so after I had forked out a couple hundred dollars to have the main electric breaker to the house replaced before it was officially mine.
It was a quick snap into reality that being a home owner is expensive. The day after closing, with my title paperwork in hand, I was able to get all the utilities turned on. Now, remember how I had mentioned the inspector said there was evidence of the main water valve in the crawl space leaking?... it was not a small leak. The crawl space would have been flooded in no time had we left the water on, so we had the utility worker turn it right back off. Great that we noticed right away.. bad that I then had an entire house to clean and no running water to do so with. Not to mention, no use of bathrooms.
Thank goodness for bottled water and a coffee house right down the street if someone needed a bathroom run. One of our friends is a plumber and his company was able to fit us in pretty quickly. I figured since the valve was being repaired anyway, I might as well have the pressure regulator replaced at the same time. Another couple hundred dollars. Feeling even more thankful for the great deal we got on the fridge at that point. My house now has fantastic water pressure.
First order of business was to remove the carpet in the living room to expose the hardwood floors. They were in really good shape! Removing the old tack strip around the room took forever because it kept splintering into a hundred pieces. Totally worth it.
As we started removing switch plates around the house to get ready to paint we started to notice a trend... they were all different. Ashleigh and Russ tried to convince me to keep the moose but no amount of convincing was going to change my mind. He had to go.
Russ was able to take a couple days off and it was just the two of us. It was fun working on the house together and our picnic lunches in the living room felt kind of like a date in a cheesy sort of way.
I thought to check the mail after lunch one day, thinking things may have started coming in my name. I was almost positive there would be nothing since it had only been a couple days. I was in for a shock!
I wanted the kids to be involved as much as they could with their own bedrooms. Jackson removed a lot of the wallpaper border in his room and they both helped paint. A big thanks to my Mom, who helped remove wallpaper from the entry way hall, and Jackson's room. Defiantly one of the less glamours and more tedious projects that needed to be done.
I wanted to pain the laundry room floor since it is just cement. Russ had the idea to use the garage floor paint. It was like a giant art project flinging colored flecks into the wet paint. One of the more fun painting projects. It turned out great.
Time went by fast. Everything seemed to take longer than I was picturing in my head. My mom, later told me, to plan on everything taking twice as long and using twice as much money as anticipated. So far that has been true. The living room, dining room and both kid's rooms got a fresh coat of paint before we moved. All the carpeted areas got professionally cleaned and new toilet and sink were installed in the main floor powder room.
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