At laaaaaaaaaaaaast!

We have officially moved in to our new house! YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

It's been a long process, but we're finally in. (I'll post pictures soon!)

We closed on the house April 10th, and immediately started working on it. The house was foreclosed, and had been vacant for a year and a half, which means no owners to take care of it. It was in pretty rough shape, but in a GREAT neighborhood, for a GREAT price! Of course, John saw a diamond in the rough, and wanted to buy it b/c of it being a good financial investment. There were a ton of houses that we looked at that were in much better shape, already had been worked on and improved (which of course I loved) but John wanted to take advantage of the 'buyer's market', so we did!

We've done SO much to the house with a lot of help from our friends! We hired people for some things, and did other things ourselves.

Here's the list...
* We tore out the flooring in the kitchen and both bathrooms, and put in nice new tile.
* We gutted the upstairs bathroom completely, and started from scratch with electrical, and
plumbing.
* Added a fully tiled shower, and a new his/her vanity with granite to the upstairs bathroom.
* We sanded and refinished the floors
* Put down hand-scraped laminate hardwood in our master bedroom
* Painted EVERY INCH of the house, and oh....I feel like there's more!

There were definitely times when I'd walk around the house while working on it, and thought to myself...and outloud, 'What did we get ourselves into?!' I'm not as much of a 'big picture' person as John is. He's really good at seeing the end product far before it's done, or even started for that matter. I on the other hand, am extremely step-by-step minded, and structured. Watching the floors get ripped out before having the flooring ready almost gave me a heart attack. Seeing our upstairs bathroom as a gaping hole was pretty scary too! (John thrives on things like this...opposites attract.)

John's mom was down for two weeks, and she was an incredible help! She painted about 80% of the house! I had painted three rooms before she got in, and then she took over the rest. And the best part...she did it all with a servant's heart!

There are still a lot of things left to be done. John and I both decided that we wanted to take a little bit of a break though with the renovations, for two reasons: lack of time, lack of money. We think those are two decent reasons. So, we are waiting to carpet the downstairs office and upstairs foyer until we sell one of the cars, and we're waiting to put flooring in the three upstairs guest rooms probably until June or so.

I will post pictures once our desktop is set up. Until then, I'll leave it all to your imagination...