House Tour - Lower Level

Our house is a rambler, so the lower level is underground in the front of the house and a walk out at the back and sides of the house.  The first room after you walk downstairs from the upstairs hall is an open living room with a fireplace and bar...

Please excuse all of the cleaning supplies everywhere!  This was the day before we moved our belongings in, so we wanted to get everything clean before hand.  Next up is the laundry room, utility room and sauna.

Then we have two lower level full bathrooms...Right now, we use one and Kevin uses the other (while we leave the upstairs open for renovations).

Aren't those accordion shower "curtains" awesome?!  That is going to be one of our first projects since they're a little hard to work with and we will be using this bathroom for a while until our upstairs master bath is renovated.

Next we have three bedrooms.  One Kevin is staying in, one we're staying in and the last is open but does have some of our clothes in there for now.

Last up is the office.  Currently we're using this to store our extra boxes that we'll keep packed until the renovations are complete in each room.

That's the bottom floor and where we're living during the renovations... hope you enjoyed the photos!

- Jess

House Tour - First Floor

I took a ton of pictures after we closed, so we can fully document all of the updates and changes we make to our home.  Since some of you may not be able to come tour our home in person, I figured I'd put this photo heavy post together so you can check it out!  This post with tour the top/first floor... enjoy!

First up, the foyer...

Next, the future dining room. This used to be one of two upstairs living rooms.  Since we'd rather have one large living room than two small living rooms on one floor, we're changing this one into a bigger dining room and hopefully opening up some walls to make the old dining room part of the new living room.

Tyson wanted to pop in a few of these photos too... he loves all the space and is so excited to be in our new home!

Next up, the future living room.  As you can hopefully see in these pictures, it's currently two rooms (the old dining room and old front family room).

And here's the kitchen...

So that's the main living space on the first/upper floor.  We also have two bedrooms and two baths.  Here's a few pictures of the Master Bedroom.

Then we have the master bathroom and closet...

Last up we have the second main level bedroom and main bath...

So that's it!  The main/first floor level of our new home!  We have a lot of updates and changes we'd like to make, but those will come over time.  We'll post things as we renovated, so check back often.

- Jess

The Big Move!

Moving day!  The weekend we moved was jam packed of activities.  After we closed on Friday, Frank had flight lessons and Jess had class (for her trip to China).  We all stayed at the condo that night, since it was going to be late when we all got home.

Saturday we spent at the new house doing some heavy duty cleaning.  We focused on the kitchen and lower level, since that's where we'd be living at first.  I brought a slew of supplies and they were based on the bar downstairs...

Here's Frank and Kevin setting up the rug shampoo-er.  We did that with all the carpet downstairs since we'd be using it when we first moved it.  We didn't do the upstairs, since those will be ripped out anyway.

 After all the cleaning, we needed a bite to eat and a water break!

We were at the house for about 11 hours when all was said and done.  Since it was cinco de mayo that day, we celebrated a successful day with some margaritas afterwards.

The next day (Sunday) was the big move.  We hired movers which were definitely a great deal and well worth it.  Our tree was still in full bloom and beautiful!

The whole move took about 5 hours.  We cleaned out the final bits from our condo, and were all set!  Let the renovations begin!

- Jess

Closing Day!

The day finally came... we closed on our house! It took us about 2 full years to find out house, but now that we closed and are in we both know it was well worth the wait!

Closing went pretty smoothly. We met with our realtor at our house and did a final walk through. All seemed to check out and there were no new damages or issues. After finishing up the walk through, we all headed over to the office where we would close, which was close by. Frank and I went through the pile of paperwork, "signing our life away" as he likes to call it. We finished all of the paperwork in about an hour and a half. Then, the lawyer looked to us and asked for our down payment check. We were boggled since the bank was supposed to wire the money over earlier that day. The lawyer called our bank and turns out, the bank forgot to send the wire!! To make a long story short, we had to run to the bank branch down the street and get a cashier's check for our down payment.

Once we turned over the check, the house was officially ours!! We were both very excited. Here's our first steps in our new home as official homeowners!

 

The tree in the front of our new home was also in full bloom that day, so we snapped a few shots of that beauty too.

So that's pretty much it... now we're in and happy to be on our way to our dream home!

- Jess