It all starts with a Closing

We closed on the house on Friday, after about 3 months of house searching, offers, rejections and finally one house that fit us both. Dave got his wish for a lot of land, I got my wish for a unique house with lots of charm. Along with it comes a lot of work, which is what you'll be able to watch here. We've got about 6 weeks until we have to be out of our little rental house and we plan to get contractor after contractor in there in that time to totally overhaul this house.

The house has been sitting empty somewhere between 9 months and 2 years - we never got a straight answer about that. The previous owners had interesting ideas about what colors are good for walls (GAG!) and judging from the kitchen, they really liked teal. The house was sold "as-is" so lots of random stuff was left in the house which we'll either keep, junk or sell.  On the plus side, we now own a pool table. :)

So let's start with the "before" pictures. I took these the day after we closed when I spent the day vacuuming up about 400 dead bugs that were inside the house.

The entrance to the house is very easy to miss from the road because it's completely grown over.



Our driveway is a tenth of a mile long:



Here's the front of the house, in all it's Christmas color glory. The roof will be replaced and the exterior repainted. Just in case you were wondering, we'll be choosing entirely different colors.



Here is the one room of the house (living room and dining room) we won't be changing at all, besides a new coat of paint.



The teal kitchen, complete with totally ridiculous wood burning stove for no reason:





The pantry at the entrance will probably be converted to a mudroom. This pantry seemed like it might have been a good idea if it had cabinet DOORS. Who wants a grocery store worth of food to be the first thing people see when they walk in your back door? Weird.

Moving onto the rest of the house, there is a theme for the 3 bedrooms and bathrooms - loud, awful paint colors. Check it out:






So that's it for now. More photos to come as we do more and more work.