A "New" House

Life has been so absolutely crazy since my last post (pathetically from July) that I have put off blogging. Especially since we've had some big events happen since our last entry.

So to start off with the most time consuming and exciting bit of news....we bought a house! We had been looking every spare moment for about 2 months and we were starting to become pretty frustrated. We definitely were coming into the housing market without too much knowledge so we had to many times adjust our price range, expectations, areas of our search, etc. Luckily Brad and I pretty much had the same idea of what we wanted.

Well the push to find something really increased when we were supposed to be out of our apartment by the end of the month. I was off track for the summer so I started making daily drives around neighborhoods looking up homes we had found on the internet. Well one day while I was looking for a house just in some Millcreek neighborhoods northeast of where we were currently living I happened to drive past a house that I became interested in. I called the number on the sign and the real estate agent basically just told me, "Sorry that house is already under contract." So I moved on. Later that night the agent called me back and left a message on my phone explaining that the contract had fallen through because the person had gotten extremely sick, lost his job, and no longer qualified for the house. She had looked up my number on her caller ID and wanted to know if we were still interested in it. I called her back later the next day and we were the first people to go through it after the broken contract. We fell in love with it. It was exactly what we were looking for: a nice neighborhood with big trees, perfect starter house size, an older house with lots of character, and it just had a good feeling inside of it that we hadn't felt in any other house before. So we played the little offer/counter offer game and finally got it under contract! We were so excited.

We moved in around the middle of August and have been working on making it our own ever since. The house was built in 1941 (very old so it has a lot of quirky things about it) and had previously had only one owner which we thought was pretty cool (it was an estate sale). From everyone we have talked to it sounds like they took care of the house like you wouldn't believe. The daughter said that they weren't allowed to run in the house, the neighbors say that it was so clean you could have eaten off the floor, and supposedly the yard was the husband's pride and joy. So needless to say- the house looks like a grandparents house complete with wallpaper, linoleum, orange carpet and wood paneling downstairs- but it is in great condition. So we'll continue to take small projects at a time to update and modernize but try to keep some of it's character there as well.

Here is a picture of the house when we bought it:


We realized that since it was going to start turning colder soon that we should tackle the outside first. It was in great shape but we wanted to liven it up a bit. We have painted the top siding (oh for quite awhile there were multiple colors up there while we were trying to find the paint we had in mind- I think the neighbors thought we were crazy), taken off that hideous storm door, painted and attached shutters, painted the door and hardware, changed the mailbox and porch light, torn off the gray porch carpet, reinforced the raingutters, painted the trim and white picket fence next to the house, removed those shade awning things over the windows, taken off the drapes and replaced with blinds, fixed some cracks in the cement, pulled out rose bushes and fitzers, and done many other things around the yard.

This is the outcome (when it gets warmer we are going to fix the trim and railings on the porch).




Now it was time to start tackling the inside stuff! I went off track the last week of October so one day I decided that it was time to work on the upstairs bathroom. When you start remodeling you realize how funny they did things long ago. So the upstairs bathroom looked like this before (notice the lovely wallpaper and light fixture):

I think we'll keep the lights as a weapon! :)

Well my mom and I tore off the wallpaper (amazingly enough it came off in full sheets) only to discover that the walls before were painted a nice really bright peach color. After much scrubbing and sanding the glue is finally off all the walls and ceiling (oh yes- there was white wallpaper on the ceiling). The most exciting part though was when Brad and I removed the large mirror. Behind the mirror was a cutout in the wall with a box that fit perfectly into the hole in the wall. It was like a moment you see in a movie when you start thinking, "What if they put their life savings or some expensive jewelry or old coins in this box???". We pulled the box out and sadly inside there was only old newspaper to fill the space (apparently it was November 1976 when they did some remodeling in the bathroom). It looks like the box (which was hollow from the other side) was the old medicine cabinet that was set in the wall. We're still looking for our hidden treasure though!


We have now torn out the linoleum, the sink, and the toilet. Now the fixing up can start rather than the demolishing. Wait to see the finished product!

More events coming soon!