When we moved in our upper deck was not very well supported. The whole weight of our deck rested on two 4x4 posts, one of which was bowing and twisting, so we haven't gotten any use of the deck off the kitchen since we've moved in.
Our ultimate goal is to add stairs from the top deck, so reinforcement was a necessary first step. This weekend my dad and brother were kind enough to come over and help us do some work! Saturday we bought all the lumber we would need and figured out our plan of action. We had to tear up some of the deck in order to gain access to the existing concrete pads for the posts to rest on.
I didn't take any pictures during the process, but Sunday we got the new 4x6 posts up along with a massive beam that will now bear the weight of the deck.
We were able to use the existing concrete pads, which saved us some time and money, but left us with a not very symmetrical support system...oh well!
The next step is to rip out the hot tub full of weeds! Hooray!
Now that we're mostly unpacked I have allowed myself to begin the painting process. I decided to tackle the fireplace mantel first, sanding the trim was just too intimidating. Last week after work I sanded, primed, sanded, painted, sanded and painted again. Here was the mantel before:
It wasn't terrible, but I really didn't like that it was painted the exact same color as the walls. I put the second and final coat of paint on it today:
The white is such a big improvement. It will be even better when I get all the trim painted as well. Phil, my mom, and my brother were kind enough to help me get all the trim in the living room sanded this weekend, so we're well on our way. I got it all taped off tonight and will start priming this week after work!
It's been far too long since we've updated! We have been very busy unpacking and enjoying our time in our new home! Now, I feel it is time to catch you all up on what we've been up to.
First! Some random photos that I had on my camera:
You can see the previous owners left us this...lovely...spice rack (and also the outlet covers). However, it's not really our style. So while Phil was napping I decided to pry it off the wall.
I began to seriously question how this thing was attached to the wall because I was able to completely tear it apart without it even budging from the backsplash. Ultimately, it came down.
It ended up being attached with some quite impressive foam tape. The important thing is...it's gone!
Next on my memory card: a quick landscaping project we completed today! First we need to remind you that we replaced our mailbox because the original one was located on the ground when we moved in. Some lovely neighborhood kids appear to have hit it with a baseball bat. Joy. We mentioned this mailbox project in a previous entry and the ever lovely Grandma Vi sent us a card!
Thanks Vi! It was great to receive some non-junk mail in our new mailbox! Anyways, back to todays project. As you can see below, this...tree(?) was eating our mailbox.
Believe it or not, there is a sign under there with our address on it. We felt sorry for the mailman and decided to do some "landscaping." While it may not be the prettiest job, it serves its purpose.
Look! We have an address!
More random photos:
Here is our new, aforementioned, front door hardware (also Finnigan's terrible Vanna White impression):
Philip being...himself:
Finnigan's Bucket-O-Goodies:
A hot tub filled with weeds:
Our new grill that we spent 3 hours assembling. Although, the BBQ with Andy & Becky afterwards made it totally worth it.
A very colorful, delicious looking, salad that Philip made for dinner:
Last, but certainly not least...Finnigan abandoning our game of fetch to roll in an ant hill.
After a nice long weekend we are mostly unpacked. Plenty left to do but things are starting to take shape. At the start of the weekend there were a few things on my 'to fix' list, and wouldn't you know it after 5 days I found about a half dozen other things to work on. I replaced all the lock sets so that they match now. The back yard should be Finnigan-proof enough now. (until we close off the bottom of the deck). And we now have a mailbox. ( the old one appeared to have been bludgeoned off its post.) There is plenty I want to do, like make all the interior door knobs match. Plenty left to unpack but overall, very happy with the house and looking forward to being here for a long time.
It's moving day!!! We began the loading process this morning at 9am and we unloaded the last item into our new home at 11am. 2 hours, done! That was an extremely efficient move and we had that truck completely full. It's safe to say next time we move we can't get a 17 foot truck again.
We closed on the house on Thursday and since then we've been bringing over car loads of items and fixing a few things here and there. Phil successfully put a new wax ring on the toilet in the master bathroom, good job Phil! He ran in to a snag replacing the faucet though. There was some rusted piece of something (that's the technical term) that he couldn't remove so he called my brother Ryan for help. Ryan came over and this happened:
They couldn't get the rusted piece off so they removed the whole sink! They then proceeded to hammer the crap out of it until it came off.
Finnigan even got in on the action.
Ultimately, they made it work and we ended up with this beautiful new faucet:
It doesn't even leak or anything. Good job boys!
Lastly, here is a sneak peak of the pretty chevron rug that was previously mentioned. After hours of barking and running around to see what everyone was doing, Finnigan passed out on it.
I seriously have a problem. An addiction. Photoshop. I should be packing since we move in 7 days and my goal is to be done packing in 4 days. But what am I doing instead? Photoshop-ing what our future living room would look like with certain furniture in it. It all started because I wanted to see what the room would look like with built-in shelves around the fireplace. Once I learned how to distort images so they actually looked like they somewhat belonged there I had to do the whole room.... It pains me to say this is what I've been doing for the past...hour and a half.
If we ever dobuild shelves around the fireplace they won't look quite like that, but similar. Somewhere we can display some frames, books, and whatever other knick-knacks we accrue along the way. Then I joked with Phil that I could probably find a picture of our couch and make it look like it somewhat belonged. So...I did. I added the pillows that Emmie recommended for us, some pretty blue chevron curtains, and a super cute tufted ottoman. I think I like it. I'm not sure how I feel about the green walls/blue curtains though. What do you think?
In 10 days we close on our very first home! We're currently in the midst of cleaning, packing, and researching! We're going to try to get a few things done at the house Thursday and Friday before the big move on Saturday. I'm going to start priming/painting the trim in the living room/kitchen and Philip is going to be working on a few different projects. He was able to take Thursday & Friday off work so he will be replacing our kitchen faucet (it's got some major leakage happening) and Finnigan-proofing the backyard.
We don't really trust Mr. Finnigan to play under the deck, so Phil is going to work on blocking that area off with lattice. The fence also needs a little bit of adjusting so that Finnigan can't sneak out. While we're talking about the backyard, here is our pretty view (sorry the quality of the photos aren't great, they're taken from Zillow):
It's much prettier now that the trees actually have leaves! The best part is we don't have any neighbors directly behind us. Hooray! We're super excited to actually have a yard! Now I'll leave you with a picture of Finnigan being a good dog so that we will give him a backyard to play in:
I love chevron. Who doesn't love a zig-zag pattern?! We needed a rug for our dining area (the floors are fairly new laminate floors and, believe it or not, Phil is very concerned that it will get scratched). Area rugs are expensive! Even most of the not-so-cute 5x7's I found were around $150. So when I spotted this beauty at 8x10 for just under $150 we snagged it!
Overstock had a mother's day special going for $15 dollars off but we were about a dollar short of getting the deal. If you've ever wondered "Gee, what can I get on Overstock.com for $1.04 that I have no use for???" The answer is: Crystal Butterfly Beads!
These are going directly in the trash (or maybe the goodwill bag that we have started?) but I do appreciate that they saved us $15 on our rug. Thanks Crystal Butterfly Beads.
We're super excited to be able to do projects around the house, from basic repairs to decorating, and this weekend we got some reading material to help us!
We ordered The Home Book and the Black & Decker Home Repair books from Amazon and my Dad gave us Reader's Digest 1001 Do-It Yourself Hints & Tips and The Right Color for my birthday! My brothers also went in on a lawn mower for us! Pretty dang awesome, huh?? Good job brothers. They sure do make up for how mean they were to me when we were children!
Now we can read up on how to do some of the repairs that will be necessary right away, like fixing the toilet in the master bathroom and replacing the kitchen faucet. We can also read up on some things that aren't exactly necessary but that we would like to do, like adding stairs to our deck.
First, though, maybe we should just focus on packing...
Hello, my name is Philip Stewart Meyer. If you have been following from the beginning I am the aforementioned husband. I have gone into this adventure with an open mind and tried to see the positives and potential in all of the houses we looked at. Some required a bit more imagination than others but, in the end we found what would be exactly what we wanted in the biggest investment we have made. And I couldn't be more excited! The process seemed pretty cut and dry. We look for houses. We find the one we like. Offer. Counter Offer. Rinse. Repeat.
Then we had the inspection. I went into it knowing that the house would have things wrong with it. More than a few times did people tell me that there is no such thing as the perfect house. That being said, there really wasn't too much wrong with the house. Mr. Inspector was a great guy and walked me through the process and the house (Or I followed him around like a wide-eyed puppy). As he checked cabinets, behind appliances, shined his flashlight on ceilings, and took plenty of pictures for the report, he explained what he was doing and what he was looking for in each instance. Not everything he checked was a problem i.e. he showed me the main load bearing wall and pointed out that there were no 45 degree cracks from the corners of the doors which all fit into the frames nicely, this meant that there was no shifting of that wall. YAY! The only things that were major issues that needed to be fixed right away were the breaker panel, which was not only recalled a few years ago, but had multiple wires going into some of the plugs. Not good. So that needed replaced. And the furnace was original to the house, for those of you keeping track. House was built in '84, so its pretty damn old. (For a furnace) The rest that Mr. Inspector noticed around the house were things that I could fix by myself with the help of my handy dandy new Black and Decker DIY book, or with the help of family and friends.
All that to say I feel the inspection went well and now I am even more excited to move into this house and make it ours. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode coming to this blog soon...
One thing that I very much dislike about renting is the inability to paint. I'm super excited to do some painting in our new house! I found a really great tool to help visualize what rooms would like if they were painted. It's the Sherwin-Williams Paint Visualizer which you can find here. First, a picture of our future living room:
I love the vaulted ceiling and the brick fireplace, but I'm itching to paint all that trim white. See how the mantle is painted the same color as the walls? Yuck. Philip wasn't too convinced so I used my fancy Sherwin-Williams tool and voila!
PRETTY. I think he's a believer now. I'm trying to decide how I feel about the wall color...it's called "Rosemary." This tool has provided so much entertainment for me. Geez I'm a dork. Time to go see what the kitchen would look like with white cabinets! Hooray!
We certainly didn't expect to find a house that we really liked quite as quickly as we did. After the 5th house we didn't really feel the need to keep looking. We brought some family members back the next day to look at it, mulled it over, and decided to make an offer! This was definitely unchartered territory for us. We had no idea how to go about making an offer, how low was too low, etc. With the help of our realtor we made our initial offer and then had to wait an excruciating 18 hours to hear back. I didn't anticipate just how anxious I would feel during this time. We haggled for 3 days and I don't think I've ever checked my email/ cell phone so much in my life. Wednesday afternoon they finally accepted our offer!
Phil's parents, whose opinions he very much values, were in New Zealand during this whole process. Before they left, Phil mentioned that we were going to start looking at houses. Next thing we know, we have an offer accepted and they're still out of the country! Um, surprise! We bought a house! Phil was finally able to Skype with them before they returned and, needless to say, he felt much better knowing they were in the loop!
We had our inspection last week and there were really only 2 big things that needed to be addressed. The electrical panel has been recalled and is a fire hazard (!) so that will have to be replaced and the furnace was "short cycling." Other than that, the house has some minor things that we'll need to fix over time...typical stuff for a house built 28 years ago. Philsey had a great time following the inspector around and learning all about home repairs, maybe if I ask him nicely he'll write all about his experiences soon :)
I will end this blog with 2 things:
1) We are newbies at all of this. Phil is eager to learn/tackle some of the simpler home repair projects (We have a basic home repair book on the way!) and I am eager to paint and decorate and make our house a home. Unfortunately, I really don't have an eye for all things interior design, though I wish I did. Luckily I have wonderful, talented friends like Emmie Reine to create mood boards for our house! Check out her blog about how to spruce up our living room by clicking here!
2) Don't you want to see the house that we almost own?
My husband and I got married in November and now we're embarking on our next big journey: Home Ownership.
I've been house hunting via the interwebs (Zillow is my fave) for probably close to a year. This has given me a really good idea of how much house we can get for our money. News Flash: Not as much as I once thought. Of couse we wanted our first house to be big and beautiful, but we quickly came to realize that what we're looking for is a starter home. We originally planned to wait until closer to November, when our lease is up, to start seriously looking. But when a house we'd had our eyes on dropped about 5k dollars, we thought meh- doesn't hurt to look! So, we pulled a big house hunting no-no and went and looked at a house before we had a pre-approval (Gasp!). That house ended up being not so great. The 3rd bedroom was really a basement rec room and there was some termite damage we'd just prefer not to deal with. However, at that point we had talked everything through and convinced ourselves that there is no time like the present!
So, we got a pre-approval and a referral for a realtor, and went to look at 4 houses the following Saturday. The first 2 were duds. The first house was in a slightly sketchy neighborhood, backed up to some super shady apartments, had wood rot, tiny rooms, and just overall not what we were looking for. The backyard had like 8 trees in it though, which was interesting.
The second house clearly had some updates and was much bigger, but was missing door frames and doors and had a lot of unfinished work going on. It also had a weird enclosed back porch that looked like it had never been cleaned and might fall over with a light breeze. Also had a sketchy neighborhood and a terrible driveway.
The third house was pretty legit, much more what we were looking for. The back yard was a little awkward, but we could have worked with that. There were some steel reinforcements in the basement which were concerning, but again- something we felt we could possibly work with. This house still had that "starter home" feel to it though.
The last house we looked at was in a nice neighborhood and just what we were looking for. Fenced in back yard, good size kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, unfinished basement with potential, 2 car garage, and no major issues. The only major downside was that the mechanicals were all original, from '84. However, the roof is only 6 years old, the house has vinyl siding, and new-ish windows. We knew this was the house for us! More on that later.
