That afternoon I met him and our realtor (who was fabulous, by the way, super on the ball right to the end) at the house and we just did a little walk through and talked about projects we needed contractors for. It was a great day.
Since then we have been toiling away on projects and not in a very organized fashion yet. I think we just work on what we have energy for. So far we've prepped the garage for epoxy floor covering, cut down indoor trees and dug out the dirt from two large indoor planters that seem to have been all the rage in the late 70s and 80s in these parts. We have removed nails from walls all over the house and painted The Bug's bedroom. We bought flooring for The Man's office, heavy duty cleaned the ceiling and floors in the living room and this weekend I started pulling out all the 30-year-old contact paper from the kitchen drawers and cupboards.
The Man has done a lot of work on the yard, cutting down two dead trees, trimming three other large trees and has the pool up and running. Last night I watered flower beds that have been suffering from a lack of water. We need to get the crazy, bizarre sprinkler systems figured out.
We also got the laundry room up and running so that I can do wash there while we are there working. We're still living in a little townhouse until we are ready to move into the new house. There's no additional costs to having both places so it's nice we don't have to rush.
We do have a plan, it's just that we need busy contractors to be available to get our two big projects done. We have met with two contractors to walk through the house and get some rough estimages on costs. Right now our top goals are these three:
1) Office Space For Me -- goal is to turn the attic storage area into a workable office/craft & art room for me -- which is the biggest expense on the docket which isn't a very expensive project actually although it's still up in the air depending on raising the ceiling just a little bit and there are some logistics to figure out,
2) Planter Removal -- we need to remove the two large planter wells in the kitchen & dining area and replace the brick flooring -- again we're dealing with some weird logistics here and need to work with a contractor for this crazy project. But we did shovel out many buckets of dirt to get them cleaned out. A smelly, dirty job.
3) Replace Tile Kitchen Counter Tops -- we aren't sure what we want to do with these yet, we're a little all over the board on what we want to spend and what type of countertop surface we want -- more to come. One of the big issues is not spending a lot to replace these when we can see from the aging counter tops that we are going to be into a full kitchen cabinet redo in the years ahead. So don't want to spend a ton on new counter tops on top of cupboards that will need replacing.
Hopefully we'll get a tightened down bid on these projects soon and get moving on those items. Everything else will be a work-as-we-go list of items that should keep us busy well into our 60s...haha.
But it sure has been fun to move our dreams ahead, learn to work together and get into a rhythm with this new house. I'm glad we didn't move right in because it's given us a chance to take our time and think things through and just get adjusted to moving into someone else's house and having it feel like out own. It's a little discouraging sometimes when we look at all the "deferred maintenance" but we'll get there. It's already feeling like a nice place to be and we can't wait to get our furniture in, spend our first night there and invite friends over for a meal. It's been so long since we've been able to do that.
The holidays aren't too far off and I humorously wondered if I should just decorate the house for Christmas rather than decorate it for regular days and a few weeks later redo it again. I will definitely be keeping the holiday decorations close when we unpack everything!
Thanks for visiting. Hope you are well! More to come soon...
1 comment:
I'm so happy for you! Eager to hear more as things progress :)
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