Three and a half years ago...

...we bought our house. I wrote this post back on the 3rd anniversary in March, but forgot about it all my drafts.

We closed on our house on a Tuesday, over our lunch breaks. I don't remember why we didn't take the entire afternoon off. I was sooooo anxious to leave work that day and be at the house. I didn't even want to stop at the apartment for dinner after work, but we did at Daniel's request and drove over to our new home together. Other than walking through a couple times, I hadn't taken a good look around. I didn't check out the  insides of closets, cabinets or the shed, or really looked very closely at anything before we made an offer. When we were considering buying, that stuff didn't seem important to me. I knew based on the general atmosphere and my vision for the future that this would be a good place for us to live. So, our first evening there we explored a lot, amazed that we were HOMEOWNERS. We also marveled at how dirty the place felt.

Fortunately, we were able to spend a few weeks living at our apartment while we worked on the house, redoing the floors and painting. We also needed to prime the entire apartment, because we had painted all those walls.

Here's something I wrote in my journal in the midst of moving, "We have been working like crazy people, trying to get the house ready to move in. I've never done so much cleaning in my life. Every evening since we have closed, we have been working hard - trying to get rid of the smell.  I hope that soon all this work (and aching back) will become a distant memory. The first thing we did was take down all the blinds and curtains." 
Those red vinyl curtains were screwed into the wall amazingly well. I suspect they were never washed, because removing them took superhuman strength (so it's a good thing Daniel was there). Originally, our timeline involved tearing up the carpet on that first night. In reality, we didn't get to that until the next day because hadn't counted on the curtains being so difficult, and we enjoyed wandering around looking at stuff. Haha. After this house, we know to double whatever time restrictions I place on projects,because we never complete them on time.

Even the dirtiest jobs, like scrubbing the shower and discovering that it is supposed to be white and not tan and trying to remove the stains from the floors and painting ceilings were really satisfying, because it was our house. Daniel and I had a good time together, working on projects until 1 or 2am even when we had to get up for work the next morning. There were a couple evenings I remember looking at the clock and thinking that 10:30pm was still plenty early and I had lots of time to give a room a coat of paint. We shared many a frozen dinner on the floor because we were too busy to cook dinner and didn't have any furniture there. I have mostly forgotten the work and just remember how fun it was, until I look at the pictures.

Below are some before and afters.

Laundry room

                  We painted the walls, tiled the floors, replaced the doors and put up shelves in here.

After - Laundry room

Before - dining room

Before - dining room

This was an easy room. We took down the folding doors into the living room and painted the walls.

After - dining room.

All the other rooms need to be separate posts, because so much work was involved!