Homeowners!

Well it's Monday, and I return to work tonight after a weekend of working on our home.  What an amazing feeling it is to put your own sweat and muscle into transforming a place into YOUR place. 

My mother and sister joined us on Saturday to help tear out carpets and to see the place.  They both love it and promise to be regular weekend visitors.

Apparently that's a paw paw tree!

Mallards that like to hang out in our pond, hoping for ducklings this Spring!  We also saw turtles, and the sellers told us that blue herons like to frequent the pond as well.

It was so nice to just walk the grounds and listen to the babbling of the stream.

 

The first floor bedroom was our top priority.  We tore up the carpet in here, next to go is the foam pad.  We'll be ordering the laminate this week.  We put on the first coat of paint, too.. I'll take photos when it's all done.

Our super fancy new reverse osmosis filter system, installed by Honeybunch under the kitchen sink.

We plan to paint the kitchen walls a deep crimson, leaving the ceiling and trim white.  

I'm looking to find some metro-style shelving to put in the corner where that box is to expand our pantry space.

This room will probably serve as our dining room.  We're going to paint it a bright happy green. 

It also has a laundry space.  We'll hang doors there after we install a washer and dryer.

The great room may stay the way it is, there is only a small section of wall that is not logs and we'll probably leave it that cream color for now.  Before the end of summer we're going to put in a woodstove.

Overall, settlement was a bit of mess, with some hiccups on the seller's end.  The furnace was not functional during our walk-through that morning, and it seems that the sellers let the oil tank run dry again.  So we're getting oil delivered this Tuesday, and we wrote up a contingency at settlement that if the furnace doesn't work once we have oil in it, the sellers will pay to have it fixed.  Luckily, the weather has not dipped below freezing, so all the plumbing is still in tact.  Seeing just how much 200 gallons of oil costs was enough to make the investment in a woodstove all the more attractive.

We had heavy rain for two days before settlement, so we got to see just how wet the basement gets during such a storm.  It wasn't bad at all, an inch of water in the deepest places, and by the next morning it was almost entirely dry.  We'll probably put in a sump pump just to be on the safe side. 

We took down one of the dead trees in the way of our future garden plot, with some elbow grease and a bow saw.  We'll be borrowing a friend's chainsaw for the rest of them, but there was something deeply satisfying about felling a tree with your own muscle.  We're going to have plenty of firewood for this fall and winter by the time we're done clearing the plot.  

This week's priorities are scheduled around work, my interview for the ER nurse position, and a "yay, you bought a house!" party from our community here at our apartment.  We're going to finish painting the bedroom, office, kitchen, and dining room.  We're going to get the last of the foam pad up from all the formerly carpeted floors, and shop vac the heck out of the place.  We're going to order the flooring for the bedroom and office, and possibly begin installing it this weekend. We're going to be sore, and it's going to be awesome.

Hurray for nesting!