The Game Plan

We celebrated closing day with pizza and beer in camp chairs in the empty living room! Our family and friends joined and agreed we bribed them with beer to help us get started on our projects that weekend.

It was Sept 30th – we had until Halloween to be out of the rental house and move our stuff in. We put together a list of things we had to do before we could live in our new house. Here’s what it included:

•           Refinish Hardwood floors
•           Killz Primer and Paint all walls
•           Paint ceilings
•           Sand and Paint Kitchen Cabinets
•           Tear out drop ceiling in basement (Eeew!)
•           Tear off what was left of gutters and hang new fascia board around house
•           Get gutters put on house
•           Tear out existing HVAC and prep for new to be installed.

And during all of this we’d also be planning for our January wedding and attending a family wedding in CA – and don’t forget Thanksgiving and Christmas! 

Here are me and my dad ready to work! Joe got me my very own tool belt to celebrate! 

Closing Day 2006

Back to the beginning...

Joe and I closed on our first house Sept 30th 2006. The entire purchase process was a whirl-wind! We first looked at our house driving around the neighborhoods that we new we liked and then enlisted the help of our good friend and realtor, Linetta.

When we first looked at Vernie it was interesting to say the least – it smelled, was in need of some major work, and had some interesting and dated décor. From the beginning we could picture ourselves living in this home. Our dad’s fell in love with the project it would be, and our mom’s thought we were out of our league. To keep our options open we looked at a few homes in our modest price range, but were always disappointed with the size of home we could afford and the locations.

Our minds kept going back to Vernie and we decided to put an offer on it. A lowball offer. After a counter-offer and an acceptance – along with negotiations to have the basement wall fixed as part of the purchase we were going to be home owners. The inspection revealed things that we knew would be issues and projects. Attic full of junk with animal droppings (thanks to the hole in the roof that went unattended for a while), we'd need a new HVAC, leaky faucets, unsafe front entrance, no gutters on most of the house, a drainage project…the list went on. And the basement - that's another post on it's own.

Here is the picture of Vernie when we first went to look at it.

Being the young and fun people we were – we were still excited and looked forward to closing day!

Here we are on closing day after the wall had been fixed – we were ready to roll!

I have a blog...

So I've decided to start a blog. I am not a writer. My posts will be short and rely quite a bit on photos. This blog is intended to document the transformation of our first home and our journey in purchasing a new one. We've started the process of considering moving to a new house and have a laundry list of projects to complete prior to listing our house. You'll hear about each and every one here on this blog!!

I think I'll start at the beginning and post the transformation of Vernie (that's what we'll call this house) room by room!

Stay tuned for a post about closing day back in 2006.