Hallelujah!

That is all...for now.  :)  Shiiiiiiiiiiny!

Welcome to home ownership...

We've been busy bees the past week or so finishing the last few boxes of weird items and finding a new home for them to doing some serious gutter work.  We knew when we moved in that the gutters were basically just dumping water at the west side of the garage and it was causing the house to settle and, er, slope downward in that general area.  Chris figured that that was a project that needed to be done ASAP, so he worked on digging a trench and guiding the water out towards the street.  I came home yesterday after happy hour to find this:

This morning when we woke up it was snowing (?!) and then raining really hard, and Chris decided to go take a look at the roof to find out what the gutters looked like up there.  Not good...he had to dig another trench and do the same process on the other side of the house and also try to re-direct the gutters on the roof (they were actually going uphill...weird).  So much for a relaxing Saturday.  Once the sun came out, Chris also took some shears to the ivy that's attacking the trees in our backyard and also worked on some of the laundry room faucet-ridicularity (honestly, I have no idea what's going on down there.  Chris and Drew have been down there for HOURS.).

I decided that I was going to tackle the branches in the backyard that I'm sure were a result of the wind/snowpocalypse in January and have started to whittle away at them a bit each day (there are a TON back there).

And, of course, I thought that making pillows for the living room was also extremely necessary today, so I made those, too.  I'm such a good housewife.  ;) This is my first sewing project (by myself) that came out perfectly.  To be fair, I've only tackled PJs before, and that was, well, a mess.

Wanna take a tour?

So, since my goal last week of getting COMPLETELY out of boxes in one week is almost done, I figured it's time to show you around.  We'll have an official housewarming/open house this summer when we can have a BBQ and we've had a bit more time to get settled.  In the meantime, I had my trusty helper, Fiona, help me with a tour.  She is very proud of her new house, you know!  :)  P.S.  If anyone can PLEASE help me, I can't figure out how to format the pictures consistently...that's why they're all wonkily formatted!

The living room, I'm standing at the front door.
We'll need another chair to put right where Fiona is sitting,
but it's WAY down on the list right now.

Another view of the living room.  We had purchased curtains,
but they were too long and we decided we could wait on them,
so we took them back and just hung some sheers instead
(much cheaper ones than we originally bought, thanks to Whitney!)

One view of our tiny kitchen (new stove coming on 3/23).

Other side of kitchen, out to neighbor's house.

The main floor bathroom.
Fiona was getting tired of sitting at this point...

The craft room!  I can fit WAY more crafts in here!
I've gotta get a good work table, first, though.

Our bedroom, side #1 (this window looks out to the backyard).

Master bedroom, side #2 (we'll need to work on that closet...)

Fiona was too embarrassed to pose in this room (but not Joe).
When it gets cleaned out, it'll be the guest room!

The basement, side #1...where the TV is.

Chris is working on the shelves for the garage.  :)

Basement, side #2...maybe where the piano will go?
We think it'll work, actually...

Fiona was laughing here.
This is what we call the "public" bathroom
because the door doesn't close all of the way.
This one will need lots of work.

The laundry room.  New washer and dryer arriving on 3/23!  Woo hoo!

The other side of the laundry room.
When we get it cleaned out it'll be Chris' shop area.

And finally, the garage.
TONS of work to do down here.

Well, that's the tour.  There's lots to do all over the house and we've just been putting things together this week.  Chris has put all of the shelves up so that I can fill them with items I'm unpacking.  He also welded a piece for the garage door so now it opens properly.  There's still quite a bit to be done with it, but that can be another post.

We hung the curtain rods and the sheers in the living room:

AND, got the cat door and the dog door into the appropriate places so the animals can get around (and so that Joe's litter box and food don't become afternoon snacks for Fiona.

Moving Day!

Saturday was moving day and boy was it a long one.  In fact, the whole weekend was pretty darn busy and this is the first time I've taken a break to sit, watch Desperate Housewives, and think about what we accomplished.

We started the process on Friday night.  Drew gets friend of the year award for coming around 6pm and then staying until 10:30 moving boxes and carrying extremely heavy pieces of furniture to get a head start on Saturday.  It's amazing how much 'last minute' packing I had to do while the men worked on loading the truck.

We were lucky enough to have both sets of parents, one Connor, and one Drew help us with all of the drama that goes with moving.  I think we had at least two parents say, "where did all of this stuff come from?" and "you fit all of this in that tiny condo!?"  Two truck trips later, everything we own (minus four snow tires and one kitchen table with eight chairs) made it to the new, blue house.

Isn't it pretty and extremely blue?

Joe wasn't really a fan of the move, and in fact he still stays primarily in the bedroom closet, but every once and a while he slinks out and down the hallway before Fiona sees him and chases him back to his corner.  Speaking of the she-devil...she is having a BALL.  Loves running around the yard (including laps around the house when she can) and is generally really tired.  PERFECT!

 

We had issues with our heater, namely that it wasn't working.  We dumped oil and money into it on Friday, but couldn't get it to actually turn on and heat our home.  We were FREEZING until Sunday night when my good friend Dianna called and offered to send her father-in-law over to help.  Low and behold, he pushed the button better than Christopher and our heater is now working.

We have tons of projects to accomplish, already made a trip to Home Depot, PetSmart, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and (thanks to Whitney) Ikea.  We'll keep everybody up-to-date on our projects and funnier things we've learned as we go and when we're not too tired to lift up the screen of my lap top. 

First meal!

I'm kindof a traditionalist, love doing the same things the same way all the time for the sake of "tradition", love the romantic idea of spending our first night on the floor of our new house snuggled next to each other in sleeping bags.  Well, that didn't happen, but an unplanned picnic in front of the fireplace did.  We picked up the key on Thursday (it was well hidden under a brick by our realtor so we could get in immediately!) and brought some boxes up to unpack because we actually needed more back at the condo.  My mom and dad met us there as they hadn't seen the inside of the house yet, so it was fun to give a tour!  Once they left, we decided that the 48 degree temperature in our house (there were only 10 gallons of oil in the furnace...we'll talk about the oil issue later) was not really going to enhance the unpacking experience, so we went to Safeway, bought some Duraflame logs and chinese food for dinner, and somewhat warmed up in front of the fire.  It was fun.  Fiona did well being left for a half hour while we went to the store (although, to be fair, there wasn't really anything left behind that she could destroy...).  We're moving today!  I'll post more about that later with some pics of the new house.  I'm already exhausted and it's only 7:30 in the morning...gross.

We're Buying a House!

I think you should know how this all began.

Chris:  We should keep a list of items on our to-do list for the new house and cross them off as we go so we see how our projects turn out and how much we get done.

Emily:  Let's do a BLOG!  A glorious, time-hogging commitment for EVERYONE to read ALWAYS.  And then we can include pictures, and we can use it forever, even when we start a family, and did you KNOW that now you can get your blog printed into a book so that you don't have to scrapbook anything EVER?  That'll be helpful when we have kids and we won't EVEN have to keep track of everything in a baby book.

So, poor husband thinks of a harmless, great idea, low maintenance, and something fun for us to do together and as usual, I tend to blow everything out of proportion and turn it into a time-sucking project. Ah, well, I needed something to do during mid-winter break, anyway.

Back to the subject of this entry in the first place...

We're buying a HOUSE!  It's in Des Moines, riiiiiiiiiight underneath the flight path about a mile south of the airport.  You know what our really loud house has thanks to the Port?  New triple-paned windows.  Nice.  If you've been in the loop for the past month and a half (and when I say 'in the loop' I mean on the  other end of the phone when I've been whining about how long it takes to buy a house), you know that the seller has fixed a few things on the house (including a shot septic system) and we should be closing on the 27th or 28th of this month.  That means, it's packing time!  I brought home some boxes from the move-from-hell at school over the summer, and we successfully spent a Friday night with a bottle and a half of wine and all day Sunday packing 27 boxes.  The good news now is that we still have a week and a half before our planned moving weekend.  The bad news is that we're out of boxes and we've only packed half of the kitchen and most of the bookshelves.  Oops.

And, the other tough thing is, we love this place we're leaving.  It's in the city, we can walk to trivia at the Harmon on Wednesday nights, we can go next door to the gift shop when we forget to buy a present or card at the last minute.  We are right off the freeway and have a killer view of Mt. Rainier from our kitchen.  It's the place that looked like such a bachelor pad when I first met Chris and has turned into our first married couple home.  It's where we brought home our puppy, where Chris held me when Joe peed on his chair for the first time and I thought, "there's no way a man would allow this wretched creature stay here", and yet he did (and now they're the best of friends, and Joe hasn't peed on anything for over a year and a half).  Here're the pictures our realtor took of the condo for the listing and, while grossly exaggerating the space because of the lens, we love them.  :)

Then again, we're going to make new memories, I know...I just have a hard time letting go of spaces and things that remind me of memories (as evidenced by the RIDICULOUS boxes of pictures and memorabilia from high school, college, and my first year teaching that I am currently packing in multiple boxes.  ARGH!  :)