H is for House!!

We got it!  We are now the proud owners of a 1959 spacious ranch.  It has five bedrooms, a family room, HUGE kitchen, formal living room and nice size dining room.  It even has a three car carport and a single car garage.  Then there is the land ~ more than half an acre (completely fenced)!  To say we are excited is an understatement!!!!

Now comes the challenge of turning this house into a home.  As you can see from the above paragraph, there are tons of positives.  However, there are negatives too!  The house has had very few updates (ever) and much neglect in the last few years.  On top of that, there is the deliberate sabotage that the previous owner did during the foreclosure process.

The door that you can see in the picture is not really the front door.  The front door is around the corner and between the picture window and the window on the grey wall inside the fence.  It is hidden there on an indent.  We will have to work on a nice path to draw attention to it.  Any suggestions you might have for how to do this would be GREATLY appreciated.

We closed on the house at lunch time Friday and were in the house, ripping out cat and dog pee carpet, by 2:30 in the afternoon!  On day one we managed to clean the kitchen counters, clean the inside of all the cabinets, and mop all of the floors.  I also managed to get an ancient window open in each child's bedroom so that I know they can escape in an emergency.  That is a relief, since replacing windows will have to wait until we sell our current home. 

On Saturday we dug up/chopped down some of the easier trees (the house looks like it is about to be reclaimed by the forest), and started prepping the walls for painting. This picture below is after chopping down five trees.  There is still lots of work to do.  The previous owners did not understand about scaling your trees to your property and house size.  When we looked up the height potential of some of the trees, we found out they could get to 175 feet plus in size.  Yep, lots more trees to bring down.

For the next few days we will paint, work on flooring for the the rooms now bare of carpet and fix the plumbing.  Our contractor will upgrade and make safe the electricity.  We are also hoping to have a little bit of money left over to have our contractor refinish the bathtub or take down the trees that are too hard for us to do or replace a girder in the house that doesn't meet code (which our piano will be sitting on soon).

Well, I better get back to work!  Time to turn this house into a home!

I am joining Ben and Me and Homegrown Learners.

Blessings, Dawn