House stuff...

Soooo, the house.   First off, we LOVE our new house.  LOVE.  It's so much better then we ever imagined our first house would be.  We kinda thought we'd be living in a tiny two bedroom condo with no yard, or a tiny beach shack in the crappy part of town.  We straight up lucked out with this one, with the loan we got and the price of the house, and the fact that it was a short sale and still everything went pretty smoothly (few hiccups here and there, but nothing really major).  We needed a house that was thrashed enough that the price would be low, but not so thrashed that we couldn't slowly fix it up ourselves.  This house was on the market for 84 days when we went to look at it and we knew immediately it had good bones and it was mostly just cosmetic work needed.   We were shocked that nobody had snatched this place up - so we truly feel like we were just meant to live here.
We are so blessed.

This is the house as we were trying to figure out a color for the exterior.  It was painted white with yellow trim, but the eaves were never painted, so they were a weird mauve color.  It just really needed a fresh and clean update.   We started by getting a new garage door (old one was broken and had a large gash in it)

We were drawn to greens, but our neighbors house is green and we didn't want to be copycats.  So then we found ourselves drawn to gray with white trim.  And this is what we ended up with.

Right now it looks a bit drab but we intend to get a RED front door - and some colored pots for plants, etc.  to help liven it up a bit.   We are a work in progress over here :)

We have had to paint the entire inside, thus haven't been able to do much on the yards, front or back.  We are currently working on remodeling one of the bathrooms as well as painting kitchen cupboards (which is a whole other blog post...yikes).

Slow going what with jobs and LIFE and all - but it sure is fun to be able to do work on our own house.  After almost 10 years of living in rentals that we wanted to do so much to, but didn't want to spend the time or money on something that wasn't ours....we finally have something that is OURS.  Such a good feeling.  And it still hasn't really sunk in yet.

We live on a cul-de-sac with 7 houses total.  5 of them are families about our age with kids about Adam's age.  Then there is a couple across the street who don't have kids, but feel like they do because of the whole "it takes a village" aspect of living on a cul-de-sac.  And then we have the token crazy lady who people try and avoid if possible.  So far, she's been nice to us - but other neighbors have some stories...so the crazy might show itself at some point.

It's like a 50's movie here sometimes.  Always neighborhood kids to play with and adults to chat with.  We actually did a cul-de-sac progressive dinner around Christmastime and we all got sitters and went house to house and it was so much fun.  I'm so amazed and thrilled at how great everyone is here and how well everyone gets along, including the kids!   We could NOT be happier about the location we moved into.  We seriously have our village now...and it's such a good feeling.

So far Adam is really happy with the move and seems to like it here (even if his goal in life is to torture our pets...sigh)

And yet, with all the poking and prodding and hugging and kissing and loving him nearly to death...this cat still sleeps with on his bed with him every night.   Unbelievable.