Finally Home

It has been a crazy week!! We have been so busy, but we are happy to say that we are officially moved in to our HOUSE! That sounds so weird, but it's so nice to have a permanent home to go to. Last week, we were able to paint the last ceiling on the main floor (besides the half bath... that's going to be a mess). Thankfully, this ceiling was already painted white (not off-white) so we only had to do one coat! We also painted our bedroom - two coats of navy blue. I love it and I'm so glad we were able to get it done before we moved in. At least one room of the house is settled and it's very peaceful.

On Thursday and Friday, we had carpet installed. We had a ton of carpet installed, and they worked very hard to get it done. I am so happy to have nice new, not dirty carpet! It's so comfortable, and changed the look of the house immediately. Instead of a house that appeared run-down and a total mess, it now looks like we are happily living in a clean house that we are in the middle of remodeling. It truly is amazing the difference new carpet made!

Our big move happened on Saturday. We started off the day bright and early with a trip to the house, kitten in tow. Ellie did NOT enjoy the car ride and was very nervous when we let her out at the house. We locked her up in a room with her favorite toys (and of course her Purdue fleece blanket), went to pick up the U-Haul truck and rushed back to the apartment to finish up packing. Two trips to the house later, we were officially moved. We are so grateful for our friends and my parents who came to help us move (and thanks Mom for staying with Ellie!) - we could not have done it without you! And hopefully this is the last time we ask you to help us move the piano. :)

Although all of our stuff is at the house - in a huge pile in the living room - we are not busy unpacking. We set up our bedroom and the guest bedroom, and moved some miscellaneous stuff into the bonus room, but have left the vast majority packed up. Instead, we are painting the main floor AGAIN! This is totally my fault, but I hated the very blueish grey color that Jeremy and his dad and grandpa had used to paint the wall. We had picked it out, but seeing it everywhere made me cringe. So, because my husband's awesome, he let me pick out new paint and is suffering through painting again. Thankfully, it's going pretty quickly and we'll have it done by the weekend so we can unpack! Hopefully we can post some more pictures this weekend after we get internet.

Ellie Enjoying the Living Room Stuff Pile

Things are going well so far - we're busy and buying lots of adult things (furniture!) but it feels good to have our home and to have the three of us living there.

So Much House Stuffs!!!

We have been oh so crazy busy with the house this past week. That's actually the reason we haven't posted anything for so long - no time to write! So here's my attempt to capture it all in dis here blog post. So grab a drink and hold on, this will be a lengthy post. Or you can just look at the pictures, I guess.

Last weekend Leslie's parents came down to help out with the house. Our main objectives were for Leslie and her mother to finish cleaning while Leslie's dad and I replaced the old, rotted beam with a shiny new one, and then for us to start some painting. Well, long story short... mission accomplished! The beam replacement went very well. I had been cranking the jacks up ever since we put the temporary supports in place a month earlier and I had managed to get the floor to basically the perfect place. We cut out the old beam with a reciprocating saw, which was like cutting through French defenses because the wood was so rotten. We then moved the old out and the placed the new in. I had gotten 18' LVLs from a local lumberyard, so we cut them to size and then put them up there. From there we had to pound in some shims to make up the difference from the 16" width of the LVLs to the floor boards above. Once we got those in place the temporary supports were basically loose, which meant that they had been extended to almost exactly where they needed to be. Now we still need to put the siding back on and do a few things with some wooden trim, but the major structural issues that were the point of this project have been taken care of.

Old Beam

New Beam

After finishing this milestone of home repair and rehabilitation, we moved inside to start painting. We got the ceiling done and a first coat of paint on in the laundry room. It's a nice small space, so we figured it would be a good place to start. That was all we got done on Saturday (although saying "that's all" makes it sound like we didn't get much done) at the house before Leslie's parents left and we went to a few stores and picked out some light fixtures. On Sunday (happy Mother's Day!) we went back to the house and finished painting and put up a new light fixture in the laundry room. We also started painting ceilings in the dining room (soon to be office) and our bedroom. I don't have pictures of the painting ceilings because... well, they still look like ceilings. Not exactly exciting. But the laundry room looks good!

New and Improved Laundry Room

Monday through Thursday (with a break on Tuesday for the New Girl season finale) was mostly spent painting ceilings. I also put up a new light fixture in the diningofficeroomthing once we finished the ceiling in there. It's nothing super fancy, but it looks pretty neat. We managed to finish ceilings in the dining room, our bedroom, and in the kitchen / family room (which was very important because we needed to get the kitchen painted before appliances were brought in). There were a few other things we did during the week, like such as mowing the lawn and patching drywall, but that was about it.

Another New Light

Then on to this past weekend. I took Friday off work because my dad and grandpa came down to help out while Leslie spent the weekend with some friends down in Brown County. We worked all day Friday and then most of Saturday (they left around 4pm). We got quite a bit accomplished. The first thing we did on Friday was get a first coat of paint on the walls in the kitchen. The appliances were to be delivered the following day, so we wanted to get the walls paint before then. After that we worked on getting the garage door opener back on and working for the door with the new beam above it. We got it mounted back on the ceiling, but needed to pick up some stuff from the store to finish the project, so we hit the pause button on that and moved back inside to finish painting the kitchen. After finishing that we trimmed some trees - I'm really looking forward to being able to mow the lawn without getting whacked in the face by low-hanging branches. We then looked at the fence to see what we would need to do and what we would need to get at the store. By then it was getting to be a little later and we couldn't do much else without picking some stuff up first. So we headed out and went to Menards to pick up supplies for the next day (and a few other things for around the house).

Kitchen Colours

Freshly Trimmed Maple Tree

Freshly Trimmed Crabapple

Saturday morning we went out for breakfast before starting on the house. Love me some eggs and pancakes. Yummy. We then started off at the house by fixing the fence. There was a section of it that was broken out, but the panel was still mostly intact. We got it set back into place and secured to the posts without much trouble. We also fixed a gate on the other side that no longer closed. We had to cut part of the gate at an angle so that everything would line back up. We also replaced a few of the pickets that were damaged with new ones we picked up the night before.

Looking Like New!

Finally Closeable!

Appliances were also delivered that morning. We now have a new refrigerator, range, washer and dryer in the house. So yay for the kitchen finally looking like a kitchen and the laundry room not being empty!

Now We Can Cook!

And Do Laundry!

Our next projects was to add a ledge to the top of the stairs. Basically we wanted the carpet on the steps to have a bullnose finish, but there wasn't anything on the top landing for them to tuck the carpet under. We added some wood and secured it with wood glue and a bunch of nice long screws.

Strong Enough to Support Elephants

We also finished getting the garage door opener working again. We had to monkey around with the safety sensors that go at the bottom and also with the distance control that dictates how far up and down the opener moves the chain. But, in the end, we got it adjusted perfectly and it opens and closes easily.

Open For Business

And one of the other things we did was to put a first coat of paint on walls in half the living room (where the ceiling was already painted), as well as the hall and around the pantry. This will give Leslie and me a nice head start as we finish painting specific areas this week. Another thing I had wanted to do was to put some screws into the subflooring upstairs in some creaky areas. We got the carpet ripped up and started putting screws in, but with no effect. Seems the creaking is coming from something below the subfloor. A little creaking isn't a big deal to us, so no need to rip into the subfloor to figure it out. Removing carpet that's going to be taken out anyway? Sure. Destroy the floor to figure out a little creaking? No thanks.

One Coat Down

Mission: Unaccomplished

And there you have it, the last week of work for us. It has been incredibly rewarding so far. It's amazing how much difference a new coat of paint or a brighter light fixture can make. Sure it's a lot of work, but it's our house - something we can take pride in. There's obviously still a lot of work to do, but things will be easier once we move in (which is next weekend!). In the meantime, if any of you want to volunteer to come help out with the work like our families have done (thanks Dave and Kim, thanks Dad and Grandpa!) we would love to have the extra hands.

That's all for now. More to come soon, I'm sure.

Fun on Mass Ave

So far we've had pretty much nothing to say about anything other than the house. Now, while that does make sense since it's obviously a pretty big part of our lives right now, we have been up to more than just that and I wanted to share.

A few weeks ago Leslie and I decided to take advantage of the nice weather we were having (70's and sunny) and took a trip downtown to Massachusetts Avenue. This is a great place to be when the weather is nice because many of the restaurants on Mass Ave have patios or open windows to the sidewalk. So lots of people were out eating at the many restaurants, walking dogs, hanging out at coffee shops, or just walking and browsing the shops like Leslie and me. We stopped at some of the stores, including Three Dog Bakery and Mass Ave Toys, and then had dinner at Yats. It was a beautiful evening and we had a great time.

My Pretty Wife Eating Dinner

Indianapolis is a nice city and we're very happy to be here. Even from our new house it's just a quick drive to get downtown. And, while Indy isn't nearly as large or diverse as somewhere like Chicago, it certainly has a lot to offer without the negatives that come with large cities (like the ridiculous traffic). We are really looking forward to further exploring the city.

Beginning Again

No, not like the Taylor Swift song (but if you must think of that, then check this out instead).

We got the house, and for real this time! A whole 32 days after the first time we tried to close we finally closed again on May 7 and own it in an official, for real, they-aren't-taking-it-away-from-us-now kind of way. This does, unfortunately, shorten our timeline for making improvements to the house before we move in. Right now we're planning on moving over Memorial Day weekend, so that basically leaves us two and a half weeks from closing to moving. We definitely won't get as much done as we would have liked, but we will be able to get the majority of the important items done.

After closing on Tuesday we headed straight to the house to start work. I got a lawn mower on Monday so I got it all put together and mowed the lawn while Leslie applied Roundup to the weeds in the driveway cracks and did more cleaning in the house. I can't really say I mowed the lawn, since there isn't much of a lawn... I think it would be more accurate to say that I chopped through the forest of Taraxacum officinale. So yeah, the yard definitely needs some help. The plan is to see how it does this year and then address it next year when we do other outdoor and landscaping projects.

Once I was done with the yard I came inside and we put some sample paint (that we bought back in February... silly us, thinking we would have the house soon after) on the walls to see if we liked it. It was partially successful, as we liked three of the colours we picked, but will have to try again on two of them. We also got to work patching nail and screw holes in the walls on the first floor. After that we ran to Lowes and picked up a few things for the next day's projects. Then it was back home just in time to catch the evening's episode of New Girl.

The next day we came in and I worked on changing the existing locks to some new ones we got the night before. Leslie went to a few stores to make some returns and pick a few things up and did a bit more cleaning upstairs. That's about all we got done that day before heading home to catch Modern Family. Wow, this makes it seem like we watch a lot of TV. Too bad that isn't very true...

Old Stuff

New Stuff

Yesterday was more lock changing, a bit more patching, and some intense floor cleaning. We also had lumber delivered for replacing the beam and even got a chance to talk with one of our neighbors. He (like a lot of other people, I bet) wondered what happened to the people he saw working on the house a month ago that just disappeared and didn't come back. I can definitely see how that would be weird to see.

Tonight we plan to get paint. We need paint for the colours we liked, new samples for those colours we haven't decided on quite yet, and ceiling paint. Since it takes them some time to get the paint ready, we aren't counting on having a ton of time this evening at the house. Ideally we would like to start painting ceilings, but if paint does take too long then we might go to the store instead since there are things that we need to either start looking at or buy (like light fixtures, window treatments, bathroom fixtures, and the kitchen sink).

That's all for now. Leslie's parents are coming down this weekend, so hopefully we have lots more progress to talk about after that.