Friday, February 26, 2010

Our potential first house!


Living Room

Formal dining/front room
Tiny kitchen- we are planning to have an island built to match, and replace all counters. Owners also left the washer, dryer and fridge! That wall is a big pantry ( one of two), and opposite those doors is where the laundry room is. Its a pretty decent size.
Back patio
Master bedroom
Both guest rooms- we are totally repainting these!


Back patio- they left the swingset..it's a nice one, not sure what we'll do with it though. Won't need one of those for a few years!

Well here it is! All the furniture is gone now, so you can see the size of the rooms better. The master bedroom is a little bigger than it seems- these people situated their bed in a manner that made the room feel very small, so we would do it differently. We have our own bathroom in our room with a garden tub & separate shower, then another full bath in the hallway for the other two rooms and then a half bath downstairs. The half-bath downstairs is really pretty- the previous owners put in one of those pretty sinks/cabinets that is a dark cherry wood with a white porcelain top. You know, one of those separate units that isn't built into the wall? I'll have to take a picture of it.
So we had put in an offer on this house on Wednesday, found out that evening someone else had put in an offer too, came back on Thursday and put in a higher offer than before (because we really, really didn't want to lose this) and were expecting we wouldn't hear back until Friday at the earliest (since we are dealing with a relocation company, not the previous owners themselves). But guess what?! We heard back that afternoon that our offer was the winning offer!! We were so excited! I came home that afternoon to find a message on our answering machine with our realtor congratulating us, and as I was listening, Dustin called me with the news. We are getting a house! And for an awesome price too!
I have to thank Mandy though- she was a big reason I even went to look at it.She called me one evening and told me she found this one, but I poopooed her and told her we didn't like it.... but the more I thought about it I decided we needed to at least go look. Dustin and I at first did not have any desire to live in this little neighborhood because we weren't loving the layout or the simple look of the houses. BUT when we went to look at this one, we LOVED the tile floors all downstairs- they are the really big tiles and are gorgeous-, we saw little easy projects we could do to make it cute, and knew this would be just the perfect size for us and our future family for a few years. We will also be saving a ton of money each month since we are getting a steal on this place. So thanks Mandy for urging us to go look at this one. :)
So we will close at the end of April since we are still in an apartment whose lease isn't up until end of May, but that will give us a month to paint, replace all upstairs carpet, tile the master bath with leftover tile from the downstairs ( I know, cool!! They had two extra boxes left over in the garage!), deep clean, and replace a door or two and bring in new blinds before we have furniture moved in.
So lets cross our fingers and hope the inspections go well, and nothing huge is going on! It was built in 2003, so I'm figuring not much will be wrong. I think we are mostly excited about the fact that we won't have to climb three floors to get to our home now!

Friday, February 12, 2010

House Hunting

Dustin and I have begun looking for a house!! Yesssss. We reeaallyy want to have a place of our own, and I think we can finally do that! We have been trying hard to stay in the boundaries of our ward, but I don't think it's going to work out. But it might! We are looking tomorrow and have a list of about 15 houses we want to go see, because the pics on the internet just don't tell the truth as we found out last week in our short search with our realtor. We will see how many we get to! But so far a lot of the homes we liked within a couple days have been sold or have 'option pending' as their status. The good ones are going fast and we want to jump on one quick if we like it enough. Which explains why we want to see so many...
My photography class is going well so far! My first project is due on Wednesday and I am pleased with what I have done, and will finish it in class on Monday. I have been going in extra hours to practice techniques and I am really enjoying the whole processing of the photo on paper and seeing it appear in the dark room. It makes me want to have my own dark room! I'll post some pictures of what I have done when I bring my work home next week. I'm no pro yet at taking pictures, but I'm learning! Black and white film has very different picture taking techniques than color and digital!