Our New House!!!

We closed on our house on Sept. 2nd. We then had almost a month to do stuff to it before we had to be out of our apartment. We were pretty ambitious for this time. Haha! Little did we know how long home improvement projects take! (Or how expensive they are!)

Everyone told us. 'You guys should paint! It is a cheap and easy way to make the house feel new!' Well, we sure do love the new paint job, but it sure wasn't cheap or easy.

Living Room!

We do love our new house though, even though it feels like the to do list on it is only getting longer. We want to do a lot of work to the yard, but we also want to update a lot of stuff on the inside.

Dining Room (in a couple years after we replace the carpet!)

We love how much storage space this house has! It is unusual for houses in the Phoenix to have large closets. The previous owners really maximized their storage space too and put extra shelves in a lot of the closets. They also put in cabinetry in the garage and extra shelves! Sweet!

Living Room again

Family Room - those awesome curtains though!

Kitchen and breakfast nook.  We are excited/dreading to be changing that yellow paint in a couple of weeks!

Kitchen. I am also thinking that I want to stain the cabinets. Or maybe paint them.

Lots of to-do's! Fortunately most of the stuff we want to do is cosmetic!

Breakfast nook.

Family room. That yellow paint! Oh and that light fixture is now a ceiling fan!

It is fun having two living areas now. Although we definitely only have furnishings for one of those living areas. When it is in the budget we will get a living room set for the front room.

Upstairs hallway light. (pretty cool!)

So in the month that we had to work on our house, one of the main projects that we did was paint the bedrooms (see the pictures below). We thought we would have time to paint the bathroom too, but of course everything always takes longer than we think it will. So we have a couple of big splotches of paint on these walls (we were considering paint color). It is pretty awesome to leave that long term.

Master bath

I had to take a lot of these 'before' pictures, because I thought they were the most noteworthy things we wanted to change. Ironically, we really don't have a before picture of the main painting that we did.

Master bath again--duel sinks!

Master bedroom--yes, you may call me master. The after pictures start here!

I love our bedroom. We hung up a really pretty ceiling fan. I love the paint color that we choose. It is called 'accessible beige.' I accidentally call it 'accidental beige' (haha, see what I did there?), but seriously, I do. I think it is a lot more of a 'greige' (read: grey + beige).

Check out this huge closet! It was like painting a small room!

The girls picked out the color "ghost pines" for their bedrooms. It is a lot like the 'accessible beige,' but it has a slightly purple cast to it that the girls love. It doesn't really show up in natural light, so we are okay with it.

Eliza's room. She wanted the one with the built in shelves to display her treasures, even though the room was smaller. (I think there is a big ol' can of AJAX on her shelves right now. )

Wow, I am looking at this and reliving how much work it was. Find the holes (One of Miriam's walls had almost 30 holes, what the heck people??), fill the holes, sand the holes, fill and sand again, caulk the window, tape the window, tape the ceiling, tape the floor. Take out the doors, paint the closet, take off all of the hardware, take out shelves, do the edging, check the edging, roll the walls (2 coats for everything), wait for it to dry, tape the walls, do the trim, paint the doors, install the doors, take the doors off and sand down them to be able to fit properly. touch up, touch up, touch up, etc. (We didn't do everything in that exact order, but you get the point.)

Miriam go the bigger bedroom to accommodate the toys in her room. (More than what is showing in this picture.)

I really do love how it turned out though. Truth be told, I have never been more exhausted at night than after doing this project. I was seriously wiped out every single night from going strong the whole day long. Miriam spent a lot of time texting people (seriously!), and Holland spent a lot of time in the swing.

Holland has the largest kid bedroom. Go figure!

Welcome to being home owners! It takes all of our spare money and time, but we love how we are really making a place ours!