I'll start at the beginning and make this story short. We finished with closing by 2:30 p.m. on April 13th and were moved in with all of our belongings by 6:30 p.m. on April 14th. We had an enormous, unexpected, wonderful amount of help from our friends the evening that we closed - we were able to get a jump on the paid movers by getting more boxes than we'd imagined to the new place in exchange for a crock pot meal of French Dip sandwiches (easy and always a crowd pleaser!). After everyone got the tour and left, Bret and I commenced our first DIY project: removing the master bedroom carpet.
Before:
After:
Haha! There is no after picture. Imagine it without carpet - replace the carpet with shiny, nearly perfect hardwood floors that needed no refinishing. We are SO. LUCKY. And you can imagine away the horrid window valances, and imagine a light kit added to the fan. But you can leave the pepto pink walls in place. Because that is still what we see when we awake each day. No “after” picture until I get around to the full transformation. (* Since I started working on this post 3 stinking weeks ago, we HAVE in fact painted. Still no pictures yet thought!)
On our first night in our new house, when the movers had left, we celebrated homeownership with a bottle of champagne that we brought back from France. A vintage bottle. A 1996 bottle. It was full of little fast bubbles and delicious. And we used it to wash down a Tombstone pizza. A touch of the life we could have kept as renters with expendable income, with a pepperoni-speckled glimpse of what we've gotten ourselves into.
The next day, I spent alllll day unpacking the kitchen, most of it with Bret's help. That should clue you in to something - it took two people a full day to unpack our kitchen. Luckily, there are a lot of cupboards.
We've even got built-in shelves for our cookbooks and pretty things! One of my (many) favorite things about our new kitchen...
