Spring is here
When we were looking at houses, we were looking in the dead of winter. It was cold, there was ALWAYS snow on the ground, and more than a few times we had to battle large sheets of ice on the front stoops. When we first looked at our house, it was freezing cold outside, a gloomy grey sky and dirty snow had built up from being plowed into the parking spaces. Needless to say, the house didn’t appeal to us so much on the outside. We had seen pictures of it in the spring, so we had a fair understanding of the landscaping. Now that spring has landed on us like a ton of bricks, the flowers have started to bloom and really given us some wonderful color.
I took this photo today on my way out the door for work. What amazes me is that yesterday when I got home from work, the flowers looked like this.
That’s a whole lot of blooming in a very short amount of time. Having lived in apartments and condos for a long time, tree/bush/shrub maintenance is not my strong suit, so it looks like I’ll need to figure this one out sooner than later. I happy to know that our lawn grows nicely, and quickly, as currently it looks like we live in a forest. My father is being kind enough to give me his lawn mower, and not a day too soon, because the HOA is going to get mad at us if I don’t tend to it soon. Anyway, the azaleas look great, and it really is a nice calming look to come home to. I love our house a little more everyday we’re there.
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Garbage Disposal
Before we we able to settle on our house, there were a few things that the previous owner needed to fix. One of these items was the splash guard in the garbage disposal.
As you can tell, it was a bit destroyed. Well, upon our walkthrough the second time, everything appeared to be normal and fixed, with a note from the contractor saying if we ever needed further work done, to call.
Well, I didn’t hang onto that note, and now I’m really happy I didn’t. Our first day in the house, our dishwasher went on the fritz (that’s a whole different story), so we had to the dishes by hand. No biggie, but as I was washing some silverware, I happen to look down and notice that the splash guard was all ripped up again. MC and I looked at each other and confirmed that we had seen it fixed. How odd. That is, until I looked into the drain, and pulled out a small little fake splash guard that the contractor simply had just placed over top of the broken one. Great job Mr. Contractor, way to screw us over. Well, I went online to see how hard it would be to fix this little problem, and much to my surprise almost everyone had said it was an easy 10-20 minute fix. I went to our super friendly (no sarcasm, it is seriously super friendly) Home Depot and picked up a new splash guard for under $10 and then got underneath the sink to pull down the disposal.
All I had to do was detach the white pipe seen in the back, which was held on with a screw, and the twist the ring at the top until the disposal detached. Not hard at all, except it weighed a bit more than I expected it to, so I had to hold the disposal in one hand and unscrew the bolts with the other. Well, after 20 minutes and a small workout, we had a new disposal splash guard installed, thanks to yours truly.
Sorry for the bad photos, my iphone doesn’t do the best quality in low light. All in all, it was a cheap quick fix, that for some reason this contractor tried to be cheaper and quicker meaning the job wasn’t done right…or at all in this case.
Read MoreMaster Bathroom
Our master bathroom is pretty small, and when it first started out, it was also pretty yellow. I seriously don’t know what the obsession was with yellow, but damn, it is EVERYWHERE.
Don’t go adjusting your head either if something seems a bit “off level.” That would be the floor. Here is a better angle showing just how bad it is.
Needless to say, this isn’t a project that we’ll be tacking right away, we’ll save that for much further down the line. For now, we’ll just have to live with a bit of vertigo. The things we will change are simple, mainly, the color. I am so over yellow. We knew the bedroom color already, so picking a bathroom color wasn’t too difficult, we knew we wanted a light green, something calming and yet not dark. Before we could even get to that point though, we needed to get rid of the yellow and prime the walls.
With the walls all a blank slate, we did our usual go to home depot, pick out a few samples, put them up and see what looks good. At first, one was too light, and the other was too dark, but we decided that even if we painted the whole bathroom too light, we could always go back and darken it up a lot easier than doing the opposite. So two coats of semigloss Behr mystical sea paint, a new towel bar and behr polar bear semigloss for the ceiling, we knocked out this bathroom relatively quickly.
Eventually we’ll probably remodel the whole bathroom, including ripping out the shower stall and replacing it with tile, but I can’t imagine doing that anytime soon, with so much else left to do.
Read MoreWe’ve Moved In!
So even though we bought our house on February 15th, we’ve been doing all this work while we lived in our old apartment. Most people tell us “you guys are lucky to be doing this while not living there” which is mostly true, we are lucky especially when doing all the demo and construction, but for the most part, it has been terrible. Going back and forth on weekends and after work really took a toll on us. Being physically exhausted for 2 straight months is no fun. That being said, we finally moved in, and we did it in true Kraft fashion, in the pouring rain, hail and tornado like conditions. Seriously, tornadoes actually touched down about 30 miles from us.
Thanks to over half a dozen friends who braved the weather and volunteered to help us out, we were able to do the move in a few short hours, but it was absolutely no fun, but all that matters is that we’re now happily living in our new house, and living out of several dozen boxes. Hopefully we’ll be unpacked sooner than later, but I am guessing it will later rather than sooner.
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Down goes the wall
When we first moved in, our living room/dining room was something to be desired. It had old carpet, was really closed off, and just was in rough shape.
I won’t get into the red curtains, but you can imagine how quickly I wanted them gone. Anyway, this drab room really needed a makeover, and one of things that we had discussed is removing the wall (you can barely see) on the left. We wanted to open up the space, and here’s why. Here is the view from the other side of the wall.
The hallway, to both of us, seemed a bit closed off, and just felt blah to us. So, with a contractor (friend of the family) in hand, we walked through our options. He explored the wall, and much like we thought, we wouldn’t be able to take the whole thing down due to two load bearing beams. Bummer, but we did decide that we could cut this wall in half, and leave posts where the beams were, still opening up the wall, and giving us separation of the rooms and the hallway. It was a plan we were comfortable with, and one we knew could really make this first floor look a bit more alive. So, the contractor came back, ready to knock down some walls.They ripped down the drywall, and exposed all of the beams.
In the background there are about half a dozen black contractor trash bags, full of drywall and wood. In order to save us a trip to the dump, and being that it was trash day, our contractor made a deal with the trash guys to take the bags away for us. Saved me a huge trip to the dump. Next they cut down all the beams that weren’t load bearing in order to really open up the wall.
With the beams down, they laid out wood along the drywall so that we could lay a shelf to go across. This shelf we will stain to match the hardwood floors we’re having installed.
Oh, and remember that carpet in our living room? Well, we ripped it up ourselves and took it to the dump. I have to say that through this whole house renovation, I am beyond happy that I drive a honda element. I took bets on how many trips to the dump it would take me to get rid of all the carpet, and tack strips. My wife said 3, I told her it would be less. Guess who was right? I did it in 1.
Now that all that is gone, the walls down, we had to drywall the ceiling back together so there wasn’t a huge gap, and drywall the posts so it looked seamless.
With the walls all set to go, the new floors are installed, and the shelf is stained to match, all we had to do was decide on a paint color and we were set. By the way, do you know how many shades of beige there are? Answer, a lot. After picking up a ton of samples (as we like to do), we decided on a color that MC’s parents actually recently used in their house. What can we say, we’re copy cats. So, curious to see what it all looks like? Well, I’ll warn you, I took a picture when we were letting the kitchen cabinets dry in the room, so sorry for the random white doors, but here you go!
The chandelier will be changed out soon enough, we already bought a new one, but I figure that is a later update. So what do you think, slightly different, huh? I’d say so!
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About Matt and MC
We just recently bought our first home, and we decided to share our story of our adventures with you. The ups and downs of home ownership, and all the fun we'll have in between. Ignore the typos and just have fun, that's what we're here for. 
