Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I am unsatisfied by how our living and dining room are set up. So, the past few days I diligently measured all the walls and furniture, and put them into an online room planner to try and figure out the best configuration. However, I’m not finding a good solution so I was hoping my loyal blog readers might have some ideas. :-)
Continue reading
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I am putting this up here not because I think y’all will find it interesting, but because I want to be able to look back at this in the future. It will be interesting to see what gets done, and what drops off the list.
People who have talked to me recently will probably have noticed that I’m a bit disenchanted with the whole fixer-upper idea. I’ve decided, buying a house that needs work is great if you have money (or have an income where you can easily save for big expenses). We probably could have done this if we had bought this house a year or two ago; as it is, we’re now 3 people on one income and so it is a lot harder. On the upside, our mortgage is lower than any rent we’ve paid. Our thought had been that we could save the extra money that we would have been putting toward rent, but there is just *so* much. There are things we’re discovering now that we didn’t know before – like the rust in the water. Just in general, older homes have hidden surprises. I like the potential of our house, though, and we do plan on staying here a while. I often daydream of what I would do if money wasn’t a hindrance. And I do like the area and neighborhood a lot. Aside from my neighbor’s dogs, I really have no complaints about that!
Below is the rough list we have so far, somewhat in order of importance. We’re hoping to knock off the first couple from the list with the $8,000 from the gov’t.
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I feel such a sense of accomplishment! Our house is disorganized at best, and I have found it hard to summon the energy to tackle the mess. (It’s so overwhelming!) Savannah’s bedroom was no exception – it had become a storeroom for all things baby related, to the point where I simply just found a space on the floor for her clean clothes. Part of the problem was that her wardrobe has grown considerably, and I didn’t have a good system for the new clothes so really all the sizes were mixed together. I had a shoebox I was using for her too-small outfits, and I’m sure you can imagine how that was overflowing. :-)
I had been trying to figure out what would be a good solution to the disorganization, and I finally decided some large plastic bins for storage and a bookcase for the closet would do the trick. We got both yesterday and tonight I spent several hours cleaning her room.
The biggest challenge was getting the clothes organized enough that I could easily see what was there, and that her current size was the easiest to grab. I had no conception of what exactly her wardrobe consisted of. For example, a few weeks ago I went out and bought two packages of 6 month size onesies. Then tonight I discovered a whole pile I didn’t know I had! Included in the pile was a set of 5 that are now too small. She never even wore them. :-(
With the help of the bookcase, the clothes are much more accessible now. I also hung up as many as I could, and arranged them in size order – smallest to largest. The bookcase also houses a shelf for her books and a shelf for her toys. Everything is much neater and more accessible now!
I’m so excited about how it all looks. I would take photographs but I’m not quite done. I still want to hang a few pictures, and I’d love to get the crib set up. (It’s in pieces right now.) We don’t have a mattress for it, which is why I haven’t set it up yet. I also am not sure what to do with the stuffed animals – perhaps a net thing hanging from the wall? Overall, I am really happy with the improvement!
Now if I can only accomplish the same in other rooms…
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
We picked the smallest of the three bedrooms to be Savannah’s room. Right now, all we do is change diapers and keep her clothes there. When she’s sleeping through the night, I’ll probably have her sleep there too. My parents have a crib for her at their house in Orlando; as soon as we figure out how to get it up here we’ll put that in the room too. I would love to get a rocking chair or glider, but it works as it is right now.
This is the only “before” picture I have of Savannah’s room. It basically shows you the old paint color. Painting the room is pretty much the only thing we did.
What her bedroom looks like now:
I picked out a pale purple color. I love the result! You can’t really see the color all the well in the picture, because I took it as the light outside was fading.
We got the dresser at a local secondhand store and I’m really happy with it. It holds her blankets, clothes, shoes, socks, bibs, etc. You can see all her cloth diapers on top of the dresser – aren’t they so pretty? :-) To the left is her hamper, and to the right is where we put the dirty diapers. Oh, and we needed a surface to put the lamp so we stuck it on one of our stools. We don’t have a breakfast bar anymore, so we really don’t need stools. However, they work great as small tables for lamps!
I hung all her clothes that weren’t onesies. Aren’t they cute?
On the other side of the room from the dresser is a pack & play and a camping chair. They are leftover from when we were working on the house. This room was the first one that we finished, so I used to sit here and nurse her, and put her to sleep in the pack & play. I don’t really spend any time here anymore, but perhaps when I get a rocking chair or glider I’ll find myself in here more!
Beth gave me an awesome baby gift:
Didn’t she do such a great job? I love it! I can’t wait to hang it. The paneling is SO hard to nail into. (All the bedrooms have paneling – the guest room was the only one that wasn’t already painted when we moved in.) So, once I decide where to put it, I better be VERY sure. :-) I haven’t gotten around to hanging pictures yet. Someday, someday…
Those are all the pictures I’ve taken so far. Our bedroom needs a bit more organizing, and I’ll hopefully get to that sometime soon. Then there’s the bathroom, the dining room, and the den… The den will probably not be done until next spring or summer, so you’ll have to be patient for that. It doesn’t look any different than when we moved in except that it doesn’t have carpet and it’s filled with boxes. :-)
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
Since we had guests this weekend (my in-laws came to visit – Grandma and Grandpa!), I took advantage of the guest room being clean to take a picture! While the kitchen may have had the most work done to it, the guest room probably looks the most different.
First, the stairs to go to the top level of our split-level home (before, after):
The before picture for the guest room:
And now, how the guest room looks today… Are you ready? Here it is!
What a difference a bit of paint made!!
The dark paneling made the room feel even smaller, so I picked a nice very light blueish color to cover the walls. It’s the same color that we painted our bedroom as well. We also pulled up the carpet, and of course the hardwood underneath was refinished at the same time as the rest of the house. It looks like a different room now!
We had the headboard already (it was mine from before we got married), so we bought a new mattress in anticipation of many wonderful guests.
In addition to a guest room, this will also be a craft/sewing room. You can see my sewing machine set up next to the bed. In the closet is a dresser filled with all my craft supplies. I am looking forward to having a bit more space to spread out than in my last apartment!
We still haven’t unpacked everything that will reside this room. Namely, the books that will go in that bookcase are still in boxes. Also, one of the closets is full of pictures that will be hung on the walls as soon as I get organized and figure out where exactly I want them. Once that closet is empty, we’ll fill it with miscellaneous boxes that need a home.
So now that you see what a nice guest room we have, you have no excuse not to come and visit us!
I have pictures of Savannah’s room which I’ll put in another post. Our room desperately needs to be cleaned and it still needs to be unpacked/organized so once that is done I will take a picture and post it. Our bathroom did not change much, but I’ll try to get a picture later. That’s it for the upstairs. Stay tuned. :-)
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
With the anticipation of guests, I finally got the living room cleaned up! So before it got messy again, I decided to take some pictures. First, the before pictures:
Please note the floors and how disgusting they were! We could see that they were just dirty, so we had them professionally cleaned. They are in really good shape for a 50 year old house, and they’ve never been sanded before! Here’s a picture of the floor in the living room now:
Now for the picture of the living room furnished!
Besides the floors, this room didn’t need a whole lot of work. We removed the borderprint (which didn’t match the wall color at all!) and painted all the walls a light yellow, and actually still need to put on a final coat. When we painted the walls before we moved in, it was during all that rain and flooding Atlanta was getting. The house was SO humid we couldn’t get the paint to dry and it wasn’t even sticking to the wall! So we had to wait until the rain stopped, and then we moved and now there’s furniture. Actually in person you can see what a bad paint job it really is! I’ll get around to it someday – and hopefully sooner than later, because I’m waiting on that to put up all the pictures!
The other two things we did to this room were take down the curtains in front of the bay window and replace the front door. The bay window has blinds, so curtains were a little unnecessary, and I think taking them down just opens up the room that much more. The original front door was a hollow wooden door without even a deadbolt so we replaced it with a steel door and new locks & a deadbolt. We also replaced the storm door. We thought the original storm door was really ugly, it didn’t close right, and it didn’t have a screen. Since the bay window doesn’t open, I wanted something to allow for cross-breezes in our house without letting the cats out. Hence, a new storm door with a screen.
Because the living room is the most used room in our house, we decided to go ahead and get a rug. I was checking Craigslist for a good rug when I found this new blue one at Home Depot for only $20! It’s not “perfect” but since I don’t have a good conception of the style I want for this room, I am totally cool with functional and not clashing.
Ideally, in the future, my goal is to put the TV and the computer downstairs in the family room/den. I’d like to get a piano to put up here, and make this a nice visiting room. Neither of us really care for the current setup, but there really is no other way to arrange it with the furniture we own. So, at a future time, we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, it’s functional and that’s the most important, right?
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I’ve had a productive day so far. I finally tackled the linen closet. Because we moved from a fairly big bathroom to a pretty small one, I had a lot more stuff than room. So, I spent an hour organizing the shelves, trying to get everything to fit, and then putting the rest of the stuff in our bedroom to be dealt with at another time.
Spending all that time upstairs has gotten me frustrated about the temperature of our house!
I’ll start at the beginning. You see, when we had the house inspected before we bought it, we found out there were powder-post beetles in the crawl space. The cost to get them exterminated was covered when we closed, but first we had to remove all the insulation from the crawlspace. Because of Paul having to be at CNN so much, he didn’t get a chance to do that until last week. They came and sprayed the crawlspace on Monday, and we now have to wait a few weeks before we can put the insulation back up.
In the meantime… MAN I am noticing a difference in the temperature of our house without the insulation! The main level of our house is really cold. We turned on the heater to see if that helped, and it has.
HOWEVER…. now the upstairs is a sauna! It is *SO* hot up there. It’s like 80 degrees, and the heat is blasting. We have all the register vents closed, but it doesn’t seem to help. So we have to turn the heat completely off at night, which isn’t a problem, but it gets quite chilly in the wee hours of the morning. :-) (This morning, Savannah’s feet were like ice. Since Paul had already left for work, I brought her in the bed and under the covers with me and rubbed her feet until they felt warm. Poor baby.)
So, does anyone have any ideas of how we can regulate the temperature? It is really quite unbearable upstairs. Is this just normal with two-story houses, or is there something wrong with our heater? Perhaps putting the insulation back will just do the trick.
Anyways, after spending an hour and a half upstairs sorting the closet, I am back downstairs and feeling much cooler. In fact, it’s rather pleasant. When I get too cold, I’ll go back upstairs. ;-)
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I can’t believe it’s November already! October flew by… We’ve been in the house for a month now, though it seems longer. My in-laws are coming on Thursday to visit their granddaughter, so I have been trying to get ready for them. As I’m unpacking and putting things away, I’m trying to somewhat child-proof my living room so I can invite one of my friends and her 10 month old over!
I can’t believe how much stuff we have. How did we fit it all into a 900 square foot apartment?? I spent some time putting books in the bookcase today, which has helped get rid of some of the boxes in the den.
We have a living room and a den, but the den is acting as more of a basement right now. The carpet was pretty nasty so we ripped it up and got rid of it. There’s tile underneath, and it needs a good heavy-duty cleaning before we get new carpet installed. We also need to price out new carpet for that room and see how it fits into our budget. I’d love to get it in soon, but I’m afraid that I will have to wait a while before we can afford it. In the meantime, we can paint the dark wall paneling to lighten the room. But all that has to wait until we finish unpacking the boxes that are down there.
In the future I would love to see the den as our TV and computer room (leaving the upstairs living room as a visiting room). However, the plugs down there aren’t grounded yet. That’s another expense; getting an electrician to come and work on the wiring. Houses are expensive! :-)
Other things are getting done though! The exterminators came today and sprayed our crawlspace for the powder post beetles that were found during the inspection. I am so glad to have that taken care of – it was paid for when we closed on the house, but for various reasons we weren’t able to have them come until now. We have to wait a few weeks before we can put the insulation back up. In the meantime, it is SO cold downstairs!
Sometimes I get tired of all the things that need to be done. I mean, the house is definitely liveable, but there are little things that would be so nice to fix. For example, it would be so nice to have grounding on all the plugs instead of just the plugs in the living/dining room. I have to remember why we bought this house when I write the mortgage check – we’re paying $150 less a month than we did renting. When we go to sell in the future, we’ll hopefully see all our hard work pay off and make a profit. But in the meantime, it’s hard!
At the same time I’m excited to have a place of our own. I think all the little annoyances (like, not having an outlet at all in the bathroom!) keep me humble – reminding me that I’m still only 26; I have a lot of life left to live and I don’t need to have “arrived” yet.
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I finally took pictures of the kitchen! Here are the before pictures, what it looked like when we closed on the house:
After spending a lot of time scraping wallpaper (two layers!) and painting, here is what it looks like today:
Our intention is to redo the kitchen when we get the money – new cabinets, new appliances, etc. Something that will make better use of the space without pricing ourselves out of our neighborhood. In the meantime, we wanted to make the kitchen a little pleasanter and less smelling like curry. What we did:
– Ripped down all the paneling and wallpaper which took FOREVER. They have special wallpaper removal stuff but we found that hot water worked better. There were two layers of wallpaper! We didn’t bother with the paper over the cabinets; we’ll get that whenever we redo the kitchen.
– Painted all the walls a sage green color.
– Replaced the curtains with new ones. The curtains that were there were stiff, stained, and greasy. They were probably pretty at one point, but not anymore. New curtains mad such a difference!
– The house didn’t come with a fridge so we hopped over to the Sears scratch & dent store in Tucker to buy a new one. I spent a long time debating about what color fridge to get, and I finally decided on white. (I wanted black, but I was afraid it would be too dark for the room.)
– Because of the height of the fridge, we had to take down the shelves and cabinet that were on that wall. We were going to reuse the shelves, but they fell apart in the process of taking them down. We moved the cabinet over near the sink. It looks a little funny, but it’s usable and that’s the important part.
– Added knobs to all the cabinets. Even after a heavy-duty cleaning, they were still sticky and made me want to wash my hands after touching them. So, we added knobs which not only make them look nicer but enable me to open them without getting my hands sticky. :-) I was going to replace all the drawer knobs too, but I decided against it because of our intentions to redo the kitchen.
So the kitchen is really functional now, and I think will be fine for the next few years. When we redo it, we’ll go ahead and get a new oven/stove and exhaust fan to match the fridge. We’ll also get a built-in dishwasher and extend the counter from the sink all the way to the wall. I’d also like to replace all the cabinets – my biggest complaint with these is that the shelves are rather low and so a lot of space is wasted due to not being able to stack things (like, for example, cups).
I put all the dishes out in the dining room so that we could use the cabinets for our small appliances. I think I’m happy with how it turned out, and until we have the money to redo it, I’m going to be brainstorming ideas for how to make better use of the space.
Originally posted at twentysixcats.com
I finally uploaded all the house pictures to Flickr! So click here to go see them. (They are the same pictures as the Facebook album I uploaded a while ago.) I took all these pictures last July when we were doing the walk-through with the home inspector, so it doesn’t have any of the changes we have made since we got the keys!
We’ve spent the past week and a half hard at work! My parents have been SUCH a great help. Also, last weekend my sister, aunt, and uncle all drove down from North Carolina, and my other aunt drove from South Carolina to help. My two uncles who live here in Atlanta came by on Sunday and everyone was hard at work! I am so grateful because there is very little I can do physically, and we are racing the clock to get the house ready for us to move by September 30th.
The house is 50 years old, and was a rental house the past 3 years. It needs a lot of work, but it’s not as bad as it could be. However, as I am working at cleaning I wonder how people could have lived in such dirt and grime… The bathtub for example was absolutely horrible, and after many many hours of scraping and cleaning it still doesn’t look great.
Here’s what we’ve done so far:
* Cleaned out all the gutters and replaced the ones that were broken or missing
* Replaced the hollow wood front door with a steel front door. Also replaced the ugly storm door with a storm door with a screen so we can get some cross-ventilation without letting the kitties out.
* Took down the weird shutters around the front door
* Replaced the old fuse box (original to the house, which was built in 1960) with circuit breakers and added more switches or whatever you call them
* Pulled up the carpet from the entire house, which made it smell 1,000 times better. Also, beautiful hardwood in the upstairs bedrooms!
* Cleaned the kitchen with a heavy duty degreaser – it was pretty disgusting
* Cleaned the bathroom, also quite gross
* Removed the shower doors and we’re still in the process of scraping all the caulking from all around the edge of the tub
* Replaced the washers from the faucets in the shower to stop the leaking
* Painted all the ceilings upstairs
* Removed the border print and painted the walls in Savannah’s room and our room (one bedroom left to paint)
* Cleaned the window panes with bleach so as to kill the mold/mildew on them; also removed the nails so now the windows can open
* Removed most of the wallpaper in the kitchen, which is NOT coming off easily despite the wallpaper removed that’s supposed to work wonders (we’ve actually decided to only do two walls; we’ll just paint over the wallpaper on the other two walls)
* Removed the border print in the living/dining room
* Weed whacked about half of the backyard (the mosquitoes have been terrible; we hope that the weed whacking helps get rid of those); most of the yard is weeds – there is actually very little grass, but we’ll deal with that in the future
Major things we still need to do:
* Replace the toilet downstairs to bring it up to code – we need to do this before we can get the water service started
* Replace the hollow wood door coming in from the carport with a steel door – the current one isn’t even an exterior door!
* Run wires to the outlets to allow for three-prong plugs
* Buy a new refrigerator and perhaps an oven (or find someone to fix the oven that’s there)
* Finish painting all the ceilings and the walls
* Put carpet in the downstairs den/family room (this probably won’t happen before we move in, as there is some question about the floor down there)
There are a whole bunch of things on our long-term to do list, but they require more money than we have right now and/or more time than we have. We have a lot to do! I am so tired right now; I will be glad when this is settled. I hate that I can’t help – I would NOT recommend trying to do this a week after having a baby! I hope it’s worth it, because a huge part of me wishes that we had walked away from the house when we were getting so close to our due date… I can’t tell you how much this is stressing me out!
