Moving update

I have been working to get us ready to move. Jacob has been a huge help! It's so nice to have him here for this move. One of the times we moved he was deployed so I did that entire move myself. Because I have been packing so much, I have been so tired today that I ended up taking a nap and now here it is almost 2a.m and I'm still wide awake. But on the upside, we are living in just a few rooms in a virtually empty house. In just a week and a half we will be loading our truck. In just a little under 2 weeks we will be arriving at our new house and unloading. Then, the adventure of unpacking, renovating, and redecorating begins. *grin*

Thanks to my mom, some of the renovating has already begun. We are sending her the money and she is going to spruce things up for us by painting and redoing some of the floors. She has already pulled up the carpet in Tammy's Room and in the room we are putting together for when we are chosen by a birthmom and have a baby placed with us. Underneath those ugly pink carpets were hardwood floors. We are going to cover them with laminate hardwoord though. For 2 reasons, 1, we don't want my mom to have to go to the trouble of refinishing the floors. She would need to sand them down and then restain and revarnish them. That is a lot of work. Frankly, we already feel bad that she is doing what she doing and don't feel good about asking her to do more. Also something you have to understand about my mom is that she thrives on having projects to do. She renovated her entire house top to bottom by herself. Now that she is done with her house she has been itching for a new project. So she asked if it was o.k. if she tackled these projects so that when we get there we can just move right in. The other reason we are covering these with laminate hardwood floors is that our dog doesn't like actual hardwood. He is o.k. with laminate, but the hardwood for some reason he is afraid to walk on.

We aren't redoing the flooring in the family room or the living room yet. Those will be carpet and we need to be there to pick it out. So we'll do that later down the road. Once we get there we will refinish the cabinets in the kitchen. Why you ask? Well, cause they now look like this:

You can't see it too well, but the cabinets, while in good shape structually are scruffed up. So we are just going to sand them and restain them. We are also going to redo the countertops because tile countertops aren't what you want when you decorate cakes and bake a lot. So those will be replaced too. And since we know how to do the work ourselves we just need the supplies. Wish us luck!

It's Official!! We're Homeowners!!!

Remember this post where I told you about the house that we found, put and offer in on and got our offer accepted? Well, Monday, the sellers signed the papers and the papers were overnighted to us (since we are still in New Mexico). Tuesday we received the papers, signed them, had them notorized (thank goodness for JAG who notorizes for free to military), and overnighted them back to the title company. Wednesday (yesterday) we got a call that the papers had been recorded and funded and it was official!! We are homeowners!!

Our house is going to take work to get it to where we want it to be. We know that. That is actually what we wanted. We wanted a home that we could make our own. We didn't want to pay $20K more for upgrades that someone else did that may not be quite our tastes. The same upgrades that we could do ourselves for half that, and they would be our tastes. *big grin* We're sooooo excited! My mom went on the walkthrough on Monday and went over again on Tuesday to take more pictures. So here are some photos from that.

The front of our house. It needs a good power washing to get all the dirt that collects over the years off the house. We are going to spruce up the landscaping and are considering doing maybe some flower boxes under those two front upper windows you see. They are too thin to me and need some help, so some simple window boxes should do the trick.

This is our living room. This room will be painted a pretty taupe color, will have the flooring changed out (eventually, for now it will be covered with my gorgeous burgundy rug that Jacob got me while he was deployed to Afghanistan). This room will have the window coverings changes and will have my piano, my antiques and some furniture that my mom is recovering for us.

In the last post I showed you another view of the kitchen. So here is this view. We are going to refinish the cabinets, replace the countertops and backsplash and paint. In a few years we will redo the whole kitchen.
I will share more pictures later. For now I just wanted to share the good news!! I need to get some more packing and cleaning done. We are over halfway packed and in fact all 3 bedrooms are packed, empty and cleaned out with the doors closed. We're making progress. Just 2 weeks till we move!!!

Happy Anniversary!

On August 3rd 2001 at 8:30 a.m. in the Provo Utah Temple Jacob and I were joined together as husband and wife for time and all eternity. What a wonderful day it was. And what an amazing ride these last 8 years have been. Happy Anniversary honey!