Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!

Hi All!

It's been a very eventful 2013, with a wedding, a new house, school, and new jobs! There are no signs of slowing down yet, so in the few days of vacation, I just wanted to stop and wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Here's a list of our house New Year resolutions that you'll get to see progress in 2014:
1) Finish up the entryway opening ASAP!!!!
2) Scrape the popcorn ceilings in the living room.
3) Remodel the kitchen (summer).
4) New flooring (before Christmas).
5) Raised beds for the vegetable garden (February).
6) Drip irrigation for the garden (February/March).
7) Plant an orchard (February).
8) Fix the broken sprinkler system (spring).
9) Replace the mantle
10) Curtains
11) Host Christmas 2014
12) Move out of the apartment and into the house!!

and more! We can't wait to tackle 2014!!

Small updates and drawing close

Apologies for the horrid formatting. Cell phone blogging is awkward at best. The apartment has been without Internet for a few weeks (since the infamous flooding incident), and the house isn't quite "get ready for work"  ready.

This last weekend has been a flurry of activity. Lauren and I got out into the front yard and cleaned up all the downed tree limbs, hopefully stopping the steady stream of landscapers with a pickup and a chainsaw from ringing our doorbell. They wanted $500 for what took us about 2 hours with an axe and a pair of gloves (I didn't want to waste all the gas on cutting tiny limbs with the chainsaw).

We also sanded and prepped one of the living room walls for painting. Unfortunately the backing glue for the wood paneling, along with damage from tearing down the paneling made for a rather uneven finish.

Now we have to decide whether it's uneven enough to redo, or whether the wall is fine to be painted. Lauren painted a small part gray, but it looks too blue at the moment. Perhaps we should restart? We'll see.

I'm all finished prepping the opening in the entry way to be reframed, and the miter saw came in the mail. Now it should be relatively simple to frame and drywall the new opening.

We're off to Indy for a few weeks, and then we move in!

Ice, Ice Everywhere!

I always knew that things could go wrong in a house, but I never imagined how many of those things would go wrong in the first month of owning our home.

We've owned the house for all of 3 weeks, and so far we've had a delay in closing that forced us to push a bunch of deliveries back, a broken down car, a broken down washing machine, a flooded apartment, and now an ice storm! Needless to say, we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop!

2013 has been a very memorable year, both with positives (getting married, starting law school, buying a house), and with negatives (two major dog emergencies, multiple major expenses at inopportune times).

What better to (hopefully) cap the year off than an ice storm! Right?!? After stepping outside at one point and hearing a nearly constant "crack, crack, CRASH!!!", I knew this was gonna be a fun one!

So far there have only been two major tree limbs that have fallen from my trees (along with a bunch of smaller branches.

One limb fell right in the middle of the yard. The other is sitting on the chain link fence and the neighbor's yard

Well, looks like I'm in the market for a chainsaw! I'm not stressing at this point, just sitting in front of the fire, enjoying the ability to work from home.

Workin' hard or hardly working?

As has been documented, we've been working hard to get this house in move-in shape by the time our lease is up. We've had a few pushes and prods to get us in the house sooner rather than later, but overall it's on schedule.

Here are the long awaited before and afters!

First, the dining area

We ended up finding a cool little surprise in this room! It looks like the wall previously had an opening where we were planning on making one! That means it'll likely be a bit easier to open that wall right back up.

We also took down the living room paneling

All this paneling was relatively easy to pull off. A couple crowbars and a few hours, and we got most of it down. The biggest difficulties were 1) giant pieces of nail-laden wood paneling flying at my face, 2) the older paneling splintering, and 3) feeding the electrical outlets through the holes in the paneling.

Then, we got the paintbrushes out and painted the "cozy room" and the fireplace.

This is just using a white paint and special masonry rollers (they're extra fuzzy). Another fun part was yanking off the mantle. A couple crow bars and a few minutes of tugging, and it came right off!

We took care of a few more odds and ends as well.

Other than that, we're just waiting until my finals are over to start doing some more work! I just got a reciprocating saw and a shop-vac, so we have everything we need to open up the wall.

Next 5 things to do

1. Open up the entryway wall

2. Remove the ceiling fan in the cozy room so that we can get some furniture in

3. Spackle and tape all the newly exposed drywall

4. Run electrical and wires so that we don't have any exposed wiring for the TV. Also run CAT5 around the house.

5. Fill in the giant hole next to the house that seems to attract bugs.