I’m going to TRY super hard to get 3 posts up this week. We’ll see if I can make it happen. THERE IS SO MUCH I WANT TO POST ABOUT but holy Jesus there is just not enough time. Sigh. Merritt is STRUGGLING at nap time. Like, screaming crying. Bedtime is pretty good now (although last night she screamed and cried for 2+ hours), but she just will fucking refuse at least one of her naps a day. If not both. It makes getting caught up at all extremely hard because so much mental energy is spent trying to either get her to sleep, or just to not go insane myself. And without my computer hooked up for almost 2 weeks, I have a lot of fucking work to get caught up on. Ooh, and there are boxes everywhere still 🙂 Boxes everywheeeeere 🙂

But you know what, this house is fucking awesome. Like, amazing. There is SPACE, the birds fucking chirp, Zoe loves to play in the front, there is room to put stuff away. Ohhhh I love it. Love. It’s amazing to be here.

Would you like to see how “here” is going? Well, prepare to be underwhelmed 🙂

The living room

I would like to point out how awesome it is that we have the TV set up. We don’t let Zoe watch a ton of TV, but even her outlook changed when she was able to watch Mary Poppins. That’s really when I think she sent most comfortable here – it felt like the old house. It’s wonderful for Chris and I to get a little time each evening to relax and watch some crappy TV. Some nights we don’t take enough of a break and we work, but it’s wonderful to have it available.

Notice the boxes? 🙂

Yup. We’ve got a LOT of books we need to figure out what to do with. The theme of this house will be built ins (MANY built ins), but until they get built, boxes and boxes and boxes (like, literally maybe 50) of CDs, DVDs and books will need to find a home.

The dining room and kitchen

I got the kitchen unpacked first after the girls were set up. Being able to find plates, food, etc is essential in feeling like you’re not camping.

We bought a nice fridge. We opted to buy the one we would have after the kitchen remodel because there aren’t really very many different versions of fridges that we care about. I just wanted one that was counter depth and Chris wanted a water dispenser. So we found one that fit the bill on sale ( just under $2k with a water dispenser inside the door).

We bought a shitty used stove. I walked into a sketchy used appliance place and literally asked, “Where is your cheapest working gas stove?” Got this baby for $240 with delivery and hook up, and honestly it works just about as well as our “fancy” stove at Picardy that we got for almost $1k more

We don’t know what kind of stove we’ll want when we do the kitchen remodel in however many years (I’m trying to convince Chris to go with induction cooktop). So we decided it wasn’t worth spending a significant amount of money on an appliance we weren’t sure about in the long run.

There are A TON of cabinets that we literally only have a little more than 1/2 full. There is so much room in this kitchen compared to what I’m used to. The “pantry wall” is kind of messy. I’d prefer to have a closed pantry area. I’ve started a list of how I’d like to improve the layout of the room that way when we do redo it, we’ll really know what we want to do with it.

You’ll also notice we have a new dining room table. We bought it in NextDoor for $100 a few months ago. I love it. I can’t wait to cover it in my sports tickets because obviously we’re never going to have time to finish building that table ourselves.

Merritt’s room

Nothing that crazy. I reused curtains from Picardy (like how horribly sized they are?) and lined it with blackout fabric. She’s got the furniture from Zoe’s old room (which was from my old office). I’ll wait till Merritt is about 2-3 to really do this room. It’s hard to really nail down her personality as far as how to decorate it, or if she has a favorite color, etc., and I really don’t want to do things twice.

I love her closet

Ahhhh the Ikea Pax closets. I LOVE THEM. And holy shit is it awesome for each girl to have a closet because neither of them had one at Picardy.

Zoe’s room

Well, this was a fail. I was hoping to have this room done before we moved in. But well, that didn’t happen. There was a week between getting the keys and moving, and life was just too full. So, in the meantime we’ve got curtains (literally) stapled to the wall 🙂 Zoe doesn’t seem to mind though.

We had to patch in a few places. Most notably the vent for the new furnace is now in the floor instead of the wall. We need to mud, tape and texture, but after that we’ll get to painting! Then I can properly hang her curtains and get everything hung on the wall. Ooh my god I’m SO EXCITED to hang everything on the walls.

Our bedroom

Yeaaaahhhhh.

This room is DEPRESSING. The good news is that carpet should be going in in about a week. And that will be WAY better than these concrete floors. And things just feel dirty. We need to rip off the baseboards before carpet goes down.

I’d like to say after that we could get a can of paint on the walls, but because of cracks in the walls, we’d like to rip down some of the drywall and add plywood for shear strength. It’s not a super high priority, so it’ll wait a while. And so will paint.

I’ll also have to figure out how to furnish the room. It’s the biggest bedroom I think I’ve had in my entire life. I don’t actually like big bedrooms, I’d rather have the square footage in communal spaces. It’s not like I’m having a party or doing casual reading in there, so for me it doesn’t really make sense. I know I could have a chair or two, but it doesn’t really feel like “us.” There is obviously time to figure this out.

The big room

We were calling this room “the office,” but there will be our computers, a TV, a nice big couch and the washer/dryer, so we felt it needed a different name. Things feel pretty disheveled in here, but a huge improvement over a week ago.

Our computers are set up now and we’re reusing bookcases from my office

Down the line we’ll build a GIANT built in along that long wall (I told you, many built ins). But for now, reusing those works. I’ve still got office supplies to unpack, we need to set up a couple more things for the TV, we need to get a couch, and we obviously need to get the laundry up and running. You like that GIANT hole in the wall along the back?

We’re making slow progress getting things hooked up, but that’s for another post 🙂

So there you have it! Of course there are bathrooms, but that’s not really that exciting. And the garage. But I’m planning to write a post about that all on its own because we got a new slab poured and all the drywall ripped down. Progress!

We were hoping to start the exterior paint in the next week or two, but we’ve got to put it on hold for at least a month. We’re currently bleeding money on this place, so we want to wait till after Picardy sells and we get our savings account replenished a bit. Spending $12k on a brand new furnace is enough to make you choke on your spit a little 🙂

What do you think? Suggestions? Opinions?

Ooh! The view

Hot motherfucking damn that view has not gotten one bit old. Like, not even 0.00000001%. I LOVE seeing it every morning when I wake up. And many times throughout the day I stop what I’m doing and just look outside. Ahhhhhhhh. God damn it’s peaceful here.