Our Adventure: Part One

I guess there’s no other way to make the announcement then to show that we’ve already started on our journey to saying goodbye to Mircea’s house and finding a home together that we can call our own. Unfortunately, there are lot more steps then sell this house, buy that house. First we have to get his house ready to go on the market. For those of you who have been in it, you understand that this is no easy task. Although the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen are super, the rest of it is well, sucky. Our realtor is coming by in a week and a half to give us some more advice so we can get this house sold (We’d really like to be in our new house by Christmas) but at this point we still have to do all of this…

- replace living room windows
- repaint entire house
- new floors in entire house (or refinish existing hardwood)
- take out back door and close off back bedroom
- make new exit from house to deck
- refinish ceiling in living room and dining room
- possible addition of second bathroom
- expand laundry area
- hope the house is priced low enough in this crappy market

We’re already a little stressed, but after talking with the realtor we’re definitely less nervous. Although the market is crappy, his house is in the price range that is still selling well. Hopefully that will continue once we make the improvements and put in on the market. The reason we don’t want to wait is that because the market is so soft, we can get the house we really want for a price that is way less than we were expecting (thereby insuring that we aren’t house poor like most of our friends.)

I did find that the best way to overcome stress when it comes to home repairs is to do some demolition. So last Friday on my day off I did the demolition of the living room. I took down the drop ceiling (who thought these were good ideas) and removed all the old crappy paneling and drywall. We learned that our house wasn’t even insulated to the outside, which is just lovely, but that will of course be remedied for the new owners. I felt like a warrior. I had two tools, a hammer and a crowbar, and was donned in safety glasses, gloves and my pajamas. I’ll tell you. That crowbar is awesome. I never knew what the heck people did with them or why criminals would be such big fans of them, but I see now that you can pretty much do whatever damage you want with one of those bad boys. Speaking of bad boys, I kept kicking Yukon outside because of the noise (the girls were in the back bedroom as far as they could be from it) but he kept begging to come back in so he could sleep under the ladder. He loved it down there. He was always in the way and I don’t know how many times I accidentally dropped little pieces of drywall on him b/c he was in the way (terrible mother that I am). After I cleaned up the room the girls were also walking around trying to inspect the changes in the house (and look out the holes in the wall that went directly outside which were NOT made by me. As you can see from the picture, Lily was especially helpful when it came to sweeping up the mess.

So there is step one. I’ll share more pictures when we get onto the next steps, and hopefully we’ll get this house on the market within the next 2-3 months and we can sell sell sell. Please just let us sell it! Pray for us!