Now, when you see this "house" you may think to your self, "Self, that home looks pretty good! What is she fussing about?" And from the magic of a camera lense, the house doesn't look half bad. Its in a great neighborhood, on a great lot and has a pool! Let me go ahead and give you a little tour.
The front of the house; it has beautiful shade, a picture window and is on a quiet street.
The family room; it has a fireplace, pocket doors leading to the back bedroom suite and sliding glass doors giving view to the pool.
The kitchen; it is open to the family room and clearly is missing the upper cabinets.
The breakfast nook; it is a very generously sized area with a nice window over looking the pool.
The master bedroom; nice sliding glass doors overlooking the pool and a vaulted ceiling.
The master bathroom; beautiful tiled shower, large walk-in closet and um... 20 year old tulip wall paper.
One of the 3 smaller bedrooms.
Bathroom; quiet a bit dated and somewhat functional.
The best part of the house as it is, the pool and lanai.
When we bought what we are now affectionately calling The Money Pit, we had initially thought that a fresh coat of paint and new carpet would make everything good enough to move into. The rest we would do bit by bit over time. Well, that plan has been totally scrapped and along with the plan, our summer has been scrapped. Thank God for the pool as the kids have been there every day, every step of the way with us as we are doing most of the renovations ourselves. And my ourselves, I mean with mega doses of help from family and friends! Thank you Jesus for people who love us! A quick run down of projects completed or in the works thus far:
- Pool cleaned, shocked, cleaned, shocked, and cleaned and shocked again.
- All popcorn ceilings scraped and retextured with knockdown.
- All walls with wallpaper (horrible, horrible wallpaper that was applied directly to sheet rock!) have been stripped and retextured with knockdown.
- All other walls have been patched, repaired and retextured.
- Tile and carpet removed throughout the house with the exception of the bathrooms.
- Soffits removed from kitchen.
- Fireplace mantel reconstructed.
- Area carved out over the fireplace so that our TV will be flush mounted up on the wall.
- New AC unit installed (most of the work done was without AC!!)
- Paint EVERYWHERE!
We have kitchen cabinets on order, have picked out our granite, are finishing up painting this week, prepping and laying hardwood floor this week and carpet is coming on Friday! We are about 3 weeks from completion and 6 weeks past exhaustion.
I look forward to the day when I can write about the completion and transformation of a "house" into "our home". Until then, I pray for strength, energy, patience and that I can stay out of the loony bin for the next couple of weeks. :-)
