The New to Us House

So, we've been in our new house about 4.5 months. I'd like to say how much I enjoy the peace & quiet but it isn't quiet. They're building a subdivision behind the house and the construction noise is awful right now. I keep telling people if the equipment just went forward instead of backward (beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.....) I'd be okay. Tumbling rocks into a dump truck isn't so bad. I know they'll be done sooner rather than later but I'm really ready for them to be done. This week they've started work at 5:45 which I must say gets on my last nerve. I'm surprised they haven't started yet this morning.

I love our new house.... the kitchen is absolutely gorgeous and nicer than we would have ever been able to do things. In my dream world, I'd have gas instead of electric and double ovens instead of a microwave & oven. But, I really can't complain. We'll live with all of that until something breaks. The floors are beautiful,too. Again, there are details that we would have never paid for. Oh wait, we'd probably think we needed to do it ourselves anyway.

We've done small cosmetic things in the house.... took down wallpaper/painted in the bathroom, replaced the light fixture over the table, painted our bedroom, & painted Coralee's room (which used to be Lauramae's room - yes, we've switched rooms in 4.5 months). The last two weeks, I've been working to get some decorating stuff done. 6 trips to Hobby Lobby (well make it 7 because there was a bonus trip for something else) in a week to get the perfect curtains for our bedroom at 40% off. I LOVE Hobby Lobby. It's not painful to go there that many times in a week. In fact, I may go today to get more fabric for Lauramae's curtains.

The living room was perfect when we got here. We've left Lincoln's room the original yellow and Lauramae's room the brown faux finish. Our next huge thing to do is our bathroom. There's only a shower and it's really small. We could do a bigger reno and take in part of my closet but that's bigger than I want to tackle. Plus, it doesn't go along with our long term plans for the room. So, there's some water damage/mold on the sheetrock in front of the shower. The plan is to replace the tile (floor to ceiling) and get a bigger door so it doesn't feel as much like a cave. I've watched enough Renovation Realities on DIY to say that the idea of this freaks me out! Still, we're too cheap to have someone else do it. In the end, it will be beautiful and much better than it is today. Ken wants to replace the cabinets in there, too. Only trouble with that is that we'll need to keep the same footprint. If we don't, we'll be replacing floor tile, too. The bathroom is super small so that wouldn't be too big of a deal but it looks really nice and we don't necessarily want to change it. Our thought had been to raise the bottom cabinets and use the granite that is already there but Ken talked to someone at work that says the granite breaks easily if you try to do that. Maybe that's something for the pros. We'd like to replace the tub/tile in the kids bathroom, too, but grownups get first dibs on the pretty stuff.

Long term, we'd like to build a guest house/garage behind the house and take in the garage as our bedroom/bathroom. Needless to say, it's going to be a while for that. A girl can dream, though!