Moving Day!!

I am currently sitting at the kitchen table writing this post from our new home!!!! It was six months of an incredible amount of work, but it is all worth it to sit in our house and be home. We still have minor projects to do, but we are here to stay. As boxes get unpacked, I will post some new pictures.

Some updated pictures

The breakfast nook bench is finished. The bottom beadboard is salvaged from the original porch wall to keep some of the original house history intact. The washer and dryer are in and working in the laundry room. And our first snow fall was on Saturday.

On the top of Andy's Christmas wish list

I caught a glimpse of this a while back at Barnes & Noble. Anyone who knows Andy knows how highly he thinks of Chuck Norris; and in light of the recent poll that came out ranking television's most "manly men" and Chuck Norris' absence from that list I feel that it is only right to remind all of you how great Chuck Norris is. Walk on Walker, Texas Ranger, walk on.

What we do in our spare time

I know that every post has been about the house and some of you may be thinking, "Do Andy and Kori ever get to do anything else?"
Allow me to introduce SAM (Smoking Anatomy Model). To go along with my tobacco unit at school Andy was kind enough to help me make SAM smoke some cigarettes last night. What a gross, smelly habit!
So yes, our lives have been reduced to work on the house, work in the orchard, and work for school.
Some day Andy and I will sit on our porch and enjoy the evening...someday.

My lovely cabinets

Is it wrong to be in love with cabinetry? I absolutely love my kitchen cabinets! We managed to squeeze every useable inch of storage space out of our tiny kitchen. If anyone living in the Nampa area ever is in need of amazing custom kitchen cabinets that are actually cheaper than boxed cabinets from Lowe's go to Kinsmen Cabinetry! They may not be the fastest, but their craftsmanship and quality is outstanding. Each slide on either side of every drawer can hold 100 pounds, that's some major silverware storage!

We took the picture at 9 o'clock at night after the 4 of us had just finished staining the hardwood floors (thus the mighty mess on Andy's shirt).

Floor Facts

We have stained the floor and the finishers came today to put the first coats of finish on. Crawling on hands and knees until 9 o'clock at night isn't the most fun job we have done, but the floor looks great. Toby and Noah were great help staining the floor. (Can you tell that our poor camera has been in a construction zone by all the sawdust stuck to the lens?) A look at the floor before we stained.

Home Sweet Home

We are getting closer to our move-in date! Flooring is next on the list. We have started to hang the doors, tiling in the bathroom is done I just need to grout the walls in the master bathroom shower. Here is the picture from the real estate flyer. As you can see, the yard is looking much healthier and the house is in much better condition, as for the deck...it will have to wait until next summer.

Uncovering History

The house continues to look more and more liveable. We have been working the past few days on refinishing the original (1920) hardwood floors. While pulling out some old patches from previous remodels we uncovered a newspaper under the floorboards from 1949. A Hudson Hornet could be purchased for $2,500 and Babe Ruth was the highest paid athlete; making $80,000 in a season! This is what the living room looked like the day we bought it, Pink floral wall paper, pink carpet and feeling like a tunnel.

Here is the most recent picture after Dad and Andy have been sanding away on the floor. The floor is amazing, there is not a knot in a single board throughout the entire house. It is all vertical grain heartwood fir. Tomorrow the kitchen cabinets are getting installed, you can guarantee that pictures will be coming soon!

The Laundry Room Before and After

Here is the current state of the laundry room. Much nicer and more inviting than previously. Here is what the laundry room used to look like. Both pictures were taken from exactly the same spot. It was a scary, musty, dirty, dark room.

Let's meet the work crew!

The project has definitely been a family affair. Without the help of Dad and Mom and yes, even Noah this house would have never come together. Andy and I are so incredibly blessed to have so many people willing to help us out.

Evolution of the Bathroom

As we approach our move-in day I am continually amazed at the transformations that have taken place. For instance the bathroom; what used to be a small fruited wallpaper room has become a much more user friendly bathroom for two. The before of the fruitiness.
The demolition. (Yes, we did cut the bathtub in half to get it out)
The final color. The sinks will be here where the bathtub used to be. A tiled stall shower is on the right and the toilet is in the corner.

We have lights!!

As you can see, we now have lights!! The drywallers are all done, and Roger painted the ceiling for us so we could hang some lights! This place is starting to look great! Hopefully this weekend we can get can get some walls painted and then get to work on refinishing the hardwood floor.
Below you can see our new laundry/utility room, much brighter than it used to be! The fact that you can't see the sloped concrete walls anymore is huge plus.

This is the octopus room, named for the plumbing marvel that lives there now. Did I mention we are now officially 2bathroom house? Of course nothing is hooked up yet, but thats just a few small details.

We are making great progress, especially with both of us working again. We will keep the updates coming.

Bush and Tree Removal

We have a tremendous amount of vegetation on the property, some of it is in poor health, some in a bad spot in the yard, and there are a few we just do not like!

Roger's truck is a great way to take out small trees. This 8' Juniper didn't stand a chance.

And why stop there, when you can drag it down the street and back to the burn pile!

We also had quite a few juniper bushes along the front driveway. We were dreading this little chore as a section much smaller than this had taken all day to remove.
But Roger once again came to the rescue and found a much easier solution. What would have taken us several days to do, took this backhoe 15 minutes...

The house is coming along nicely, as is the yard and orchard too. Kori actually just sold our first fruit crop (apricots) from the orchard last saturday! The plums and peaches should be next up the harvest list.

Changes so far

We have done a lot of work so far, so I will get everyone caught up on the work that has been done.

First I will start on the south side of the house. There is a big bay window that the ro0f barely covered, and a gas fireplace bumpout just on the left edge of the photo.

We extended the roof down another 8 inches around the entire house to cover the bay window, and now an exterior door resides where the fireplace used to be.

This is a good view of the new roof and what the south side looks like with new siding and the new door.

Now lets move on to the new living room space. This is the room we put the new exterior door in and also stuck a few windows in the west wall. That really light the place up! We will be putting the fireplace we took out back in the room between the 2 new windows. The first picture is how the living room used to look before we showed up!

So far we have replaced 8 windows, inserted 5 new ones, moved the front door, added a new exterior door and put up new siding on the house. Hopefully we will be ready to paint in the next week or so.

The new house

At the begining of June, Kori and I bought a new house. Well actually, a new "old" house. This 1920's farmhouse is our new project for who knows how long. This is the real estate ad picture that sold us lol.

The house sits on 2.3 acres of land. Which came with 4-5 outbuildings(I don't know if the chicken shed really qualifies as an outbuilding), around 100 fruit trees of all types, 80 rose bushes, 40+ pine trees and a ton of other landscaping. Oh yeah, and one giant silo.

The outside was in pretty bad shape, weeds 2-3 feet high, shrubs, trees and bushes had been neglected for several years, the pine needles have never been raked up.. the list goes on and on. We have our work cut out for us for quite a while.


Now on to the house...

This is our quality living/dining room. This is probably the best room in the house, which is saying a lot! We have big plans for our new place and the remodeling is moving along quickly. We will be putting up some new pictures as we change up the place!

Wooot for our first post on our first blog!