1st Blog/House Update

I was nervous about starting my own blog. I read my friend's and family's blogs and I get inspired, or I laugh, or it just makes my day at work better. I'm not sure if I can do that, but I decided that i'm not going to worry about it, instead i'll use this blog to keep in touch with my friends and family and if someone else wants to hear cat stories, or about the fun of fixing up our house, they're welcome to them.

Some of you already know that we bought a foreclosed house last April. There is no doubt that it was the biggest and best thing we've decided to do. Have you ever seen the movie "The Money Pit"? Well my house isn't that bad, but some days I do feel like we should just direct deposit our paychecks to Lowe's. Pretty much every surface needs to be refinished. We've been taking it one project at a time. We were pretty gung-ho when we first moved in, we painted and painted and then painted more. I'm glad that first wave of energy is over. Now that I look at the colors we picked and the quality of our work, I'm thinking that taking it slower and one project at a time is the best option. I'm really not looking forward to doing our kitchen over for the 2nd time, and I really don't want to repaint the dining room and entry way again either, but after countless hours of HGTV, I now know that picking your paint color and then trying to match everything else to it is not the best option. More on those choices at a later date.

The main reason for this post is to show you some pictures of our current project.

Here is a pic from the outside. We affectionately call it the ugly blue house. Honestly this picture just doesn't do it justice. This is actually better than seeing it in person. Our house is covered with faded blue vertical siding. We have 70's storm windows that barely open, and if you look carefully to the right of the house you'll see the Leaning Shed of Shipman.

We decided to spend our entire tax refund and our 1st Time Homebuyer Tax Credit to get new windows and siding.

Here is what's left of the old siding. Would it be wrong to do a victory dance on top of it? Dan pulled all of this off the house by himself. (I was out of town, I would have helped, but he did it all before I got back, honestly) We'll do whatever we need to save a little money, and pulling the siding off and getting rid of it ourselves saved $500. I thought we'd list the siding on Freecycle, but in the end, it's in such bad shape, I think its best that it is just plain recycled. Don't let this little pile fool you, it has a twin sister just across the yard, and the other half of its family has already gone to bad siding heaven. (it already did its penance here on earth)

Have you ever seen a naked house? Who knew that we would have blue wood vertical siding underneath all that vinyl? That means 20 odd years ago someone decided to cover their blue vertical siding with...you guessed it blue vertical siding. Hmm. If I was a braver person, and if I had handy family members living closer, maybe we would have tried to just paint it ourselves and fix the trim, but we don't and we didn't, so new siding here we come. In this picture you can actually see where they have started with the new white trim, and you can see our new white windows freshly installed. Today it is raining, so the siding guys didn't come. Our house gets to sit exposed for at least another couple of days. We had the new windows open last night. They open from the top or the bottom, or both at once. So we pulled the tops down to let the hot air out and the bottoms up to let the cool air in. The girls (aka our 3 cats, Zoey, Telley, and Jinx) didn't know what to do with themselves. Being indoor kitties with formerly crappy windows, they didn't know that fresh air could feel so good and honestly I didn't either. It's obviously still a work in progress, but I love it already.