Home (and soon-to-be) Sweet Home

Yes, we've moved. I'll give this a moment to sink in. After all, it's been over a year of house searching and offers and potential "I think we got a house" claims. So go ahead... let it sink.

Now that we've gotten over the shock, here's the rundown. Naturally, it is NOT the house I posted about a month or so ago. It's a house about a half-mile (as the crow flies, if you're into corny sayings) from our last home. Oh yeah, we were robbed last week at our old house. Another post, another day! Sheesh. Focus. As I was saying: it's very close to our old house which means it's still in an extremely good area. This neighborhood seems to have a lot more children which hopefully means grown-up friends too. :) It's a cute little bungalow, and if you have the definition of bungalow, I'd love to hear it. We're renting-to-own from my father-in-law so while it's not "ours" yet, we're definitely settling in for the long haul. And by that I mean at LEAST four years! That's just crazy talk, I know.

Hubby officially has a honey-do list about a mile long. Some of the goodies include:
-fix disposal (at this point I can wash NOTHING down the sink, including water)
-replace kitchen sink faucet and bathroom faucet
-set up internet (obviously accomplished last night)
-set up entertainment center
-install dimmer switch on our bedroom
-hall closet needs a door
-fix upstairs shower so it stops raining in downstairs bathroom
-build bathroom storage cupboard

And so on and so forth. I haven't taken pics yet but I think they still might be online from when the house was listed to sell. Of course, these pics are realtor pics which means everything looks MUCH larger than it actually is. And let me tell you, it's not big. The house is almost exactly half the size of our old house, with very little in the way of storage. It's stressing me out. The kitchen is probably 1/3 the size of our old kitchen and if you know me, you know I collect kitchen equipment the way your grandma collects doilies.

However, kitchen aside, I really do love the house. It's cozy and I've decided it's better to have a too-small house than a cavernous house that's mostly empty. This already feels more homey since we no longer have giant empty rooms to collect dust and run up energy bills.

We have a lot of plans for the house. Short term, we want to renovate the kitchen slightly to add more cupboards and counter space. Oh, and to bring the fridge into the kitchen, because that's always fun when it's not in your hallway. Long term we hope to bump out the entire rear of the house. We'd like to enlarge the MBR and add a master bath as well as make the kitchen BIG by absorbing the small upstairs bath. We'll put a bathroom behind the kitchen, and possibly a powder room by the living room. Of course, that's long term and would only happen if we stay here say five years. Or more!

I also have a zillion decorating ideas for the house. I've been collecting ideas for a house for ages and it's fun to be able to implement them. Currently, the $0 budget has been slowing me down, but I hope to get around that soon. I'm aware that this post is already forever long, so I'm going to wrap up here. I'll post more ideas about decorating when I have a budget for that!

I can't find the pictures online, so I'll take some this afternoon and post them then. Back to unpacking!