good golly

Boy, I really do keep forgetting about this blog!!

Trust me, I won't be forgetting it for much longer. I hope to start updating this regularly again. A lot has happened on the home front since I last posted here. For one thing, we sold the house we were living in and moved into a new house (new to us) in the same neighbourhood. Our moving day was May 25 so we've been here almost 3 months now. It's been a busy three months and we probably did more to the new place in the first month we were here than we did to the old place during the first 18 months we were there.

You learn a lot when you buy your second home. We learned that it's easier to paint the whole place before you get moved in and settled. Fortunately, we closed on the new house a week before we closed on the old house. As luck would have it, our contractor was available that week and he painted the living room, kitchen, master bath and two bedrooms. He also painted the ceiling in my office and primed a third bedroom. Non painting jobs included installing a new toilet in the second bathroom, replacing the faucets in both bathrooms and the kitchen, installing our new fridge and dishwasher and some small plumbing/electrical jobs. Of course, there are things we have done ourselves since then. Also, a few things have cropped up over the summer that we need to deal with before winter settles in but we'll get to those in the next few weeks.

Right now, we're just really enjoying the new place. It's a four bedroom bungalow so we have a lot more room than we had before. It also has a full basement which is a pleasure after not having one (our old house was built on a concrete slab. Our lot is smaller but we have a huge front porch and a nice deck (off the kitchen at the back of the house) so we now use the outside way more than we did at the old house. It's kind of nice to not have a football field sized backyard to look after too.

We literally worked our asses off all spring, between the rush to fix the old place up to sell (we had bought the new house before we even thought about selling the old one) and then the stuff we did to this one when we moved in, we were both a little renovation fatigued. When we decided to sell the old place, we packed up all of our books, cd's, dvd's, videos, pictures, posters and extra dishes (and just junk) and put it into storage. We then had the whole house painted, two coats of white primer through out. It looked a bit barren when we were finished. The house itself was kind of small so removing everything and painting the place white (not to mention cleaning the place from top to bottom until it sparkled) made it look huge and it only took about 14 days to sell. It felt a lot longer than that but the listing became active on April 18 and by May 1, it was all done and dusted. We had a short closing and actually got $1100 over our asking price. It was really stressful and exhausting but well worth it in the long run.

I have some photos posted of the before and after shots at the old place and some before, during and after photos of the new house here:

Old house - Before
Old house - After
New house - first viewing
New house - under renovation
New house - settlin' in
New house - out in the yard