Home Sweet Home

As most of you know, Kurt and I bought our first house in October. We were so excited to be starting this new chapter in our already new lives of being married and expecting our first baby. Crazy?.. I think so.

The escrow office gave us a little bit of a run around when we were supposed to close. But they were paying any of the late fees, so we were not too upset about it. We were just anxious to get started on all the the work that was to be done in our new home. We only closed a few days after we were supposed to, but it seemed like an eternity because we had to wait over the weekend. We signed the contracts on a Thursday, but did not close escrow until Tuesday or Wednesday. I am not exactly sure on the days.

The real estate office was actually nice enough to give us the keys to our house when we signed the papers so we did not have to wait until we closed to start cleaning. Which was a process. We did not want to do any real demo or anything, just in case. We scrubbed and cleaned and disinfected everything in that house. It was pretty digusting. There was this layer of grease covering the entire kitchen. We really so not think that the previous owners cleaned a day that they lived here. And when I say that we cleaned, I mean that my mom, Barbie and Kim cleaned :) I did help, but not as much as I would have liked to. Chemicals and the first trimester of pregnancy do not mix so well.

Note to self: Do not let your husband take before pictures of your new home. He will only take specifics and no pictures of the entire space. :) He was the inspector and looked at every little detail.

The floors in the kitchen were supposed to be white.. or cream.. But they were a nice shade of dirt and grime and grease.

The hallway to our bedroom. The carpet was pretty disgusting in the house. The door on the left is the bathroom and the door on the right is the nursery. Straight ahead is the master.

This was the fireplace. It leaves something to be desired.

The nursery carpet. There are tire marks on the wall. We have come to the conclusion that they parked their motorcycles in the house.. in this room. And then proceeded to change the oil in said bikes. After talking to neighbors, they did indeed have motocycles that they brought in the front door. Anyone heard of the garage. We do have one.

The murder scene in the master closet. Notice the large red stain and the random missing square of carpet. No it was not a real murder scene, but it does make one wonder.

The entryway looking towards to front door. Those lights are in every room, the kitchen, and living room and hallway.

The division between the kitchen and the living room. Again with the missing carpet. There were several things in this house that just made us stand there and scratch our heads saying, "What the heck did the do in here?"

Another beautiful shot of the carpets that we had when we got the house.

And what do you do when your floors look like the above. You rip them out of course. Becuase who could put a baby on those floors. Even with an team of carpet cleaners, there was no was we were going to get all those stains out. The carpets had bleach spots on them where it looked like someone had maybe tried to clean the floors, but then again, maybe they were just bleach spots. We both agreed. The floors had to go.

Kurt and his friend Joe had the pleasure of doing that. I stayed far away from this project because we really had no idea what was under or in that carpet.

This is my husband breaking out the tile by the front door.

All loaded up and ready to be hauled off to the dump.

Remember that garage I was talking about, you know where you are supposed to park vehicles.

So that was the easy part.. and now the real work begins.