My God, This House is Freakin' Sweet

I haven't blogged since before we closed on the house. Lemme tell you what we've been doing. In that week and a half, Dada (and sometimes I) not only moved our voluminous amounts of crap over to the house, but Mamaw, Dadaw, and Dada completely revamped the place. After Dada went through and washed, sanded, and patched the walls, Dadaw single-handedly gave the entire house a new coat of paint, and painted each room to Dada's exacting specifications. Dada ripped up the carpet that was in the living room and hallway to reveal these gorgeous, basically untouched original oak (?) flooring, and shop-vac-ed all the nastiness out of the basement. Mamaw gave the place her special Mamaw touch, in every room, to make sure it was squeaky clean for me and mah boys, including special missions of cleaning mouse poo out of the oven and going hunting for stray pills so kindly left behind by the original owners all over the house. I served as baby-wrangler from the wee hours of the morn until way past everyone's dinner time, which made me start cackling in insane ways after about 3 days. Our desktop computer is still not up so I don't have the "before" pictures to wow you with, but I can give you a virtual tour of our gorgeous new little home that is ALL OURS! You must excuse the boxes and occasional misplacement of furniture or various other cluttering objects.

Here's the kitchen, which is unchanged except that it is now with white walls instead of putrid yellow:



From the kitchen you can walk into the dining room, which is the crown jewel of the place. No longer an institution green, Dada deemed that it should be this color to promote healthy eating. We also bought the dining room furniture off of the previous owners, as it is all handcrafted maple antiques from Vermont. And it was a steal -- $600 for all this business (AND a small kitchen table and chairs AND a '40s curio cabinet in the kitchen, which we kindly donated to my slave-labor in-laws):



More hidden fun in the house -- the old lady was an avid gardener. These were blooming in my backyard, and they are now MINE, so I cut them off and brought them inside.



From the dining room, you walk into the front room. Here is our gigantic front room, minus ugly/dirty/dusty carpet and institution green walls. The color, again, was chosen by our resident interior decorator, Dada:



Standing on the other side of the front room, looking to the hallway:




Here's the hallway, which also used to be carpeted and institution green:



Here's Isaac's room, which we painted white from the same ugly green as everywhere else. It's the smallest room -- I wanted to give him Jacob's room, but it turns out that the daybed Jacob and I usually sleep on doesn't fit in this room:



Here's our bedroom, which Dada chose to have painted cream:



Here's Jacob's room, which is currently lacking an assembled crib:



Here's our retro-sexy bathroom, which we didn't change anything about except to give it a fresh coat of white paint (above the tile). I've included Mamaw and Isaac for scale:



We also have a laundry room upstairs, a full basement, half of which we will turn into a rumpus room for the boys, a screened-in porch, a partially fenced-in backyard, lots of mature trees and flowering bushes and perennials, and no noisy students walking by outside. It's down the street from where the boys will go to elementary school, and we have almost 100% elderly neighbors who sit in front of their windows and watch everything like hawks. Um....can you say "Our house rocks"?