Holy crap, we own a house!

I think in the back of our minds, we never really thought we'd get to this point. Owning a house was always the plan, of course- but this process took so long it began to feel like we were going to live forever in limbo!

Today, it finally happened. We closed on our very first home. It needs some work...

Still, it was amazing (and annoying- man do you have to sign a lot of paper)! It was joyous! We finished the signing, stopped at Home Depot and rushed over to spend the afternoon prettying up our new space...

... and then we started to notice the things we hadn't before. Nothing terrible, nothing life altering- just.. wow.. these projects are going to add up.

Our first fun discovery was that the seller had let the propane for the furnace run out. Thankfully there are no frozen pipes (and the water heater is electric), but we're still in the grips of winter here in New England, and it was COLD in there. We set up our account with the propane company pronto. Hopefully they'll deliver before the week is out.. it's a good thing we're not moving right in! We really wanted to be there though, so we decided to brave the cold for a few hours anyway to get some painting and poking around done.

The house has some major renovations being done by a contractor- when you get a rehab loan, anything covered by the loan has to be done by a licensed contractor. So, the bathroom rehab and some of the flooring will NOT be our problem to tackle- which is probably good, as there is plenty of small stuff!

Turns out, on top of the usual painting, beautifying and accessorizing, we'll also be learning about putting up trim (someone let dogs chew on the door frames), hanging doors (someone let dogs chew on the doors), fixing windows (hmmm... what a cute little porthole window.. wait.. why doesn't this close?), removing wallpaper (how did I not notice how incredibly ugly that is?) and cleaning stains out of carpet (please don't tell me what that was).

All those fun things (and probably more) are going to be dumped right into the mix with our mostly DIY kitchen redo (no, I am not going to install my own countertops, or run pipes for our appliances- we draw a line at things we don't know how to do and can't afford to get wrong), closet makeovers, painting projects, DIY furniture projects and the giant project of making the outside of this little house something someone would actually want to look at!

So: this is our little corner of the internet, where we're going to chronicle the projects as we go. Some will be bigger (time to read up on tiling a backsplash and painting cabinets) and some will be smaller (our soon to be adorable book loft), but they'll all be here for you to see, if you're so inclined. We aim to amuse and entertain.