New Homeowner

Hooray! As of last Friday, I am officially a brand spankin' new homeowner. My first visit there with the keys in my hand involved lugging a camera around into every room to take "before" photos. We intend to change quite a lot of things cosmetically and some structurally, too, over a very long span of time. This past weekend involved spray painting some of the brass fixtures around the house into more pleasing palettes. We no likey brass fixtures.

The first visit as a homeowner also involved our real estate agent taking silly photos of my mom and me enjoying the house. She left us a gift on the kitchen counters welcoming us to our new home with a bag full of new tools, which we broke in over the weekend.

 

The first major renovation on the list is the kitchen. The existing cubby for the fridge is too small (we are replacing the refrigerator with our own), and there is no ventilation over the stove. This for the most part requires us pulling out the old cabinetry and replacing them with new ones, so we are essentially re-doing the whole shebang. I probably won't ever see it this way again myself: my mom is helping demolish the room today.

 

Don't worry, we are keeping those adorable breakfast nook cabinets.

City of Trees

I had always wondered when I was little why my hometown was nicknamed the City of Trees. I was like, okay, we have trees, but other places have trees, too. Greener trees, even. Wondering about that just a couple of minutes ago, I googled it and found that the city has the most trees per capita in the world. What! But then that reminded me of the times I've come back home after long journeys like school in Texas, where I was able to see the city differently than I normally do. Driving down the interstate, I would normally just see the cement of the freeway, but now I see all the treetops lining either side and out in the distance. Instead of seeing the cement of the bridge I'm driving over, I turn my head for once and see how beautiful our tree-lined rivers are. After all this time, I've finally come to appreciate my city and how it really is such a great place to grow up and live.

Anyone looking for an update on the house I mentioned in my last post? We're in a counter-offer war and there's been lots of addendums to the original offer in that we decided to scrap it and start over. The selling agent claimed that everything had become "convoluted", so that's where we are at. Now I'm waiting to see what the sellers will say about our latest offer and hoping they decide to go with it. There isn't much room left to negotiate further now. We'll see!

What is happening!

Over the last year or so I've been casually reviewing homes for sale on Zillow and Trulia just for funziez. We all know that I want to move out of the house. The problem has been that my mom isn't comfortable living by herself, and so the only way everyone can get what they want (for the most part) is to move into a large home that can be split into two units.

After walking through an open house of a particular home very close to where I work, we saw a lot of potential for us: a two story house that could be split per floor. The only major renovations to be done at some point on the house include an installation of an upstairs kitchen and a second entrance to the second story via outside staircase and deck. Coincidentally, this deck would provide lots of needed shade on that side of the house. The rest is cosmetic updates to the downstairs kitchen and bathrooms that don't have to be done for years if I can't get around to it for a while. It's on a dead-end and tree-lined street, within walking distance of my work and grocery market. You can imagine how excited I am right meow.

At this very moment, my mom is having her handy dandy and knowledgeable ex husband inspect the home for flaws, so we have an idea of how much we can knock off of an offer we may make. My mom is also going to measure the house to create a floor plan that we can plan renovation layouts off of, however neither of us will have renovation money for a while until my mom manages to sell her current home.

WISH ME LUCK I'M SO EXCITED OMG AM I GONNA BE A NEW HOMEOWNER?