Our House: Let the Fun Begin!

The past week has been a whirlwind, but I am SO pleased to report that we did in fact close on our house last Friday!  It was down to the wire, and we were so relieved everything came together and we got the keys!

Since then, quite a bit has happened.  Our contractor arrived bright and early (bless him) Saturday morning and got to work pulling out the carpets.  When Holland and I left the house at 8:20 am, it looked like this:

An hour later, we returned and we had this:

You can see the edges of the boxes of flooring which will go down soon!!

The guys working also got the fireplace removed.

We decided to have it removed for a couple reasons.  First, a {hot} wood stove like this poses a major safety concern for us and our life with small children.  I am not interested in fencing off the area with some sort of plastic baby gate.  Second, there are burn restrictions in Davis (for environmental reasons, I would assume) where I'm told, there are literally like, five days out of the year when you can use your stove.  Some people convert their wood stoves to gas stoves.  We aren't interested in doing this because we don't love the look of this type of stove in the first place.  

The kitchen has also been gutted!

Here was our thought process on that:  We are all about working with what you have.  Especially when what you have are solid wood cabinets.  With some paint and some new hardware, they could have definitely worked for us.  Problem is, we really felt the kitchen would serve us best if we reconfigured the location of the appliances (allowing for more countertop space) and utilized the wall opposite the window for additional cabinetry (where the boxes of new flooring are currently sitting).  By the time we did all of that, we would have chopped up the original cabinets so much it hardly seemed worth saving them.  Not to mention the fact that the new cabinets wouldn't match the old ones...

The last change to report on so far was the fastest to implement and probably my favorite so far!

BEFORE

AFTER {no more awning!}

I'm also quite proud to tell you that I was so anxious to get this baby down, I got the wrench all set, scooched a bench over in lieu of a ladder, and unscrewed this bad boy all by my pregnant self!  Philip ripped it off, and thanks to the adhesive that pulled some of the paint off the house, I now have the perfect justification for painting the exterior :)

Woohoo for progress!!