Sunday, September 14, 2008

Our new house

This is a LONG post!!! But it has been awhile, and so much has happened, we have to catch up. So, we've been here over 2 weeks, and I still don't have a good family picture of us in front of our house. We started up projects around the house even before all of the boxes were unpacked, so we've been keeping busy. Here is a picture of my parents and MJ in front of our new house when they came to visit last week.



Mario's first project was to mount the TV above the fireplace. This is the same TV we had from our townhouse, but looks more fun mounted on a wall. I'll have to take a better picture of it tomorrow.
This is the kitchen (of course) and below you can kind of see Mario's wall-mounted TV in the family room.

Next, he added the "hotel shower bar" as some may call it to our bathroom upstairs. There are 3 bedrooms upstairs and 1 bath (the main bedroom suite and bath are on the main level, which is kind of fun). This bar is only about $40 and really makes a shower seem bigger (we highly recommend this project).

Above is our "upstairs bedroom". The master bedroom on the main floor is where we keep all of our things in the closet and we mostly use that bathroom. It's actually kind of convenient to have all of that on the main floor with 2 kids. And then at night, we are upstairs for if the boys need us (me) at night. And as my parents can attest, the bedroom on the main floor becomes a pretty nice guest suite.


These 2 are from the upstairs bathroom. Mario would like to make-over all of the bathrooms some day, and we already have a double vanity in mind for this one.


We really want to make use of our .45 acre lot and so feel clearing out some of our woods in the backyard, seeding for grass, and building a fence are top priorities. MJ liked to help Mario a lot. After over 2 days of work and many fun hours with a chain saw, we realized we had WAY too much stuff to haul away and hired some people to come and remove our yard debris. They started today and should finish tomorrow and it is so exciting to get that finished. Then we can seed quickly and have Mario start on the fence. Meanwhile, Mario had more time to help me with projects inside. We'll get to that later.



Last week, my parents visited for a business related trip for my dad, but then 4 days of help from them. My dad shared his expertise and helped us take care of some mole crickets eating our lawn, as well as help us gather the new yard tools we would need for this yard. My mom really helped with just about everything, cleaning, unpacking, watching the boys, but her most exciting task was to paint the half bathroom on the main floor. She did an amazing job (as you can see). I almost thought I was allergic to paint as I was sneezing like crazy when she started. 2 days later, I realized I just had an annoying cold.


Half bath before and after. Great job, Mom!


So, I'm free to paint again...and that is what we did this weekend. I'm sorry that none of these after pictures are fully finished and decorated, but it shows the major impact of the new look.


Living room on the main floor.


Joey likes his new house, and wanted me to take a picture of him while I was running around the house getting these other pictures.


We admit with these projects, our kids have had a lot of play time on their own. We found that Joey "hid" all of the toys on the right in this sub woofer while we were working. Note - if you buy a speaker like this with a hole, and you have children, this may happen to you. At most, MJ put in 3 cars when he was a kid... we were impressed with all these blocks!

2 comments:

Ryan and Kim said...

Things are looking great! Way to go guys!

SJT said...

Your house is beautiful! I'm sure you will be very excited when the projects are done. What kind of fence are you going to put in? We want one too but I thinkt hey are kinda expensive.