Hold on to Hope: House

Well, it looks like we are buying a house.

We found a townhome in Morgantown, right off the turnpike, that seems to suit our needs. Its a 3 bed, 2.5 bath, finished walk out basement, ginormous finished loft that has WAY more room than we actually need. Its going to be rather amusing to move our ONE couch and TWO armchairs and then realize that we still have a bazillion square feet to fill. However, I think we will try to be as minimalistic as possible.

Anyway, we like the house and it seems like a really good place to start. Its cheap, first of all, which is the most fabulous thing. Quite honestly, its only a couple hundred more than we are paying for our rent right now, so we feel its very managable. We have asked about their utility bills, and they seem to be reasonable as well. Our home inspection was last week and that went swimmingly. We asked them to fix a bit of electrical work, some flash collars on the roof (no, I dont know what that means! ha!), and fix a window that was not locking and was letting water in because of it.

We hope Lily likes it.

There are really only two major improvements that need to happen:
1) the deck... its 7 years old and warping like the dickens. It has obviously not been taken care of or stained consistently or anything like that. We forsee us rebuilding the deck within the next year or two if we have the dinero. I also want to put in a spiral staircase if the HOA lets us.
2) the carpet... you basically walk in on the first floor which has a powder room to the left, living room to the right, then closer to the back of the house, the dining room on the left with kitchen on the right. Both the kitchen and the entryway are nice hard wood floors. But the rest.... and up the stairs... is forest green carpet. Now, I love me some forest green carpet. In fact, I chose it for my bedroom at home. But the ENTIRE living room and ENTIRE dining room? EEP! Its just a lot of green. So we are going to rip it out and put down floors. We may even attempt to install it ourselves, depending on what type we go for. Should be a learning experience (gulp) but I think we can swing it. Jon is so anal retentive that I am not worried about the measuring and cutting. And I am good at seeing how things fit together.

Other than that, the house is in phenomenal shape. The carpets are a little funky upstairs with some pulls and whatnot. But the walls are all white. The upstairs and basement carpets are neutral. I guess I will include some pictures here at the end for you, if you are interested.

Overall, I am getting kinda excited about decorating. I already know what I want to do with our master bedroom (light blue accent wall) and the basement (floor to ceiling bookshelves from ikea droooooool) and the smallest bedroom (Jon's giant white desk from when he was in jr high will go there for our office).

I think the nicest thing about it all is that we are going to be able to put down 10% of the house and still have money left over to do these things. Its a good feeling and a pleasure to know that Jon and I have actually done a good job of managing our dinero over the past few years. 'Course it helps when your parents let you live at home forever.

We settle Sept 10th and we have until Sept 30th on our lease here at the apartments, so we will have almost 3 weeks to move in and get the painting and floors done. THAT I feel really good about. School will be starting up and getting into gear, which makes me nervous... but hopefully I can buckle down and put in some time there to get things ready before school begins so that I will have a few weeks of lessons prepared for all of my classes. That is the plan anyway. We will see what actually happens.

So... yay.

Hopefully we can slow down on the major life changes, though I am not sure if that will happen either.... Remember, Sept 14th of last year we got married. Sept 10th of this year we will own a townhome. Sept next year... let's just say we do not have any plans yet. :P