Work Weekend

October 19, 2013

We had a great turn out for our wallpaper removal party.  Jared and I want to say thank you to everyone that came and helped.  We truly appreciate everyone's help.  We were able to remove the wallpaper from every wall, ceiling, and closet (well besides the walls we are removing).  While we did tons of work I think everyone had a pretty good time too.  At least the girls in the bedroom with me had a blast singing and removing wallpaper.  It was definitely a much better room than the small bedroom.  That bedroom was really difficult as you can see in the pictures below.  It is the one with spots of plaster missing from the walls.  In addition to the wallpaper some great work was done outside to remove some overgrown plants.  It looks great now and ready for some new plants. 

October 20, 2013 

Today just Jared, his parents and I went to the house.  Our mission was to remove any last little bit of glue off the walls and ceilings.  This proved to be much more tedious than the actual wallpaper removal.  We ended up only getting the walls of the living room done.  While we were inside working,  Jared's dad was outside power washing the porch.  He was cleaning it and getting any loose paint chips off all the wood.  He did a great job.  We still need to sand the wood to make it nice and smooth before we can paint next weekend. Once we were done with the living room walls Jared and I moved some of the plants that line the driveway to in front of the house. Now we just need to get some colorful flowers to make it look pretty.  

Settlement

October 18, 2013

Yay!! We finally settled on our house today.  We had a stressful week leading up to today, but today was very stress free.  We met our realtor Tyler at the house for a final walk through and then headed over to the title transfer office to sign all of our paperwork.  It only took a little bit over an hour to sign our lives away and then we got the keys to our New House!!

We headed right back to the house to unload our cars.  We had them packed up with things needed for our wallpaper removal party scheduled for tomorrow.  On our way to our walk through Jared picked up a bottle of champagne and we popped it open as soon as we got inside.

Next we unloaded our cars and Jared cleaned the bathrooms so that we would have nice clean toilets and sinks for everyone the next day.

I also walked around and took some before pictures now that house is empty.  I have tons, but I just picked out some here to show.

Plans

Sorry for the long delay with regards to updates to the blog.  But just because there aren't posts, doesn't mean there hasn't been anything going on for the past month.  A quick summary of the past events is as follows:
We quickly put together plans of the existing house and created plans for the future layout, which I included the drawings in this post for you all to see.  
Also, we created a long list of work to be done as part of the renovation (which overlaps the drawings, but also contains things like new electric run throughout, new HVAC throughout, new windows throughout, etc.)
We utilized the above mentioned documents to sit with a contractor and a 3rd party consultant to  price and refine the scope of work.  Once that was complete, we submitted all of that to the mortgage company.  
It's been mostly a waiting game since we submitted everything.  They were having the appraisal completed, and the mortgage underwritten.  And then Monday, we received our commitment letter. YEAH!!  

So now its just time to get the final paperwork in order for our settlement, which is only 2.5 weeks away, October 18.

So it seems like we are going to be firing back up and working with the contractor over the next couple of weeks to get his construction started as soon as we can after settlement.  We will be starting October 19 with removal of wall paper, exterior paint, and some other demolition prior to the contractor starting.  So look forward to some great demo shots in a couple of weeks!  We'll keep posting updates as we have them. 

Until then enjoy the plans.

2013-09-06 112 Washington Ave - Planning Documents