New

If you thought new beds were exciting, how about all new carpet? And new paint? For a NEW HOUSE?!

Oooooooh, yeaaaaaaaah baby, we finally closed on the house!  House-S to be precise - on Monday morning we drove to Denver (Kari graciously adopted my kids for the day) and signed the papers and sold our Thornton home.  It was really an interesting experience, we got to meet the buyer!  Not exactly who I'd been hoping for - my dream was that a small family would move in - but he's very nice, is moving in with his brother, they both work construction trades so we felt a little kindred bond there, and it was his 29th birthday that day.  Can't feel too bad for someone who buys a house on their birthday!  Sadly, the sandbox will be put to use for horseshoe pits rather than dump trucks :( So after closing we were rolling in the dough for approximately 24 hours, until we closed on the house in Pueblo on Tuesday and said dough went toward a downpayment, paying off the LAST carpet we bought, and purloining some for new carpet and future improvements here. Still, it was an exciting 24 hours :)

Now our excitement is the new house! It needs a bit of work, but some of that is personal preference (like paint). SOME of it is that the previous owners were smokers and owned a dog that peed ALL OVER THE PLACE. When we bought it we really smelled the smoke but the more we were in it the more obvious the REAL smelly culprit was... and there's no amount of carpet shampooing that'll remove either of those smells (and stains) so we've already been busy! Kari adopted our kids again one day and we scraped the popcorn ceilings - what took us 2-1/2 years in Thornton took us 2-1/2 hours in Pueblo! With 2 people working, no kids distracting, no furniture to move or cover, and carpets not being a problem we SAILED through the house! The next day Joe SAILED through the carpet de-installation so now we have no texture above and no texture below, but big plans for everything. By the end of August we will not have a finished house, but it'll be pretty dang amazing and we'll be officially moved in with the basics done. THEN we can start our pet projects and drag them our for years and years, like updating the downstairs bath and (again) painting kitchen cabinets. Sounds awesome, huh? These are all "before" pictures, I'll have to get a few "during," but they're not very exciting just yet.

Welcome to our humble home!

Tri-level, just like ours last one, but this one actually put some parameters around the living room.  Feels kinda cozy :)

We still have an eat-in kitchen, but back where you see someone standing (the inspector) will be our "breakfast nook," where I plan to feed the kids so all the dishes from our meals won't be the first thing you see when you walk in the door. Phew!

 Fireplace in the basement, we're very excited to have a mantel to hang out stockings on this year.

 This house has some pretty great closets, the kids have already claimed a few of them as their "club house."

And finally, I love that the garage is finished and has tons of shelves already put up.  This is one area we seriously need to crack down on, with all our home projects we tend to accumulate project debris like flies on stink.  Which is NOT a good thing, if you couldn't guess.