Hi ho the merry oh, a House Hunting we go!
Our future home
So last week, er was it three weeks ago? Yikes, I don’t even know! I’m in turbo PCS mode, and it’s seriously cramping my style. But we drove up to Rapid City, SD to do some house hunting for the house that we will plan to live in for the next three years!! Three years!! That is the LONGEST we will have lived in ONE place since we got married! Yea, the loan application part where you have to write your addresses for the last three years was a little ridiculous – we had FIVE. Five.
ANYway, we looked for just two days before we decided to make an offer on TWO homes actually. Our first choice was a dramatic chalet style house on the side of a tall hill with views to swoon over… with a TON of work to be done to it. We had a beautiful vision of it all fixed up, but if you were an unimaginative buyer you would literally run from the three different shag carpets cut together to make a design on the floor in the bathroom, the gold painted shiny wallpaper, the magenta carpet that matched a magenta wall going up two stories… It was going to be GORGEOUS in my head! So we offered way lower than the asking price hoping for a miracle.
Our second choice was where God worked a little subtly. We thought it was fine and good. The backyard is huge (half acre) and there’s already a greenhouse (which is the first thing I wanted to put into our SD home) AND they accepted our first offer! Our reaction should have been to recognize our miracle, but we said, “okay, what about the house on the hill??” …God always has great stuff in mind for us!
The house we’re getting doesn’t REQUIRE work like the other one, and is so much better for us in lots of little ways – while it doesn’t have the wow factor, it has very good bones and the projects we want to do are much more manageable and less necessary.
Thus, we’ve been excitedly researching how to install….
radiant floor heating (since it will need a new furnace and water heater soon and the exhaust goes up through the wall I want to knock down),
wood floors in the living room (because it’s pretty and the floors will already be up anyway),
tile in the kitchen (same reason, plus think about warm toes in the winter… sigh),
new cabinets (while I want to knock down the wall to open the kitchen and built a prep area/breakfast bar, why not?),
concrete countertops (we’ve been practicing!),
and a large master bath (can anyone say steam room?)…
Don’t worry, we’re prepared to get into this life of chaos and do-it-yourself-ing and pretty excited about it, actually. Get ready for some hilarious (and hopefully not too depressing) blog posts about our do-it-yourself adventures. In the meantime, here’s some pics of our future home!
It’s a split level home. You enter onto the main level with living, dining and kitchen. Stairs go up one half floor to two bedrooms and bathroom. Stairs go down one half level to one bedroom, one bath, and a mudroom from the garage (we’ll turn it into a big bathroom). Stairs go down again to the basement with a fireplace, laundry, and space for a guest room. It’s like the basement is under the main floor and the two floors with bedrooms are on top of one another.
The wall is coming down and a breakfast bar is going up!
When you come to visit us (Mt Rushmore anyone?) you can stay on our rockin’ shag carpet!
Your choice of colors! There’s another one that’s brown beyond these two…
Fireplace in the basement – it can also warm the basement through those vents.
Lower level bath that we want to enlarge (a little further down the to-do list)
Greenhouse!!!
Our backyard is LOVELY!
We’re very excited and looking forward to actually being able to make changes in a place we live.
