I am back! I have been busy, busy, busy with everything. I graduated in December with my Associate's degree in business, and have been trying to keep up with my now crawling 7 month old. He is getting too big!
We also got a new roof on our house! Hallelujah! Our old roof really wasn't that bad, and probably had a few years left on it. But we had a giant walnut tree in our backyard that had huge branches above the house. We were trying to get someone to come out and give us a quote to get it trimmed or cut down but no one would call us back! During a storm while we were trying to find someone to cut the tree, a giant branch fell on the roof and gouged a big hole in it. Rather than pay someone to just patch it, we decided to go ahead and get the new roof a few months early. Our house has dropped ceilings (no idea why, it looks like an office building in here now) and now the tiles are stained in one spot from the water dripping down. That's okay though because we are going to take the tiles down and just patch the holes that the screws made. I think it will definitely open the rooms up once the ceilings are restored back to their former beauty.
The living room also has this weird paneling over the walls that we are going to take down. There is drywall underneath the paneling so I'm also not sure why the former owner put the paneling up. The drywall is brand new, and hasn't even been mudded (is mudded a word?) yet. So we will be doing that and painting the living room. The kitchen also has that old 70's style paneling and it would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to take it down and replace it, so instead I watched a tutorial on using drywall mud (or something of that nature, I'd have to go back and check) to smooth over the paneling and then paint it to look like regular walls. So we will also be doing that.
We have a very long list of to-dos left (if you couldn't tell) but the things we are focusing on this year are getting the outside of the house painted (you will see why in a minute!), taking out the dropped ceilings, removing the paneling from the living room and finishing the walls, and making the paneling in the kitchen look like regular paneling. A bonus that I hope to accomplish if we have enough money is to build a new roof over the front porch. If you remember, I think I posted about it last year, the roof was tied into the house roof wrong and had gotten a giant hole in it that rotted the whole roof out. I really regret making the decision to tear the roof down instead of fix it, so now we have to put a new front porch roof up.
Okay, I've kept everyone waiting long enough. Here are the pictures of the outside of the house! Pictures of the inside will come soon, I promise.
This is our little shed. The part that sticks out to the side is actually a stairwell going down to a cellar type thing. It's really just a giant cylinder of concrete buried in the ground, but it's pretty cool.
This is our pitiful little garage. Our car doesn't even fit all the way in it, and there are no garage doors to fit this size hole. But the other part with the window is a storage area that also has a loft, so that's nice. The other small building is an outhouse. Not in use, obviously, but we could use it!
This is the "back" of the house, but this is the door that everyone uses. It looks like the front of the house from the street. See what I meant about needing a paint job?
This is the front of the house. That platform to the side is the front porch. We don't use that door so we didn't build any steps. For some reason when we bought the house there weren't steps at either porch. You can see the brand new roof really well here!
This is the other side of the house. That is technically the front door. It previously had a roof on that porch. It doesn't look right without the roof which is why we wanted to build a new roof.
This is the back of the house. It is an addition, basically an added-on mudroom. The extra space is really nice.
