Six months ago today, we closed on our house. We went to the closing in the morning, signed papers for what seemed like hours, went to lunch to celebrate, and then later that afternoon, drove over to our new house to pick up our keys. When we arrived at the house, Mom was already waiting for us on the porch (after driving for 7 hours!) and we started working right away. In honor of our 6th month anniversary of home ownership, I thought it would be fun to do some comparisons of where we were on closing day, and where we are now. So here they are, the before and now photos:

Downstairs bathroom - nothing. I picked out the new paint color, does that count?? I'm hoping to work on this room next.

Small front bedroom - nothing. This was our storage room for the first few months, but we've basically cleared it out. This is where we put guests when they come to visit (sorry guests!!). It will become our storage room again when we start clearing out the other rooms upstairs to have the floor refinished. Eventually this will be the office.

Small back bedroom - removed carpet and then also nothing. Started removing carpet pad that is stuck to the floor, but stopped. The floor refinisher will remove the rest when he sands. This is now our storage room, we keep the door shut at all times cause it's scary. Sadly, we've been making progress on unpacking boxes but it still looks like we have a lot left.

Upstairs bathroom - removed wallpaper, put giant hole in wall to find window, repaired window, drywall and trim patching around window, removed glass shower doors, removed closet door, removed medicine cabinet, painted closet, vanity, trim, and walls, and installed new light fixture.

We also cleaned the deck and put deck sealer on the entire deck and second floor balcony. It's dark outside so I didn't take any exterior comparison shots :-)

So that's where we are now. It's very easy to get frustrated at times with our progress. I'm getting very tired of having so much of our stuff in boxes still. It's difficult to always be living in a construction zone. All of our money seems to go towards the house. But, after seeing all of these pictures, we really have come a long way in six months. I'm really proud of us and it's a great feeling to have made so many improvements to a house that has so much potential. I can't wait to see where we are in another six months! I think that having the floors done upstairs will be a good start on the work upstairs. And in the spring, we have plans for the yard and some other projects outside. So happy anniversary house, it's been a great first six months!

As you know, we have 2 golden retrievers, Reese and Cooper. Most of the time they are very well behaved and don't get into trouble. Yesterday, they got into trouble. A lot of trouble...

When we lived at the apartment, we kept them mostly in their crate while we were gone during the day. We had an extra room at the back of our apartment where we could leave the crate up and it wasn't in the way, most people didn't even realize it was there. In the house, we don't have a room like that anymore. Our options for dog crate placement were a bedroom upstairs, the basement, or someplace in our dining/living room. We decided that we would just try and see how they did without the crate. They are 4.5 years old, we've left them home alone out of the crate before and they usually are fine. We tried that for a few days and it wasn't working very well.... they were getting onto furniture, and more importantly, trying to look out the front window by putting their paws up on the window, leaving scratch marks on the woodwork. So then we decided to just gate them into the kitchen. We had done this for probably almost a year at the apartment (gated into the kitchen), and this worked fine until they started chewing on things in the kitchen (always this one doorway). That's when we started putting them in their crate almost every time we left the apartment. Anyway, it's been almost 6 months now that they've been gated into the kitchen at the house when we're gone, and for the most part, they have been fine. They started chewing on this little rug that is by the back door, I was annoyed, but I forgave them. But last night, Mike came home and for some reason, they really wanted outside. Outside before he saw what they had gotten into during the day...

They ate my digital camera case.

The camera was inside the case, and while the case is destroyed, so far, the camera seems to still be working. It's kind of scratched up, but hopefully that will be the worst of it. Everything else in the case is also destroyed. My extra memory cards, the adaptor I need to transfer pictures off of the camera, everything gone. One of the memory cards had all of my pictures from Finland on it, but I think (I hope I hope!) I transferred those onto our external hard drive awhile ago, I need to check on that tonight. I will be so upset if I lost my Finland pictures.

So, it might be a little while before I can post any pictures, I need to see if I can buy a new card adaptor. The strange part is that there is so much food that they could get into in the kitchen, and the camera was sitting on the counter right next to a box of chocolates. Why did they eat the camera instead of the food??

Reese and Cooper know they are in trouble. They know they did a very bad thing. And all last night, while I sat there angry at them, they just looked at me with their very best "I'm the most pathetic dog in the world and I'm so so sorry, please just pet me or I might die" look. And I, of course, gave in... I'm still mad, but really, who can resist that look??

But now I'm not sure what to do with them during the day. Should we give them another chance at just being gated in the kitchen, maybe making sure they have extra chew toys? Should we try to set up the cage somewhere? Any other suggestions??

We've decided to go ahead and have the floors upstairs refinished!! See, even though we're not doing very much work on the house right now, we're still moving forward! Earlier in the week we joined Angie's List (online site that lets members provide honest feedback on various companies in their city) to see which floor companies were recommended. We set up estimates with 3 companies, but after the first guy came last night, we decided to just go ahead and hire him. We had already had 3 other companies come out a few months ago to discuss the downstairs floors, so we knew what we were looking for. His price is reasonable, he seems to know what he's doing, and most importantly (to me anyway), he's the one who would actually be doing the work and I feel like I can trust him. I'm really excited!! This is an old picture of our bedroom floor, but you can see how it has paint on it. This room is actually in the best shape, the big back bedroom (den) has some kind of weird tape on it, and the smaller back room (to be guest room) is covered with that yellow carpet pad:He'll also refinish the hallway upstairs. The smaller bedroom at the front of the house (office) was the only room that didn't have carpet when we moved in. The floors in that room are actually a different type of wood, we think maybe hickory?, the rest of the floors upstairs are oak. We would like to refinish the office floors eventually, but since they don't need to be sanded and are in ok shape, we're going to leave that room alone for now. Then we can pack all of our furniture from upstairs into that room instead of having to move everything downstairs. The floor guy said he should be able to come back later and just buff that floor and apply a new coat of poly. Since it's a different type of wood, it won't match the rest of the rooms anyway. Hopefully it will all work out, I don't really want to have to move the furniture downstairs, esp. since some if it didn't fit up the stairs in the first place, and had to be brought in through the second story balcony door.

Does the living room need these chairs??
They are a very dark gray, and I think they would look nice in front of the window seat. I would get 2 and put a little table between them. My only concern is that they might be too formal??

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas, we spent the week in Columbus, it was a fun week, fully of shopping, eating great food, and seeing friends and family. We received some new things for the house for Christmas presents, I'll have to post some pictures when I am more motivated. Right now I'm enjoying being lazy for a little while...