Archive for December, 2010
And Now For Some Holiday Window Shopping
As we continue to unpack, we thought we’d share this year’s virtual gift roundup (a la this one from last year). It’s a three-post-in-a-row thing (we couldn’t fit all the pics into one) so stay tuned for two more that’ll pop up today. First we hit up Crate & Barrel. Here’s what we found:
These cute wine glasses were on sale for $1.50, and two of them along with a bottle of inexpensive vino could make a nice little gift for someone that doesn’t drain the ol’ bank account:
This pretty ceramic serving tray was on sale for $5.95, and could be filled with anything from cookies to candy (I’d do an assortment of fancy olives for my Italian antipasto loving mom). Who doesn’t need another serving platter? And one with the Crate & Barrel logo on the back always feels swanky (we’re betting the giftee would never guess it was under 6 bucks).
I also couldn’t take my eyes off these gorgeous $3.95 votive glasses (a gift of three of ‘em with simple white candles inside would be sweet). Full disclosure: if we weren’t packing and moving when we shot these pics, I totally would have snagged a few for myself.
These colorful bowls were $3.95 a pop, so a cute gift idea might be pairing a few of them with anything from a box of your giftee’s favorite cereal to a bag of mixed nuts or caramel corn.
I have a certain bake-happy best friend who I think these $2.95 cupcake-shaped cookie cutters would be perfect for (along with anything from a baking cookbook to a bag of flour, sugar, and baking soda).
We can’t forget gifts for our four-legged friends! And these designer dog toys would look pretty darn cute on the floor:
These feisty little pepper-riddled dishtowels (just $4.95) would be nice for anyone that you know who has red or green accents in their kitchen (John’s mom has a red kitchen at their beach house…).
This is just a DIY idea that we noticed while trolling the store. How creative are these grasscloth wallpaper bookcovers? We’ve seen it done with white or tan craft paper, but the texture from the woven grasscloth is really cool.
We can’t forget our recently acquired patterned napkins (which have a lot of the tones we’re loving for the new house color scheme worked in). They’re were still $2.95 each (marked down from $4.95) when we were there, so a gift of four of them tied with a turquoise ribbon would only run you $12.
Here’s another idea that we thought might inspire some good old fashioned DIY. A big box, bin, or jar of markers, crayons, pipe-cleaners, stickers, scissors, balloons, and other inexpensive (even dollar-store) items could make a really cool “I’m not bored anymore” present for the kid in your life.
These delicate $3.95 ceramic leaf ornaments were so pretty (for gifting to yourself while you’re shopping, or to someone else who might have a penchant for white ceramic things…).
And speaking of white ceramic gorgeousities (not a word, but bear with me), this $6.95 pinecone ornament makes me want to make up words.
And of course we have the obligatory photo of John and Clara in the Clara chair. Lookin’ good guys. Lookin’ good.
And so ends our trek through Crate & Barrel. We’ll be back in a bit to share what other budget friendly things we stalked at Pottery Barn and Urban Outfitters (we took too many pics to roll everything into one post this year). Until then, we’ll just be unpacking… again.
Psst- We weren’t paid or perk’d to mention these items or stores, we just like them and thought you might too.
Day One
We’re running about a day behind since we didn’t have internet at home until late yesterday, but here’s how things looked on Tuesday (our first full day in the house) with all of our boxes littering every room. Goodbye clean blank slate. Hello chaos. Oh and it bears mentioning that nothing is necessarily staying where we put it (we just dropped furniture and boxes around the house, and will definitely be living with things a bit before committing to final placement for anything).
But let’s rewind a bit for a moment. The last time we moved, we were going from NYC to Richmond in a minivan (well, I guess technically we moved one more time three months later from our apartment to our first house, but we borrowed a small trailer from a friend and were able to transfer everything that way). The point? We had no idea what it was like to move with more than five boxes a piece. And I’m not gonna be all rainbows and unicorns about it. It totally bites. But we’re slowly but surely making a dent in things and starting to gain some order. As in, we now know where our socks and underwear are again. And we’ve showered!
We estimate that by tomorrow we should hopefully be mostly unpacked (since we’ve been taking post-writing, picture-taking, Clara-tending, address-changing, and comment-answering breaks between box unloading spurts). Then we’ll be diving into projects like painting, hanging, removing, replacing, floor planning, window treating, etc. We don’t know what we’ll tackle first (it’ll honestly just depend on our mood and what supplies we have on hand). When it comes to big projects we like to save our pennies and plan things to death, but for small things (which we always recommend doing first so you can live with the house a moment before making any dramatic changes that you might regret) we always just dive in and learn as we go. It’s the only way we’ve been able to accomplish things instead of being paralyzed by indecision. So we’ll hang frames somewhere and if we don’t like them we’ll move them. Same deal for picking paint colors and arranging furniture. And we’ll post pics and details as they occur, not to worry! Anyway, on with the messy just-moved-in pics…
Future dining room:
Future office:
Kitchen:
Future living room (furniture won’t necessarily stay in this configuration, it’s just where we dropped it for the moment):
Hall bath (amidst a diaper sprayer installation – more on that here):
Clara’s room (of course rebuilding the crib and getting the basics in there got priority because we wanted her to adjust as well as possible- which seemed to work so far):
Future playroom/kids room (we had to disassemble the daybed to get it down the hall):
The master bedroom (since our old bed frame conveyed with the old house, we’re sleeping on the floor until we build/buy a new one- who knows where we’ll end up on that):
The master sink/bath (we need to raise that tension rod to accommodate our extra long curtain… soon):
No idea what Burger was doing in that picture. Maybe he’s developing an interest in home related details like hardwood floors and molding. Anyway, here’s the sunroom:
And the laundry/mudroom:
Oh yeah and we have another separate entry basement (this time it’s under our bedroom instead of our sunroom) which will be awesome for storing tools, bikes, the lawnmower, seasonal decor, baby stuff, maternity clothes, etc.
So that’s our house. Can’t wait to get things unpacked and share pics as each room starts to take shape and projects start to unfold. Off to unpack more boxes…
Psst- Here’s a floor plan to help you make sense of what room’s what (although we switched Clara’s bedroom and the playroom since the smallest room makes a great nursery).
Psssst #2- We announced the winners of this week’s giveaway. Click here to see if it’s you.
Monday The 13th
You don’t even know the half of our moving day adventure. We glossed over it because we knew you deserved empty shots of our old place and pics of the new house’s interior – but we couldn’t let this story go untold. So take a moment to pantomime the buckling of your seatbelt and get ready to enjoy the ride. As we mentioned earlier, the day started off with an unexpected surprise: a snowstorm. And even though it wasn’t a Friday, the thirteenth of this month (aka Monday) surely lived up to its less than lucky reputation. Which is so not a good thing when it’s closing/moving day.
Sure the snow was pretty, but it definitely had its hand in a few unlucky events that day. Like knocking out power at our attorney’s office, making it a bit more difficult to stay updated on what was happening and get transfers and files through in order to complete our closing on time (which is partially why it was delayed until Tuesday). But that was nothing compared to this, um, predicament:
Yep, that’s our 26 ft U-Haul truck in a ditch, blocking two lanes of traffic. And it’s not just any ditch. It’s the ditch at the end of our driveway- er well, the driveway that we had just sold. So technically, it was someone else’s ditch that was holding my truck captive about an hour before they’d be returning with the keys. Not to mention it was someone else’s mailbox that the truck was precariously leaning against. Sigh.
Here’s how it went down (pun intended). Sherry was already at my sister’s house with Clara and Burger playing the waiting game until we could move into the new house. I had been dropped off at our old house to meet the buyers and their agent so they could do one last walk-through of our old casa before closing (apparently to make sure it was vacant and everything was still intact… can you taste the irony already?). The walk-through went fine and I was leaving right behind them in the giant truck packed full of all our worldly possessions when this happened (though they were already too far up the road to see it). I blame it on some combination of paying too close attention to keeping the front end of the truck from ending up in the ditch across the street, snow that was hiding the edge of the driveway, and general inexperience when it comes to driving a big ol’ truck.
At least that’s how I like to tell the story. Sherry prefers this phone conversation play-by-play:
JOHN: Hey Sherry. Walk-through went fine. They’re off to go close and I’m headed to the new house.
SHERRY: Okay, be very careful. It’s snowy out there so drive as slow as you need, even if people are honking at you. Just take your time.
JOHN: I will. Don’t worry.
SHERRY: Great. I just don’t want you ending up in a ditch or anything.
[HANG UP, SHERRY GOES TO PUT HER PHONE DOWN BUT IT IMMEDIATELY RINGS AGAIN.]
JOHN: Crap, the truck is in a ditch and I think I knocked over the mailbox.
SHERRY: You’re kidding right?
[END SCENE, FADE TO BLACK]
We can laugh about it now, but let’s just say it was definitely a disastrous moment in our heads at the time. We had visions of everything in the truck shattering and having to wait hours to be towed out (which would definitely have pissed off the new owners who would be back with the keys in about an hour after their closing). Fortunately none of that happened. Heck, the mailbox didn’t even fall over.
Once I got the truck towed out of the ditch (within about half an hour- which was truly miraculous in that storm with all the other car-riddled ditches to be attended to) I drove it about one mile an hour over to our new house. Then I called our house’s new owners’ agent and agreed to replace the mailbox post (which had cracked in the process). Between that and the tow truck charge to un-ditch the truck, the whole ordeal ended up costing us $185. Sucky? Yes. But it could have been so much worse (so far not one thing that we’ve unpacked has been broken- which is a total Christmas miracle because the back of the truck crashed down at least 18″ when it slipped off the driveway). We’re just happy it didn’t result in a cracked flatscreen TV, a delayed closing, an injury, or any other number of things that could have gone wrong. And it somehow made making it into our house later that day that much sweeter. Like we’d battled all sorts of insane and unexpected adversity, only to end up where we belonged by day’s end.
Plus, later that night I redeemed myself by surprising Sherry with this:
I snagged it on lunaCielo’s Etsy shop a few weeks ago (after hearing Sherry admire Courtney Cox’s small gold turtle necklace during Cougar Town). I though it made a great house-warming gift because it came with this note about the turtle’s symbolism: “The turtle’s whole life is one of steadfastness, effort, and patience. There is a saying, “Home is where the heart is” — the turtle is always at home within itself.” As we switch from one house to another, it’s a good reminder that our sense of home stays with us wherever we are.
And perhaps on this unlucky day, it was a good sign that even our ditch-bound truck itself was emblazoned with a giant turtle. Coincidence? You be the judge.
So that’s the story of Monday the 13th. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about what can happen when a case of the Mondays merges with that unlucky number…
Did We Make A Profit Selling Our House?
Are you kidding? In this market? Of course not. We managed to sell it for around $5k more than we bought it for back in 2006 (in “the bubble”) and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we spent more than five grand on improvements (we estimate that we spent around $35K on new bathrooms, a new kitchen, new flooring, new windows, a new roof, a new patio, a paved driveway, and upgraded details like crown molding and wider doorways). This is where a “wop-wop” sound effect would come in handy.
But we’re sleeping like babies and are downright giddy about the sale of our house and the purchase of our new one. Why? We’re 100% convinced that the time was right and everything happened the way it was meant to. Are we crazy? Maybe. But here’s our thought process:
- Our monthly payment for the new house is $200 less than what we’ve been sending in for our old much smaller house thanks to historically low mortgage rates and a great deal on the new house (which we never could have afforded in a better market – our offer was well below the asking price and they went for it). More house in a better neighborhood for less money each month? Yes please.
- The unimproved houses in our old neighborhood (which look a lot like ours looked back when we purchased it) are selling for 30K, 40K, even 50K less than ours sold for. So not only were our projects fun and fun to enjoy while we lived there, they seemed to help our house retain its value and even improve upon it (even though we bought it when the market was amazing and we sold when the market was -uh, not).
- We got an offer within just a few days of being on MLS, so that’s a lot to be grateful for in this housing market.
Want more details? Sure. You know we like to talk…
We’re not house flippers, we’re house lovers (hence the blog name). We never moved into our old house intending to flip it or upgrade it for any other reason than to enjoy it and make it the perfect home for ourselves in the time that we spent there. And it was. So the fact that by doing those updates we were also able to keep the house from dropping a lot lower into a price range that actually may have made us cry ourselves to sleep at night really does feel like a blessing. And we can’t forget the inexpensive backyard wedding that we were able to host thanks to diverting our venue rental budget into a new paved driveway and cobblestone patio that were around long after our big day ended. Or the kitchen renovation that spawned a blog that spawned a business that now affords us the opportunity to both work at home with our spawn by our side (sorry for calling you “spawn” Clara- it’s a terribly un-ladylike word).
Plus, it’s easy for us to see the rewards that the new house holds. After all, we’re not just sellers in this buyers’ market – we’re buyers too. And boy is it a sweet time to buy. We’ve scored our new larger house in a nicer neighborhood at a serious discount (we paid over 40K less than it was valued five years ago). Plus since interest rates are awesomely low we’re potentially saving tens of thousands of dollars in interest over the term of the loan. And since we had some nice equity in our old house to roll over into the purchase of the new one (and thanks to that lower interest rate) that’s how we got to that lower monthly mortgage payment that we mentioned above.
Plus we figure that when/if the market recovers in who-knows-how-long, there are greater rewards to be had on our new house than if we had waited around to sell our old one (which might have gone for more money in a few years, but at that point our new house might have been waaaay out of our price range just like it was five years ago when the market was doing gangbusters). And of course we can’t ignore the most important facts: that this new house satisfies our passion for DIY, offers more room for our family to grow, and helps fuel our business. Which is really the day to day stuff that helps with the whole sleeping at night thing.
But let’s revisit that whole 35K spent on improvements, only 5K of which we actually made back in the sale price. The good news is that it’s not like our improvements didn’t serve us at all. Similar houses in our old neighborhood are now selling for muuuuuch less than ours did because they don’t have any of the updates that ours has. In fact a similar ranch on our old street (only about three houses away) that’s notably bigger than ours sold this summer for 50K (!!!) less than our house did. Which makes us feel incredibly good about the improvements that we made to set our former casa apart so that it would not only hold its value but would even creep up 5K since the good ol’ days of the bubble. So although on paper it might look like we lost 30K based on what we paid, how much we put into it, and how much we sold it for- we like to look at it like this: by making the improvements that we did, not only did our old house not drop 50K in value in this bum economy, it also slightly improved by 5K. Call it looking through rose colored glasses if you’d like, but thinking about it that way really helps keep things in perspective.
Oh and here’s another interesting house-for-sale point that our lender made. He has noticed that what homeowners aren’t getting back financially from their improvements, they’re getting back in sale speed. For example, a buyer might not pay much more for your house because it has granite counters, but you’ll get an offer a lot faster than a similar house down the street that’s sporting laminate. And that has certainly been our experience. We were on MLS for 2 days before getting an offer while a similar larger house down the road is going on 4 months without a bite. And it’s listed for $30k less!
Do we wish the market were better? Sure. But we’ve got zero regrets. Some may accuse us of seeing the glass as half full (and we definitely don’t think everyone would make the choice to sell at this time), but these are just a few reasons why we’re so glad to be in our new house just in time for Clara’s first Christmas. Speaking of which, we’ve got some boxes to unpack…
Odd little house made of money in a pot image from here.
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The New Digs
Greetings again from Panera (there’s no internet at home yet – so we stop in, get hot chocolate, and slap together a post or two for you guys whenever we have a spare moment thanks to their free WiFi). We know you’re anxiously awaiting interior shots of our new house all empty and move in ready from yesterday (can’t believe it’s really ours!). So here they are. I ran around quickly, which resulted in some less than perfect shots (our friends and family were outside in the snow waiting to start bringing things in so I made it snappy and didn’t have a chance to record a video so that’ll have to come later). But anyway, this is the blank slate that we can’t wait to start having fun with. Paneling? Check. A yellow and beige bathroom? Check. Dark wood trim? Check. Many different floor choices? Check. Brick that we’re dying to paint? Check. Off-centered windows? Check. Small box-like rooms? Check. Walls to knock down? Check. A sink in the master bedroom? Check.
In other words, we’re insanely excited to get in there and start making our new house feel like it’s really ours. Which usually doesn’t happen until the paint brushes and the hammers come out. And we have to send a huge shout out to the former owners for allowing us to be the lucky new residents of their pride and joy. They even hosted a party to welcome us to the neighborhood a few weeks back and listened with excitement as we mentioned what colors we wanted to paint things and what walls we couldn’t wait to knock down. It has been an absolute pleasure to buy their house.
But enough jibber jabber. You guys are all probably all thinking “just get to the pictures” (if you haven’t skipped this intro entirely and scrolled down already) so here they are. Oh and check out this post for a floor plan description that will probably make a lot more sense of the flow, some of our future plans, etc.
Here’s the exterior in that blanket of surprise snow courtesy of mother nature:
And here’s the room that has us at hello. It’s actually a formal living room with a dining room behind those built-ins, but we’ll be converting the formal living room part into an entryway/dining room with a huge opening on the left wall that leads into the large eat-in kitchen. And that back room that was once the dining room will become our home office thanks to the addition of some pretty french doors.
Here’s a look from the other direction back at the door.
And here’s the long eat-in kitchen we mentioned. Lots of paneling to paint! We’re also planning to paint the cabinets (not sure what color or colors yet) and add a giant island. The opening to the new dining room in the front of the house will be on the right wall in the picture below. We’re hoping to get at least a 5′ pass through so it feels really airy and inviting.
Here it is from the other direction. Another thing we loved about this house from the get go were the wide doorways that it already had. You know we’re suckers for the whole open flow thing.
Here’s another one of those nice wide doorways that leads down the hall (this was taken with my back to the master bedroom facing the front door). Burger likie.
Here’s the room where we’ll do all of our living (when we’re not in the kitchen, since everyone seems to end up there anyway). We realized we never used our formal living room nearly as much as our family room in the old house, so we longed for a bigger all-in-one room to gather (that could accommodate a lot of our large family and a sectional along with some other larger furnishings) instead of having two smaller sitting rooms that were half as functional.
We love that it feels airy and spacious thanks to the generous size and the awesome sliding doors (one leads out onto a raised patio and one leads out into the sunroom).
Here’s the view looking towards the kitchen with your back to that big square window in the picture that’s two images up. We’re planning to make that fireplace a double-sided one so we can enjoy it from the kitchen and from the living room- and we also want to widen that doorway to make the kitchen feel even more connected to both rooms that are on either side of it.
Here’s the sunroom that was added on a while later. The challenge here will be making it feel more integrated with the rest of the house since it feels so modern and new when compared to the rest of the house, most of which was built half a century before.
The other side of the sunroom has an off centered window and some dark brick that we can’t wait to transform.
Here’s the master bedroom. It’s a really generously sized room, and the reclaimed pine floors (with super wide-planks!) are pretty special, so we can’t wait to show them some love.
Here’s the sink in the far side of the room (with a shower and a toilet in a room to the right and a walk-in closet to the left). It’ll definitely be a challenge to make that sink feel integrated since it’s visible from the bed (romantic!) but we have lots of ideas when it comes to getting ‘er done.
Here’s the hall bath that’s back near the other three bedrooms. We love that it’s so similar to the original full bath in our old house (and the tile is luckily in much better shape).
Here’s Clara’s new nursery (it’s almost exactly the same size as her old one):
And here’s the middle bedroom that we’re calling the playroom (it’ll become another kids bedroom when our clan grows someday):
Here’s the guest bedroom that we can’t wait to offer up to family and friends stopping through. Of course we need a bed first…
And here’s they funny little yellow-beige bathroom suite (that room used to be the master before they added the new one along with that spacious living room behind the kitchen, so it has its own bathroom).
Can’t wait to redo this baby.
And here’s the little laundry room that we want to pack with storage and function to create a mini mudroom as well.
We love the lines of the back of the house (and hope to upgrade the exterior up front someday to match…).
Doesn’t the snow make our backyard look so charming? We’re in love.
So there it is. It was totally love at first sight for us. And we’re still so thankful for our buyers agent who convinced us to go look at the house (we snubbed our nose at it because it had a carport, and later learned that the owners were offering a full credit to pay for the conversion from carport to garage so it wouldn’t cost us a dime). Seriously, it makes us crazy to think that we might have missed out on our dream house because we were anti carport. But the (real estate) world works in mysterious ways.
Anyway, we hope you guys enjoy the first of many pics of our new place. Please bear with us when it comes to questions (since we don’t have internet access, and want to spend more time at the new house than Panera, we might not be able to answer a ton of new house q’s). You have our word that we’ll share more details about what will go where and what projects we want to take on as things unfold. We’re all about the whole real-time blog-as-we-go thing. Especially since we have so many new projects to tackle! Thankfully we have nothing but time (at least 4.5 years, since that’s how long the last house took us) to settle in and share every detail with you guys. You know we’re chronic over-sharers, so don’t worry about us sparing any detail. Stay tuned for diary-like updates as we tackle transformations both big and small. Until then, come on in and make yourself comfy in our new home! So glad to have you guys along for the ride.
Psst- You can check out our new BabyCenter post all about Clara’s new room here.
