Finally Started

I've wanted to start a home improvement blog for a while now. And we'll mix in some family updates too. I know several of you have been doing this for some time. I guess it takes some people longer to get things going than others...

Anyway, on to our house. We bought our first home on February 6, 2009 and let me tell you, after almost 9 years of living in an apartment, we were ready for some room. Our home has 3 (almost 4) bedrooms, 2 baths (one upstairs, one down), a basement, a garage (with shop :), a fenced backyard, and is located on a side street. It was built in 1940 so there are plenty of fixing projects to do. Which is what I want to keep track of on this blog. I've been keeping a written home improvement journal since we started, but I lost it twice. This way I won't lose it quite as fast and we can more easily share our progress with those who might have an interest.

While we were house shopping--which we did for about 2 years--we made a list of all the things we wanted in a home. And with the exception of staying in our ward boundries, this one fit all the requirements. We found this house in December of '08 and it was listed at $84,000. We looked through it with our realtor and quite liked it. There was an LDS family living in it and we could tell they liked living here as they had done several fixing projects on the house and were in the process of working on the basement. On one of our walkthroughs I took measurements of all the rooms and made a Google Sketchup drawing of the house--mostly so we could be sure our table and chairs and other furniture would fit. If I can figure out how to post the file, I will, otherwise I'll put it on our website when we get it going.

Anyway, we sat on it over the holidays and after people got back to work, our realtor called and said they lowered their asking rice to $79500. We decided on a full price offer with the sellers paying the closing costs. They accepted within 2 hours and we were in a month later. We did have it inspected and the inspector didn't find anything we didn't already know about. The only major draw back was the electrical needed upgraded. Which we did two weeks after moving in.

Our move went very well. We used the month between bid acceptance and move in to pack and get all things prepared so when the big day came and all the help showed up, we got all our stuff moved in about an hour. Loaded and unloaded. We had a lot of help from both our old ward and our new one.

So that's how we got our house. My next post will be what I've written so far in my hand written journal.