Befores

At the beginning of August we bought our first home.  It was a whirlwind of an experience!  We'd been planning on waiting almost a year longer to start house hunting seriously, but several factors changed our minds.  The biggest factor was finding this spacious house for a good price.  In fact, the price was so good I was wondering what was wrong with it.  We found it online Thursday night, I looked at it Friday morning while Walter was at work so we could rule it out if there were real problems (there weren't) and then Walter saw it for the first time on Saturday.  We also looked at other house options, not wanting to buy the first house we saw, but in the end this house won.  We've talked about buying a fixer-upper since we were married and this was the perfect one for us.  It was well-maintained structurally, electrically, plumbing, etc. but basically was ugly.  We can fix ugly.

So on Monday we put in an offer on the house.  It was accepted the same day and 2 1/2 weeks later we closed on the house!  We started working on the house that afternoon.  We had a baby due 5 weeks later and school starting in two weeks.  So I gave us one week to get as much work done on the house before we moved as we could.  That way we could move in a week before school started and be at least a little settled for the girls' sakes.

After we got started a little I remembered to take some "before pictures.  Some work had already been done but it was pretty much just laying stuff out and spackling the walls where there were dinks, etc.  Also, I only took pictures of the upstairs because that's all we'd have time to work on before moving in, and even that was pretty ambitious.

Let's start the tour.  This is the dining room.  I'm standing in the living room taking the picture.  The two rooms are really one, but the living room portion is recessed, making it a little deeper.  I wish the colors turned out better.  The bottom is clearly a baby blue and the top is a sort of pale, yellowish-mint green.

This is the view of the living room from the dining room.  Same colors.  We set up our work station in there, as you can see.

Here's the kitchen.  Honestly, this picture blows my mind.  It actually looks kinda nice!  The same thing happened in the listing online.  It looks like the cabinets, countertops and floors are all fairly new, in good shape and much brighter than they are in real life.  I would have probably left the kitchen untouched if this were true.  In fact, the cabinets were a cream color, the countertops off-white and the floors a sort of grayish green color.  We're pretty sure they're asbestos tiles, too.  The countertops are corian countertops and are in very good shape.  The color wasn't so bad, except that everything was dirty/dingy and the other colors in the room made the countertops look old and yellowed.

Here's the other side of the kitchen, the eat-in area.  Once again, it doesn't look too bad in the picture.  The yellow is a little softer than in person and the whites are brighter.  Plus, and this is a theme throughout the whole house, you can't see the paint job itself.  The paint jobs were generally bad.  Sometimes they were only one coat where there clearly needed to be two.  Sometimes paintbrushes had obviously been used, leaving the walls very not smooth.  Speaking of not smooth, when they patched the walls I don't think they sanded down the spackle.  So the walls were the opposite of smooth.  This is in addition to the millions are areas that probably should have been patched and never were.

 Here's the den/playroom.  We call it the play room now.  The living room is the adult room.  It's not formal, but I try to keep toys out of there so we have a place to relax that stays generally clean.  The playroom is where we keep all the toys and, well, the kids play.  To translate the picture, the walls are sort of a pastel pinky-mauve color.  There's paneling on three and a half of the walls (The wall that's not visible has chair rail with no paneling on top.) and the walls look as if someone hit them with a chain.  There were little dents all over the place!!!  To the right of the fireplace is a little nook with an office built-in area.

 Here's a view of the playroom while I'm standing to the right of the fireplace.  On the very right in this picture you can see Rebecca walking out of the kitchen, to give a little perspective.  The doors on the left in the picture lead out to our sunroom(!).  Oh, and the doors resting against the wall used to be hung between the kitchen and dining room.  They were two doors and they automatically swung closed when you opened them.  They were finger pinchers waiting to happen is what they really were.  So one of the first things we did was to take them down and just have a doorway sized walkthrough there.

This is our front entry.  This is the view from next to the playroom.  To the left you can see the entry into the living room.

Now we're heading back down the hall to the bedrooms.  This is the kids bathroom.  I love the layout because the sink and linen closet are separated from the toilet and tub by a door.  I'm sure we'll be very happy to have that separation as the kids get older!  However, the wallpaper will be leaving us and the cabinets need some freshening up.  I don't love the old shell sink either, but that's definitely a down-the-road project.

Here's the other part of the bathroom.  I wish you could see the state of the walls in here.  Not only are there dinks in the walls, but there are raised parts where they must have painted over whatever was on the wall, like perhaps pieces of old wall-paper still clinging to the wall in some places, or in others large clumps of dust.

This is the girls' room.  It's got the same green and blue the living room/dining room did.  But in here most of the room is green with a blue accent wall.

This is the boys' room.  It's mostly cream with the pinky-mauve color from the playroom as the accent wall.

The awesome part of the boys' room is their closet.  It's wallpapered with different kinds of what appears to be comic book shelf paper.  It's actually really neat.  We're keeping that!

This is the master.  I think it was also the green with a blue accent wall.

This is another shot of the room from the far wall.  You can see that our walk-in closet door is right behind the door leading into the bedroom.  I like having a closet door, but the two always hit each other.  So Walter finally convinced me to take it down and it's a lot better.  I'd still like to figure out some solution so we can't always see into our closet.  All I've come up with is to hang a curtain.  I don't love the idea, but we'll see.  On the left in the picture is our master bath.

And here's the close up!  Once again the paint-job is really bad, although you can't tell in the picture.  The cabinets are new, as is the toilet.  Very nice!  The medicine cabinet mirror is also new and offers excellent and needed storage in this little bathroom, but is an awkwardly large size!

Gotta love those floors!

Oh, and here are the floors in the hall bathroom.

While I'm on the floor kick, here's a view of our floors in the front of the house.  That's right.  We've got three different kinds of wood laminate.  The foyer is sort of rustic, the living room/dining room is a darker, almost cherry laminate and the rest of the house is a lighter laminate.  And they all three meet right here.

 Oh!  And I can't forget what is probably the most awesome part of the whole house!  We have a faux drawer that houses a built-in, pull-out ironing board right between the sink and the refrigerator!  Now that's not something you see every day!  And how efficient!  I can do my ironing while I stir pots for dinner!

One last shot:  Walter and me as we were working well into the night that first night.  

So that's it for the upstairs, folks.  Coming soon: progress.

Also, a little explanation on the name of this blog:  One thing that I thought was cute about the house was that it's on Peacock Dr.  I can't call it a major selling point or anything, but I do think it's a cute street name.  And as we considered houses (Ya know, over a two-day period.) we always referred to this one as the Peacock House.  So, in honor of beautifying this house, I thought "Peacock's Plumage" was a good analogy for where we're hoping to take it.