Wednesday, March 20, 2013

We own a house!

 We got in to Phoenix on Friday, March 8th.  Stayed in a hotel Friday night, moved to base TLF's on Saturday and stayed there Saturday - Wednesday.  My parents got to Phoenix on Sunday evening, and we closed on our first house on Monday!  Here's the grand - pre-renovations - tour.  It already looks a lot different, but here's what we bought.



The entry way, formal living room and formal dining room

The kitchen with eat-in area behind the island

Staircase to the upstairs

Downstairs guest bedroom
Downstairs/guest bathroom

Family room


Master bedroom

Part of master bathroom (door on the right is the toilet room)
Other part of the master bathroom  (2nd vanity not pictured)

Half of the master closet
(This closet is about 4 times bigger than our bathroom was in Italy)

Upstairs hallway
Master bedroom is right to the right (not seen), hall closet, Ben's room is next to the closet, Abbie's room is straight back, the play room is right next to Abbie's room and the upstairs bathroom is next to the playroom/across from the closet

The playroom

Upstairs bathroom

Ben's room and walk in closet

Abbie's room and walk in closet

Part of the back yard

Our pool!!!  Who's coming to visit?!

Built-in grill that's hooked up to the house gas.  (My stove is also gas.)

Not pictured is the 3 car garage with a whole bunch of built-in cabinets and shelving, under stairs closet with lots of shelving, side yard with more trees and my raised garden with sprinkler system already installed, and the rest of the porch that has ceiling fans and shades that roll up and down.  The previous owner also gave us a less than year old lawn mower.  The house included all the kitchen appliances and also fairly new washer and dryer set.  This house has a lot of great features, one of which is a built-in sound system in the living room and master bedroom.  We are really happy with it.

That being said, it also needs a LOT of work to get it updated.  We put carpet in all of the upstairs bedrooms and hallway (which were originally tiled - pics on what it looks like now coming later) and replaced the carpet in the family room and living/dining room and stairs so they all matched.  We've repainted most of the first floor and we will eventually repaint most of the second floor also.  In our repainting, we discovered that the original wall color was this horrid PINK color.  Gross.  All of the door handles, bathroom faucets and light fixtures and drawer/cabinet pulls are gold and silver, so we plan on eventually replacing all of that as we get the money for it.  We discovered on one of our 28 trips to Lowe's in the past week that interior door handles are $20-40 EACH and we have about 15 of them to replace.  Yay.  We're going to replace the ceiling fans on the 2nd floor also since they are pretty dated.  We're putting a back splash up in the kitchen and I've already ripped down the vertical blinds and have plans to put sheer curtains up in their place - once I get my sewing machine, that is.  We're still debating painting the kitchen cabinets white, but right now we're all painted out and we still have the entire stairwell and upstairs to paint so if we do redo the cabinets, it won't be any time soon.

We're loving being able to call this place our own, although we've spent a scary amount of money at Lowe's already and we haven't even owned the house for 2 weeks!

I'll get more pictures up of the renovations as soon as possible.  Please come visit us!!!  We'd love to have guests!

7 comments:

Jane said...

What a great house! That pool will be so fun! And the outdoor space is just great!

Chrissy Thomas said...

Great house Monica and welcome back to Phoenix!

Snakeye said...

Nice... I love house renovating. You're doing it right also: In our first house, we renovated more and more as we had it... right until the 3-year point when we moved out. After that, I vowed never to renovate like that again unless it's something that we're gonna be in for more than5-6 years. I had felt like I wasted all my money and time only to give it all up after 3 years... so I caution you to not go too overboard.

Shelly said...

I like the kitchen and the built-in in the family room is great! I think putting carpet in upstairs was a good choice. It looks great. I cannot wait to see all the changes you make.

Brittney said...

Cool beans, I love the palm trees in the back yard! I will take a hop to come visit :)

Elsbit said...

Make sure to post your after pics! I love seeing them. And you already know when we are coming. :) Email me when you get a chance and things slow down.

Amanda said...

So jealous! It is beautiful. Love how it looks from the road too! I am sure you guys are more than excited to have that much space after being overseas!