We are homeowners: The saga begans

WE'RE STILL ALIVE ONLY NOW WE HAVE AN ACTUAL KITCHEN O-M-G!!!1!

Firstly, I would like to apologise both of you on behalf of Alicia for her not reminding me to update the site earlier. 

Come with me now, my children, to the dim dark days of December 2020. We closed on the house, which I think is American for "you're going to be paying for this till you're 78," and immediately set about moving our stuff from the small metal box they'd been in since September.

Here's the pod, full of stuff we'd forgotten we owned. We had to make an hour's journey to Albany to open it for the movers, so yay. 

After waiting for them for 40 minutes in freezing temperatures they told us that we didn't have to hang around and could head home. We spent an hour hanging around an empty house, so I took some "before" pics to go with the "after" ones I just took when it occurred to me that it was about time I updated this... wait, I mean for when Alicia reminded me to update it. 

Pictured above is the mudroom, which is a room designed to dump your wet and muddy boots and dogs. Inexplicably it has a carpet, which is not long for this earth, and that lovely white wainscoting doesn't actually go all the way around the walls. 

As the mudroom is not a huge priority it's being done in bits. The fridge is actually from the top floor because the previous owner rented out two of the three floors so each one has a kitchen and bathroom. We have a total of four toilets, which will come in handy after chilli night. 

This room of gloom will be our living room. You can just about see the wood stove on the right, which our home inspector assured us was absolutely bottom-of-the-line and should be replaced. We're looking into a new one, but as they're $3500 we're happy to stick with the underfloor heating for the foreseeable future. 

This is what it looks like right now, with a new hole to the kitchen, grey primer on the walls and new flooring. It's still too dark in here but we have lamps and the huuuge sofa I wanted is being delivered at the end of the month. The walls are going to be painted a sort of burnt orange and our painter is working on getting the living room done fast so we can move out of the the basement ground floor. 

Ah, the basement.

This is it, where we've been living for the past five weeks, although the photo is slightly out of date as we have an actual bed and there's 50 packs of laminate flooring behind the armchair. It's not actually a basement, it's the first floor, but as the important rooms (living, bed, spare, kitchen) are all upstairs we keep referring to it as "the basement". Like all the other rooms it's getting a new floor and paint job, but it'll be the last one to be done.

I don't know why the spare room is painted a shade of maroon that would be more at home on a 1976 Austin Maxi, but it's bloody awful. Also, the floor is just... well, a floor. It's bare boards. 

Here it is, painted, much lighter and for some reason not in widescreen BLOODY PHONE. At the moment it's beautifully furnished with random crap, boxes and stuff moved from other rooms, but who cares? Look at that floor, which stands a 0.3% chance against Erebus' talons.

Here's the top floor, which is going to be our bedroom. The bit to the right is where the little kitchen is.

Here it is, with the flooring almost done and a bed from the same supplier that Wile E Coyote uses for his roadrunner traps. The mattress is "in transit" according to the internet. You can see where the kitchen cabinets used to be; we're waiting on a plumber to show up to disconnect the water pipes under the sink, so the bedroom is basically on hold for a few more days.

And here's the kitchen in its current state of "half done". We were going to have the floor replaced but the cost and time were prohibitive, so we're keeping the 1980s school gym floor for now. I'm not too bothered as the kitchen in our old apartment was the size of the bit where Erebus is.

As for all our stuff:

Here it is, having the holiday of a lifetime in our garage. We obviously cannot wait to start unpacking all this crap.

So that's the state of affairs with the house so far. I'm aiming to update this more as things go on, but right now it's pizza time.