Happy Easter!

April 24, 2011

Happy Easter everyone! Alok and I had a lovely Saturday night last night. We celebrated our Easter Eve with a very long trip to Lowes. We're talking about standing in an aisle for an hour discussing things for the house, leaving to go get food with the hopes that the nourishment would help (ok, really, we thought a margarita may help), and then back to Lowes for about 4 more hours. That is the longest that I have ever spent in that store in my life.

Anyway, prior to going to Lowes, we went over to the house to check things out. No yard elves had magically mowed our lawn, so it is even more ridiculous. Attn neighbors: We should be getting a mower for this house this week, so hopefully it will look better later in the week. As for the multi-colored house and constant pounding sound, there is no hope for those things. Here is the lawn now:




These pictures don't really do it justice, so here is a close up to try to illustrate how tall the grass is and how weird this grass looks:


Moving on inside, Alok has been working hard on tearing it out. I was only in the house long enough to take pics, and I proceeded to cough the rest of the night. And people wonder why we are taking out everything before we move in. Here is the upstairs:


Hallway with the yellow bedroom ahead and laundry room to the right


Ceiling/hallway upstairs


Ceiling/hallway upstairs.... the door to the right is the hallway bath and the door to the left is my office area


Alok wondering what I'm doing, with my office in the background (yes, my office currently has a washer and dryer in it)


Floor of the hallway bathroom. Apparently, this board is loose and someone almost went through the floor here. Oops. We may want to repair that. And we also may want to have anyone who enters the house sign a waiver.

Here are some other happenings in the house:


This was hidden in a downstairs closet, which is now a big hallway. You can still see about 4 types of wallpaper on it.


Random doorway in the middle of the house. I'm not sure where it came from.

Last time we had a dumpster, Alok filled it with 8 tons of plaster. Here is our new one:




Anyone want to take a guess on how much this will weigh?

Notice the toilet in the dumpster? On our trip to Lowes last night, we ended up getting a new toilet that was on clearance. (Yes, we know that we don't have any plumbing right now, but it was a good deal, we also got a sink). Who would have guessed that toilets were so expensive and we'll need to buy 6 of them total. Alok said that we should have kept the old ones, but being that they were all very nasty, leaking, and many had to be chipped out because of the way that the floors were installed, he realized that buying new ones may not be too bad.

We also looked at bath stuff at Lowes. I picked out the tub for the master bath.



Seriously. Of course, it is one of the most expensive ones there, but when we get to the point where we can live in this lovely house, I think we should have one nice one :-) Needless to say, we aren't buying it now. Although, we may want to move some of these things in prior to drywalling in case it can't make it through the door openings.

Our other debate of the day was whether to install a ceiling light in the middle of a living room ceiling. I said yes and Alok acted like I had lost my mind. After dinner, he said that if I could show him 1 living room pic with a light in the middle, he would go for it. Luckily, the design book at Lowes had lights in the middle of about every living room. Debate over.

The debate that isn't over is what to do about the kitchen. Here it is now (or a few months ago... the only difference now is that there is about 6 more inches of dust)








Our plan is to integrate them all into one big room. The is going to require the removal of 2 load bearing walls. Here's the debate: 1) Do we leave this now, which means not really finishing the butler's pantry or anything now (kinda leaving it destroyed) until we have $$$ to do the kitchen, which will be a while. or 2) Do we suck it up and do it now, knowing that we may not be able to finish it, but we'll at least get the walls out (aka we won't have that dust flying later) and we can always re-install these crappy appliances and replace the appliances as we get $$$. So, we'd move the walls, plan it out now and then slowly finish it.

Thoughts? We keep going back and forth. We really never intended to do it now, but I'm not sure how my crappy lungs will hold up if I live there while we do the kitchen.

Sigh. Anyone know an arsonist? JUST KIDDING!!! We're sure the house will be nice eventually. Or that's what we repeatedly tell ourselves.

Jessica