Day one-Smells like victory!

Well, today's the day! We now owe a house--that is, we are homeowers. (Thanks Aunt Sally for letting me use your tagline.)

It's been a long road, both in the bumpy ride through the search, offer, inspection, escrow process as well as the looooooong process to get here. You see, it takes a long time to recover from a jack@$$ landlord who screwed us up, down and sideways back in 2002, leaving us in a very bad place. The recovery from having someone take every dime to your name to being able to set foot in your very own place is exhausting but exhilarating in the end. I guess it makes the process seem like more of an achievement!

Here's a little preview of the place if you haven't seen it:



So here we are. The plans from here? This evening we are playing CSI-Home Edition. We plan to truck on over to the house, with two little dogs, some wine, cheese, duraflame log, matches, a belt sander, utility knife and electrical ground tester.

Aha! I have your attention now, don't I? Well, if you know us, those are the ingredients for a good time! Seriously though, our goals tonight are to check out the electrical system--we need a few more outlets in the kitchen and living room, and need to see if we can tackle it ourselves or if we need to call in the pros. Plus, one or two outlets are still knob and tube, and the DVR, TV and stereo system won't work too well in it. The ground tester will tell us which outlets are the K&T.

Then we rip up the carpet. The blood red carpet. There are the original hardwoods underneath, but someone painted them. So we have to see what a project it's going to be to sand and refinish them ourselves. So we attack the floors with a drum sander, we'll know more. If the paint gums up the sandpaper, we're calling in a pro. If it doesn't, it'll be DIY time.

If we can do the electrical and floors ourselves, we are going to start with closing off the door to the kitchen (framing, drywall, etc.), the demoing the kitchen cabinets and installing electrical in the kitchen, getting Ikea cabinetry and doing a "mini-remodel" of the kitchen, getting rid of our carpetburn in the kitchen problem!

The kitchen is what I'm most worried about. We've gone over the #'s about 100x, and if we can do it all DIY, then it should cost about $4500, and that's being generous. And it's within our budget, but that seems REALLY low to me. So I've said that we need to have $8K ready for it. And I guess we do, but it still scares the bjesus out of me.

If we do it now though, it will be much less of a headache. We have the kitchen in the duplex to cook out of and we won't have to move out of that place until the 20th, so we won't have the added cost of eating out for a month while we get it done.

So we'll know more tonight!!!

Here is the cabinet line we'll be using for the kitchen (yes, we will be putting in wall cabinets too):