Home Sweet Home 🙂

We will be painting the porch ceiling blue like the sky in an attempt to fool insects into thinking it is the sky and not building nests there. Sound far fetched? Well the internet seems torn, but at the very least it’ll be pretty and southern 🙂

http://www.sherwin-williams.com/home-builders/color/education/sw-article-pro-thewhysbehind.html

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/look-painted-ceilings-of-the-s-82029

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/repel-insects-with-color-145178

Hopefully the title didn’t fool you into thinking that we now have them. Instead we’ve ripped out some more. This room had an elevated carpeted floor where someone had tried to offset the balance of the house by building the floor at an angle to the floor joists. The best part was that the house had clearly settled since they’d done this and the floor was still slanted.

A bit of original? or at least very old hardwood found in the corner. They’re going to save what they can and stagger it with the new wood. To save money they’re going to leave it unfinished and we’ll have to tackle that DIY project (eek!)

It’s gotten worse since this, so we currently have no access to our parking area, so thank goodness we have understanding neighbors.

All our gutters hanging out in the foyer (which now has floor joists!)

**I posted this a bit ago but accidently made it a new page instead of a new post**

More new siding! They’re still not quite finished because they ran out of siding, but they’re very very close!

I’m note sure how they’re going to fix this guy, since when they raised the house he was suddenly too short to reach the porch.

This window sill was completely rotten and had to be replaced.

2 years ago Chris and I took engagement photos and 1 year ago we took wedding pictures. Noah Magnifico (http://magnificophotography.com/) took both these pictures.

2010:

2011:

It seemed like a shame to break our picture-taking streak so Chris and I had a photoshoot with Amy Allen (http://www.amyallenphotography.com/index2.php#/home/) for our 1 year anniversary. I love the idea of doing one of these every year so we can look back through the years. My stipulation would have to be that it would be possible to place the pictures in time based on ___________. So our engagement pictures should be easily placeable since I had an engagement ring but no wedding band and we were in Blacksburg, our wedding pictures should be easily placeable because of every single thing in them (wedding dress and suit, fancy hair, flowers, makeup, fake eyelashes, etc.), and this year’s pictures should be easy to place because of the house. Once we have kids their ages will help place the years as well.

2012:

More siding!

Monday Chris and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary. Since we’ve been moving around a lot/ homeless eating out has sort of lost it’s appeal so we decided to have our first nice dinner celebration at the house.

The first requirement was a fan which you can see Chris putting together. After that we had: champagne, raspberry lemonade, water, strawberry-spinach salad, sourdough bread, fancy salami, super fancy cheese (from http://www.reliablecheese.com/), blackberries, strawberries, and then our 1 year anniversary cake from Blue Moon (http://www.bluemoonbakery.com/home.php). The cake was free since we got out wedding cake there, and was a smaller version of the layer we cut into: chocolate cake with chocolate raspberry mouse and vanilla buttercream. Their cakes are amazing and we only got the one bite each at the wedding so this was really great!

It was a very nice anniversary! We also did a photoshoot, sort of like another set of engagement pictures, so those pictures will be posted here eventually but you can currently see some of them here: Amy Allen’s Facebook.

We have siding! It’s not completely finished yet, but I’m very please to announce that people can no longer shimmy into our house via a gaping hole in our wall! Things really feel like they are moving forward!

So what happens when you jack a house up 3 inches on one side? Well for one thing you get some cracks in the plaster. Chris and I went on a hunt for things that had broken/cracked and it was weirdly satisfying. We had expected some damage and seeing it really made it feel like we were moving forward. Weird huh? The last pictures shows something I had not expected, none of the doors would shut afterwards. It makes sense to me now but it was a little disconcerting to walk away from the house and leave everything open! Next time we went by they’d been fixed though.

As part of our FHA loan we had to plan for some repair to the plaster, so hopefully this will not go beyond the scope we laid out.

Since I’ve been so slack about posting (honestly I always think about posting but never actually do- I blame the fact that my iphone app isn’t very good.)

So we went by the house one day to find the beginnings of a foundation had been put in place. This was about a week ago and was very exciting (warning: we’re at a stage where everyday something exciting is happening!)

So then we go by the house 2 days later…

Can you see it? There is a layer of bricks sitting on the cinderblock that wasn’t there in the first 2 pictures. They raised the house 3 inches on this side. Chris is posing to show how level the support beam under the door is, unfortunately my camera was not level so it doesn’t look good at all. In person it’s looks quite level and is a huge improvement over the slant we had before!

So I was posting about the backyard for awhile but haven’t update anyone on it lately. Basically by the time I got a decent chunk cleared out the sections I had already did had grown back up. This completely killed my motivation to continue so I left it alone for a few weeks. Ultimately we decided that the little saplings were stronger then we were. Our new plan is to cover the entire backyard with a tarp and cook everything living for the summer. Then in the fall we’ll rake everything up and put down sod, which will hopefully choke out everything that survives. I used 2000 sq. ft of tarp and missed 3/4 of the perimeter so I’ll have to buy more tarp and return tomorrow. I’m not 100% confident this will work but we’re going to give it the old college try.