The house.

STARTED THIS A WEEK AGO......

I realize I was quite harsh on ASU's fashion sense but hey, sometimes you've just got to be straight up honest and it seems like no one ever is these days.

BUT.... I'm moving on to a new topic!!!!!

12 days ago my house officially closed. Yes, after months of drama drama drama.... heads banging against walls, dreams pulverized to fine powder and set on fire, I found a house I wanted and one that I get to keep.

Here it is:

I've never seen this picture with tacky little statues scattered about the yard but I just realized I did not have an outside picture so google provided.

This house is TRASHED. I am not one of those people that goes, "ew gross there is dirt on the floor. I'd better keep my shoes on so I don't get dirty!" No. That is not me. I have been through enough extremely dirty houses in my house shopping that I hardly even notice it anymore.

But this house. . . . . oh my. I cannot even figure out how a house could become so absolutely tragic. Let's start from the moment you walk in the door.

Not too bad, right? A normal hallway with a closet, wallpaper, and ceramic tile. . . . . totally typical. But then I tore down the wallpaper. All three layers. It was quite an adventure. In fact, weeks later I still have not finished the last touches because I had such an absolutely fantastically fun time doing it before that I wanted to save the best for last. I found a few holes in the drywall that they had wall papered over too. One of which was covered up with duct tape. I couldn't stop laughing.

On your right you look through this archway into the dining room and sunken living room. See the beautiful carpet? This is my favorite spot of carpet in the whole house. It's not worn out really. It's not dirt. It is oil. Still haven't figured that one out but I wished I would have worn gloves when I ripped it out. 

Here's a view of the whole dining room and living room. With my grandpa inspecting the window sill. Yes, my REAL grandpa :)

And in case you were confused, there is indeed an entire wall of mirrors. It's amazingly strange.

Then one day. . . I began ripping out the carpet. . . . . . . . . . .

and discovered this! 

But moving on. 

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My kitchen: 

Not much to say about it other than it now has been mostly scrubbed and has a new black fridge and oven in it :)

Here is my bedroom. It also has a full mirror on the 

wall. I'm kinda in love with the ideas of what I can do with it. I love my window/mirror markers and now I have a huge new space to attack. I ripped down all the wall paper and ripped up all the carpet and am planning on dousing the room in blue and green.

This is the bathroom/closet side of my bedroom. I'm a little bit in love. I bought one of those string doorways to hang over the doorway in. I have a walk-in closet on the right, sink on the left, and toilet and shower behind that. 

This is the fireplace in my family room. As you can tell from the wall paper it is at the end of the entry hall. The thing I am most excited about is that I can pretend to have a real Christmas and build a fire and hang stocking on the mantle place. And maybe pick up some snow from work to made it complete. 

Here is a lovely side view of it looking in at the kitchen and front door. 

Here are the bathrooms! First is the hall bathroom in which I finished taking down the wallpaper and took up the tile. Never again do I want to chip out tile adhesive. NEVER.

Do you see this not lovely tile? It severely worried me and up it came.

Oh and here is the window. We're still working on getting this situation solved.

Both bathrooms have shell sinks. It kind of makes me happy. But then again I am a little bit ocean obsessed.

Now on to the master bathroom. We spent a few days scrubbing the brown tile in the shower and it miraculously turned yellow but for some reason I am not finding the photographic evidence of that today so we will move on.

The floor had linoleum on it that simply would not do and was curling up around the edges and worn out in the middle so once again I started another floor project. It's not the tile that is the problem pulling up. That part is actually quite easy. It's the who-knows-how-many-years-old adhesive underneath that you have to chip out with chisel and hammer. And no, getting the floor wet did not work. 

This is Trogdor the dragon. Can you see him?

Tabitha dear came and scrubbed the floor of my shower while I chipped out tile. 

She also pulled up the bottom track for the shower door and cleaned that out. Let's get a closer look :)

Yes... mmmmmm yummy. Somehow I think that after years of water penetrating beneath the shower door along with a numerous amount of cooties, the caulking just didn't survive. 

Brianna dear helped me scrape "popcorn" off the ceilings. We got 3 bedrooms mostly done in about 4 hours or so. 

See? Look how lovely they are without black dusted popcorn and black spiderwebs. And by black, I do indeed mean black. My house's spider webs are extra special. 

This past week we finished scraping all the ceilings. Hooray!!! Also took down the big shelf in the family room which you can see from the last paint job. My house has signs of this everywhere. I mean, the shelf I almost understand painting around. But there are other places where they didn't even move whatever was in front of the wall out of the way. Half the wall will be painted and then it will randomly stop. For example, beneath the bookcase there is a tan square where someone was not moved. I just don't understand. 

The thing with scraping off white ceiling texture is that the texture gets EVERYWHERE. One day when I was especially covered in an excess of powder I felt like a vampire with ultra pale skin. Made my day and was a nice laugh in the middle of monotonous spraying the ceiling and scraping it off. 

I've begun walking around my house barefoot now that the carpet is all gone and the floors have been swept and mopped at least once. I failed to remember that my feet were covered in ceiling when I stood on the fireplace to change a CD.

After the ceilings were finished the next step was to wash walls with this solvent called TSP (tri-sodium phosphate). I often refuse to call it that though. My mother must have forgotten that I am a chemistry nerd. Or was but I terribly miss it sometimes so I still believe I am. Let me break this down for you less nerdies. . . tri: 3 + sodium: Na + phosphate: PO4 = Na3PO4. Tri-sodium phosphate :)

My beautiful Stephannie and Brianna friends started this washing adventure with me and helped me out one night. Right after the second AC unit died. Yes, the day after the house closed the second AC unit died. What luck. 

Any guesses as to which half of this wall has been washed? 

Perhaps you need another view. Let's just say that when my mother saw this she commented on how the walls didn't need painted as bad as we thought. Just needed washed off. 

After the walls were painted I started marking some of the places the drywall guys needed to fix. You see, in addition to bad paint jobs, my house has an incredibly large number of bad patch jobs too. 

So current status of my house at this moment: 2 new AC units, inspected for termites (the company that fixed the problem in April will be coming back to hopefully get rid of the termites a little bit more permanently) carpet is gone, bathroom tiles are gone, shower is scrubbed, ceilings are scraped and retextured (and from what I heard from my grandma on the phone yesterday apparently they are painted too. Wish someone would have informed me that my house was being painted without me.), walls are washed, kitchen cabinets are mostly scrubbed clean, most holes are patched properly. . . . I think that is it for the moment. 

Goals for this week: 

1) finish drywall

2) paint all ceilings

3) paint kitchen

4) finish kitchen (appliances, cabinets)

5) sand baseboards

6) begin painting ? 

more updates later.

Check out my old fashioned dress off of 5th Avenue I was rockin' last week:

And appreciate the blonde hair.... 

Because it should be a lot-a-bit darker by tonight.