Our First Monsoon

Thomas was just talking to me about how this has been a dry season for Phoenix. We've heard a lot about monsoon season and how crazy it is but we really hadn't experienced much of it. We had gotten a little bit of rain and some thunder/lightning... but it was kind of around us.... not close by.

Well, today we got a monsoon. It was incredible. I was working in the front yard on my little solar lighting project along the walkway. The weather was hot (hot enough that I had to take frequent breaks) and the sky was clear. We had talked about how picturesque the day was just a few hours earlier. All of a sudden (and I mean suddenly!) the sky was dark gray and rumbling! I thought nothing of it at first... but it got crazy quick! I started to see cracks of lightning right overhead! I had to go out back to call Thomas into the house because he was cleaning out the pool with the giant metal rod!

Within minutes, it was a full blown crazy monsoon! Pouring rain, incredible wind, roaring thunder and blinding lightning. I opened all the blinds in the house so that we could see at every angle.

I love this weather. I even went outside several times to shoot video (I knew I wouldn't be able to catch the lightning with a still camera).

Anyway, that's today's big adventure!

Funky Built-In Make-Over

From the moment I saw this wall of make-shift shelving, I knew that I wanted to rip that thing out!
The cubbies were an odd size, the bookshelves were limited and where the television is meant to go is all sorts of wrong. For one thing, built-ins like these don't really work with modern television sets... flat panel televisions make for lots of wasted space in built-ins like these. (I realize that we don't have a flat panel television- but we do want to get one in the near future). Also, this built-in would require that our television set be less than 35" and that just isn't something that we want to commit to. Lastly, if we were to use this space to house our tv set.... it would be on the ground. We would be looking down at it, and it would subsequently require that our couch be positioned in front of our big beautiful front window.

Unfortunately, our budget ran out quickly (thanks to lots of paint and new carpeting) so we had to settle with the fact that this wall was going to be here for a while. A quick coat of paint instantly made it look 100x better! But now I was faced with the obstacle of coming up with a functional use for this funky space.

I used another DIY blog to come up with some simple and affordable ideas. I found some storage ottomans in the "dorm room" section of Kohls so I scooped up two of them to serve as additional seating for if we ever have more people over than traditional chairs. I also found some collapsible storage cubes that I thought could be handy for extra blankets on chilly evenings. To round it out I used the book shelves to store our smaller (in size) book collection and also put the porcelain kitty treat jar and silk hat box to fill in extra spaces and add some color.

For the finishing touch- I hung a "B" in the main space. I love monograms and had been looking for a nifty way to incorporate one in our home. Luckily, this "B" was hanging out in the clearance section :)

Here's the finished product:

I really like the space now! It fills it up without looking cluttered and the cats kinda dig the extension of their cat tree (which is on the other side) as you can see from Misty sitting on her perch.

Carpet Install

We knew that getting new carpet was going to be essential when we moved into our house. The old carpets were stained and filthy.... and they were old. We couldn't move anything into the bedrooms until new carpet was put in so after the walls were painted we called to have an estimate done.

We wanted to make sure that we got good, durable carpet. One that can handle having cats (and later kids) and possibly stains. Having the best meant spending a little more but we're happy with the results. The carpet we settled on is highly stain resistant (we've already had a cat barf incident) and we are very happy with the look. We chose the color Sweet Cream (why is this stuff always named after food?) and it's super squishy to walk on. As you can tell from the picture I've posted below... Thomas likes it :) His sister even commented that it looked like a Febreeze advertisement!!! Ha ha!
We didn't replace the carpet in the living room because when the old tile gets replaced we figured we would just use tile (or laminate) in that room as well to give it a continuous look throughout the house. Plus, in Phoenix, carpeted living rooms are very rare. So we'll have to live with the old dirty carpet in there for a bit longer :(

Once the carpeting was in we could start moving things into the bedrooms!

Painting!!!

When we got into our house the walls were a boring, bland white. It had no life, no style, and more than that, it was dirty! The walls were painted without a gloss to it so anything on the walls couldn't really be wiped off without leaving a scrubby mark on the paint.

To fix it, we chose a light satin gloss Valspar paint in a sandy color. To make sure our whole house wasn't super boring we chose to accent a few walls here and there with a slightly darker sandy paint.

Prior to us moving out here and buying our first home, we had saved up a pretty penny so that we could make any house out here our home. We thought that we had saved up enough to to most (if not all) of the upgrades we wanted but it quickly became quite clear to us that these things were not as inexpensive as we had budgeted for. The first slap in the face came with the paint.

We chose Valspar paint because the helper bee working at the paint station had mentioned that you would only need to use one coat of paint and that one gallon should cover about 400 square feet. HA! We had to purchase twice as much paint because not only did it require at least two coats but one gallon did not go as far as the retailer had suggested! No big deal.... we bought a lot of paint. We were just disappointed that our savings was taking it's first big hit.

Prepping the house for painting wasn't as extensive as most other painting projects either. We didn't have to throw down the plastic tarp to protect the carpet because it was the next thing to get ripped out- and why waste the extra time and expense to protect something that's being tossed anyway, right? We just had to take down the window treatments (something else we're debating upgrading in the future) and tape off the molding, light switches, and outlets.It took me about a week to paint the whole house. It was exhausting! Thomas helped me with some of the prep work but his main job was working on the outside of the house. He hates painting and I hate yardwork- we thought it was a fair deal.

I don't know if I'll ever paint an entire house myself again! Ideally I would only paint one room at a time but with an empty house we needed to take advantage!

(Above is a "before" picture of our living room built-ins and the "after")

More posts to come on our continued home improvement projects!

Clean Clean Clean

So, since Thomas and I have arrived in Phoenix we have successfully moved into our new home, Thomas has begun working for the Mayo Clinic Hospital (yay!) and I have started to work remotely.

While adjusting to our new surroundings and new work arrangements we also have to juggle making our house into our home. Before we bought it, our house was used as a rental property and was treated like a rental property :( The carpets were disgusting, the pool was a mess, the toilet was rusty.... this place just lacked some major TLC.

The first thing we did was hire a cleaning company! What a lifesaver! It would have taken the two of us all day to clean this place! Everything needed to be wiped off, sanitized, swept, mopped, etc. There was dog hair everywhere and dust had settled in the few months that it had been vacant. Plus, (and this may just be me) I get the eebie jeebies thinking about what invisible germies I might be coming in contact with when cleaning up after Lord knows who.

Two wonderful women from a local MaidPro scrubbed the inside of the house from top to bottom while Thomas and I focused on getting things off of our moving truck. That saved us sooo much time! Anytime we move in the future (and hopefully those moves won't be numerous) we intend to have a cleaning service come through to prep the place for us.