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.

Bye Cali!

So in March, Thomas and I finally found out where we will be for the next 4 years! Thomas "matched" into the Mayo Clinic Neurology program! We are all so proud of him... all of his extremely hard work has paid off!
We were very excited at the idea of being able to start our new life somewhere different. Both of us spent most of our lives in California and we thought that there would be no better time to pick up and move to another state than now. We had no house, no kids, nothing that could really hold us back. Besides, it's only for 4 years.
I dove right in to looking for an apartment in the area and played with the idea of renting a house. When I saw how inexpensive housing was here I decided to look into how much real estate was here. To our happy surprise, we could afford a house!

We came out to Phoenix on the weekend and looked at a couple of houses. The whole thing happened so quick! On Tuesday we were talking about the possibility of buying a house, on Friday we were looking at houses, on Sunday we were making an offer on one! Wow, mind-boggling!

Through much stress and headaches, two months later we had a house!

We've got a lot of work to do on this place to make it our own... but I'll be using this blog to post updates and new pictures. I'm getting a lot of inspiration from a couple who write the blog younghouselove.com.... I love it.

Anyway, we're in Phoenix and loving it so far. We miss our families but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and we plan on taking full advantage of our many new and exciting adventures out here!