And We're In!

After one year, two realtors, 87 houses, six offers and one "almost" purchase (seemed like the end of the world at the time, but in hindsight, thank God it did not happen!), we finally closed on our first home on November 30th! Yay! What an amazing feeling it was to finally have the keys. What a not so great feeling it was to scrub every inch of the place! Wow. It's amazing that people can be so dirty!

The house has a lot of great updates, but there's still lots of work to be done, and of course some things I want to change - especially the paint on the walls! But, we'll get there and are so excited to make it our own. Here are some "before" photos. "After" photos to come after we actually start decorating and getting work done. Since we're painting I just threw a few things up on the walls for now, so it's pretty bare, but it won't be for long! I just picked up the engagement photo we had framed - 2 years later! (you'll learn this about me as you read my blog, but I'm a serious procrastinator. I'm hoping my blog will help un-procrastinate me.) It looks ah-mazing and i can't wait to hang it up - stay tuned for a photo.

Anyway enjoy the photos & hopefully you'll come back for more as we start to transform this place and I start on some of my pinspirations! You can follow my pinterest boards here.

First things first, say hello to Kylie, she's our adorable little shepherd mutt (we adopted Kylie from a rescue in Haverhill, MA called One Tail at a Time, if you live in New England and are looking to rescue a dog, One Tail is amazing. Check them out!). Ky is kinda confused and thinks that our bed is actually her bed and is on there every chance she gets. But how can you say no to this adorable face?! I'm obsessed with my pup so you'll see much more of her in future posts. This is the master bedroom, as you can see, it needs some serious work. This is our tired old bedspread, hopefully will be updating soon!

Here's the family room, where we will spend most of our time, as seen from the entryway. We just ordered our new couch from west elm last night. I can't wait for it to get here, but I guess I have to b/c it isn't coming for 10-12 weeks. Waaahh! One of my first projects is going to be refinishing this old cedar chest that belonged to my Nanny. I'm going to restore it to it's former glory and make it our coffee table. As you can see we are also lacking curtains, a rug (this is the ridiculously expensive one I want) and some wall decor, among other things. I tried to inject a little Christmas into the room by filling some apothecary jars with ornaments in different shades of silver. You can barely see them on the left, but I'm learning to use my dSLR so hopefully my future photos will be SO much better than these, sorry!

I love our kitchen (minus the mess - this was taken this past weekend in the midst of cleaning and organizing). It was renovated by the former owners. I love that it's new and updated and I love the warm colors, although I'm seriously digging the kitchens with the white tile back splashes that have been popping up on other blogs recently.

Weird, but true, the mud room (aka Ky's room) is one of my favorite things about this house. It's great with Kylie and nice to have an area outside of the house to throw our shoes, coats, etc. It will be awesome this winter too. Again, please try to ignore the shoes strewn all over the place, I really should have cleaned up before I snapped these pics, but I couldn't be bothered. I promise it won't stay like this forever! The hubs & my dad made this shoe rack together to replace the beat up one we had in our old apt. They did a great job didn't they?!

Here's another angle of the green bungalow. Umm about that curtain in the top right window, that's actually the attic and I don't really want to go up there, so I need to make Jon go up and pull it down b/c it's weird. And we're seriously lacking Christmas decorations. We're gonna make this place look awesome for Christmas next year, I swear!

I'm in love with our front door. Am I strange? I just love the glass window and the patterns it makes inside the hallway when the light shines through. And I'm also in love with our doormats (yes, I bought two of these little gems! which was good considering we actually have three doors to our house)

That's the tour for now people. More to come...I've reserved this weekend for setting up the office and painting the guestroom, which used to be a baby's room. It's a hideous green with pink and brown circles painted into a border (gag!) I just got a sweet bedspread for the guest room too, which I put on our bed after I started writing this post.

What were the first things on your "To Do" list when you bought your first home? How long did it take you to accomplish them?

~Amy