short pants romance

It is official: I own a house. To be more accurate, I own half of a house, the other half of which is owned by my wonderful husband-to-be Gregory. We went to the bank, got a very large check, went to our realtor's office, signed our names 847 times, handed over said check, and received our keys. After a quick champagne toast, we got straight to work.

First item: Hideous carpeting.








To our surprise, we uncovered beautiful parquet floors. They look a bit dinged up in the photo, but it's mainly due to a layer of carpet dust. We're hoping that once we bust out the Method OMop we'll find that we don't need to refinish them. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the rest of the house, which presumably had hard wood floors at one point, but they now have a layer of vinyl glued to every square inch. We're still up in the air about whether or not we want to install new floors ourselves or pay a professional to do it for twice the price. Part of me wants to prove to myself that I can be handy around the house, but then again this could be the kind of project that could put us in way over our heads. And what with getting married in two months, that's not where I want to be. The jury is still out.





In the mean time, the one thing we've gotten down is stripping wallpaper, which is convenient, seeing as 91% of the house is covered with it.






Greg was working the scraper when he made me come to look at his amazing discovery - a patch of wallpaper in the shape of Abraham Lincoln:



My parents came down this weekend to check the place out, and I put my mom to work cleaning the icky kitchen. That woman has elbow grease that doesn't quit, she totally rocked all that grime. Unfortunately even three hours of Brillo, Mr. Clean and Bon Ami couldn't combat fifty years of spills and scratches, but she at least made it a little less scary to put something down on the counter. Oh, and I realize the kitchen is a total horror show, but that will have to wait until after the wedding so I don't go completely insane.



For now we're just plugging along, cleaning things up, trying to get ourselves into a position to move in early August, even if we're just living on the first floor. The amazing thing is that the first floor alone is about the size of our current apartment, so I'm not even sure that we're ready for the shock of spreading out from 800 square feet to 1700. I'll keep you posted.