It only took 26 months......

I started this blog back in May 2013.  In my first entry, I wrote "The journey is likely to be very painful, but hopefully will be worth it in the end.."

We never knew it would be quite as painful as it turned out to be.  I have lost count of the number of houses that we thought would be our number five.  Now we are in our number five, I'm closing this blog and all future house-related posts will be on my regular mchowat.blogspot.com

Our first visit to the new house

Ben and I took a look around our new house as soon as we could get in there!!!  This is his bedroom

These closets will be gone ASAP

Walking around in Maggie's room

Maggie's room is so small you can't open the closet door fully with furniture in there!!!!

One of the closets at the top of the stairs

Closet next to laundry

Closet in our bedroom

bathroom

Goofy Ben at bottom of stairs

Dining room

Family room (soon to be dining room)

Ben's fishy room-look at where the TV was!!!!

Skylights in back room

half bath (scary)

kitchen

hydrangeas with limited life span

magnolia that will have to go

One step forward, two steps back.....

Sometimes I feel like this will NEVER end!!!!  Sam met with Rochelle (our designer) on Wednesday and we finally got some numbers from them-$8000 to do what we expected to be $2500!!!  This caused us to take a HUGE step back.  I have had major reservations about this group since we started to pin them down to what we wanted done.  Our worst suspicions and fears have been founded.  We are not going to work with this group after all.  It means we won't be getting any/much work done on the house before we move in, but that is OK.  This sets us back with our plans, but will be for the best in the long run.  As of now, I think we should just move in to the house, decide what we really want to do and try to get Jason to work on our projects when he has time.

It is finally ours!!!!

The White house is finally ours

Ben was the first one through the door.  He was very excited

The house is starting to look empty

Despite the kids being gone this week, we haven't got as much done as we wanted to.  However, we have managed to get rid of quite a bit of our furniture and upstairs is beginning to look pretty empty!!!!

This is our room, the love seat is now downstairs because the chairs are gone

Maggie's room has no furniture left, I am using it to store boxes

Maggie is now in Greta's room

Ben's desk is gone

the bookcase is empty

Trip to the new house

We met the contractors at the new house on Wednesday. We keep changing our minds on what we are going to have done and when.  There are so many obstacles and road blocks.  I'm still not even sure what we are doing as soon as we get the house next week!!!  It'll all get done eventually-fingers crossed
I took some pictures of storage space so that we can start thinking about where we are going to put things.  This is our laundry area down in the basement.  There is a second dishwasher that will go eventually.  We plan to redo this and make it more like what we have now.

There are quite a few shelves in the basement, not sure if there are enough, but we will try to make it work until we can move some things around

We bought a new fridge to go in the basement.  They have a freezer too, so we'll have a little space where that is

They have started to pack up their things, our house needs to look like this too!!!!

The back yard is now grass!!!!!

This is the storage room at the back of the house, we haven't been able to see this for a while.  It used to have a bar in here!!!!

A little more storage, but we don't have a garage!!!!!  Every square inch is needed.....

We are starting to get moving....

Things are starting to look different in our house.  We have sold some of our furniture already.  The tapestry chairs and Sam's leather chair are gone.  We moved the love seat from our bedroom to the sitting room so we had something to sit on.  We have also sold Maggie's bookcase and the dresser out of Greta's room, they are already gone.  Ben's bed is sold and will be picked up next week and Maggie's bedroom furniture will hopefully be gone this week.  The house is also getting filled with boxes and I think we are getting to a stage where we will be ready to move.