It's the Little Things

Seriously, when we moved in, our basement den looked kind of like this:

Sorry for the quality, it was done a a cell phone

If you look closely in that back left corner, there is a ginormous desk the previous owners left (they offered, we accepted) plus a ton of our stuff all crammed in to allow for passage through the basement, which wasn't much, we still had to negotiate to access the pantry and craft room.

The other day, Ellie took apart that behemoth desk and we hauled it upstairs to it's permanent home in the guest room. She also worked some magic to create a semblance of what the den could look like once we have things like a couch and TV:

Same angle as the first picture above

Not a bad concept, huh? Obviously we'll have to do a bunch of measuring, and shopping, and will most likely re-arrange some stuff, but it makes me feel like things are coming together (unlike the bedroom, which is haunting and teasing me...more on that later though). I'm glad those pictures are a little dark though, because everything else in the basement is...shall we say...messy and piled up, and the crappy cell phone hides all that very nicely :D

The kitchen and pantry are also going well, they just don't make interesting before/after-type posts because it's just plates and glasses and small appliances and canned goods. Having a mostly-functioning kitchen (can't find those damn mixing bowls!) and what looks like a nice living area really make a difference, especially as these are 2 of the rooms I see the most.

What We've Been Up To

It's funny, I feel like we have both been working our asses off and accomplished nothing in the last week. Yes, we have officially lived in our house for a week! Sunday, June 23 was the first night sleeping there, and as of 8pm on Monday, all of our things were in the house. I have to admit to feeling a little nostalgic for the apartment. *cue Bare Naked Ladies*

As much as I loved it, and for all the memories we made there, we knew it was only temporary.

In the house, we can really set down roots and make the place ours. Even before closing, we knew that the master bedroom would be the first room to get a makeover. I'm not going to say that the wallpaper in there was ugly--honestly, for wallpaper, it wasn't half bad. But it is wallpaper, in a baby blue flower pattern with years worth of cigarette smoke. One of the first things we did the day of signing was make our first foray into home renovation and begin to peel wallpaper. We were treated to a little surprise:

Jungle print UNDER the blue!

But that's not all folks, the lovely jungle print was only relegated to a single wall. The other three wall had this lovely paper:

Slow and steady wins the race, right?

As of tomorrow it will be 2 weeks since we got the keys, and I have to say that Ellie has been a wallpaper removing machine. Saturday night when we showed off the house to a friend, I discovered that we were down to the last layer of glue on 2.5-ish (I use really technical measuring tools) walls (pictures coming, I need to upload them). We are fairly confident that the paper will be all gone and the skim coat will be applied by the end of the week at the latest. I think we'll be able to actually set up our bedroom next week! *fingers crossed*

There is a lot of work to be done still, and maybe someday I'll get around to creating a Master List (a la Sherry & John at Young House Love), but I'm so thankful the house IS in living condition, and that all the "issues" are cosmetic.