kitchen

our new kitchen is so very different from our old one. it's about a million times bigger and it's not white! never again will i ever have a white kitchen. i loved the look of it but it was so hard to keep clean. now our cabinets are dark so we can be as messy as we'd like and it just blends in. score.

moving in

as we've been unpacking i've been trying to take photos of rooms as they get "finished". I put finished in quotes because when is a room ever finished? we're still in the process of getting art hung on our walls, and curtains put up, but for the most part furniture is where it will be. i'll post more as things come together, but here are a few...

play room
play room looking into tv roomtv room looking into play room
guest room
office

never again!

never again do i want to move! it seems like everything that could have gone wrong in the few weeks before our move went wrong. not only that but we just had so many other things going on in our lives. i felt like i was just barely holding it together!

let's go back a few months, shall we?

all winter long we had been casually checking out the MLS to see if anything had popped up that we might be interested in. the first week in march i was looking around and came across something that looked like it might have potential. we actually got very excited because looking at the photos it seemed like everything we'd been looking for. we called up our realtor right away and she got us in to see the house that weekend.

on march 6th we met our agent out at the house and decided on the spot that it was THE house for us. we spent about an hour out there looking things over and talking to our realtor about an offer. we left with the intention of making an offer first thing monday morning. on the way home i called up our st. paul agent and got the ball rolling on getting our house on the market once again. in the meantime we had our loan officer working on getting us approved to carry two mortgages in the event we couldn't sell our city house before we closed on the country house.

the next couple weeks were a blur of inspections, paperwork, showings, offers, and a million and one other piddly things that made us wonder if we should move forward with the purchase. we did a lot of praying and soul-searching and we just kept coming back to "yes, this is the house for us". we were completely and totally on the same page. we wanted the house and we were going to do everything in our power to get it. for about a week everything was calm....

then andy had to have surgery, we threw together our fifth craftstravaganza, andy got a promotion at work (= longer hours), i found out i was going to be laid off, packing, packing, packing, and then....the stomach flu, problems with the closing on the country house being delayed and a dozen issues that came with those problems.

i just can't even tell you how relieved i am that these last few weeks are over! it feels so so good to be done with it all. i don't know how much more i could have handled.

but we have so so so much to be grateful for. none of these problems are life-threatening and we're stronger because of them.

now my job is to get this house in order so that we can have all our friends and family over for a big party!

carver

never did i ever think i'd live in po-dunk carver! but here we are, all moved into our forever dream house. we are slowly but surely getting unpacked, finding homes for all our things, and making this house our own. it will be a long process getting there, but one day we'll be able to take a look around and all the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets will have doors on them, all our exterior doors will have doorknobs, bathrooms will have mirrors, toilet paper holders and towel racks, all our windows will have curtains and blinds, we will have light fixtures in all our rooms, and there won't be any nails poking up out of the floor.

I thought I would miss our house in the city more than I do, but we've just been so busy with the house and new jobs that there hasn't been time to miss it! So far the only thing that I don't like about living out in the country is the bugs. The mosquitoes and gnats are awful out here; in the city they spray so much that you could probably go all summer without more than a dozen mosquito bites.

All in all we are very very very happy to be in our new house. We even had our first overnight guests over last night, and they slept in a dedicated guest room!