New House Update

Well, this post is long overdue but hopefully it won't disappoint! Most of the house is still very much in flux. My studio is not quite in useful shape but I'll be working on that as soon as the semester ends. Our dining table is still in the living room while we put on finishing touches in the dining room, not all of our books are on their proper shelves in the library -- and the list keeps going on. But here is where we are at the moment. I'll go room by room with before and after photos. This is our living room. The off-white and pink paint job is before, red is after.

The dining room.

Our bedroom. It was a crazy electric blue (first photo) when we bought the house, not really our style. So we toned it down with cool blue grey.

This is Joel's workshop. We still need to paint this one since neither of us is wild about the sunset mural on the wall.

My studio. The first photo is as it was when we toured the house. It was the master bedroom of a 50-something year old woman. Now it's my studio and at the moment is covered in seed pods and photo prints. Again, I'm tackling this after the semester is over.

This is the study inside my studio. It's a funny little room under the eaves that is big enough for my computer and a pull out couch (for guests, or knitting -- win-win!). You can see it in the second to middle studio photo (in the doorway).

And the library.

Joel's parents came down to help us move in one weekend and it was super helpful! We got two rooms (library & bedroom) painted, the wallpaper scraped off the dining room and a whole slough of odds and ends. Our friend Mike also helped us move in (we helped him move into his new house just a month before).

More photos of the house will come as soon as things start to fall a bit more into place. I'm already designing the front and backyards in my head for next spring. The backyard is not my first priority because it is ornamental, as opposed to our front which will be edible (though still ornamental.) I wish someone would have told me that buying a house during your first semester of your masters degree was a crazy idea -- or at the very least that it was hard work. So, if any of you are contemplating these two things: highly consider waiting until your second semester when you have already found your groove! That is my word to the wise for the day.

Life Happens

Sometimes blogs have to hibernate for a little bit while the rest of the world around them is going on. That time is now. Joel and I just bought a house in Cincinnati, of which I'll be posting photos of hopefully by the end of the week. And by "just bought" I mean a total of two weeks ago. We're currently working on painting the house and getting the furniture we need to get by, or at least enough to keep us from looking like total slobs. Last night we started painting the basement. There is some pretty dated looking wood paneling down there that we're covering with some paint until a later date when we might do a little more than that. We started stripping the wallpaper from the dining room (also pretty dated, though admittedly in good shape). And we now have a full yard to mess about with. Hurray! It's easy to get carried away with all the things we would like to do, and lose track of reality. But thankfully it all seems relatively manageable. We originally considered purchasing a fixer-upper because there are a lot of those in Cincinnati but then we found this house and couldn't say no. It's really fantastic and we're both really happy to have found it.