So I hear you bought a house...

[FrekeChild]

I know there are a few PSers around these parts who just bought homes, and I figured we could start a thread. I love looking at houses, so I thought this could be fun!

Show me your houses!

 

[FrekeChild]

I'll start, but I don't want to post pictures of the interior because it's about to get painted. So I'd rather do a before and after once it's done!

In the meantime, here is our backyard!

 

[FrekeChild]

We plan on doing some stuff to the backyard, but most of the major stuff will remain untouched. We live in southern-ish California, so I'm looking forward to being able to plant just about everything and actually have it grow. There is a huge amount of ivy in one back corner of the yard, and while it's beautiful and creates great ground cover, it's trying to kill what I believe is a grapefruit tree, a plum tree and will probably try to pull down a fence soon, so that has got to go.

I think that the sellers had kind of been neglecting the yard for a while, so there are certain things that need to be addressed, like cleaning up palm trees, making the lawn look better, growing grass in some patchier spots, weeding, etc.

I want to start a small vegetable garden and grow some items to use in my kitchen, and maybe throw a berry bush out there to go with my orange, tangerine and grapefruit trees. I'd love to grow some lemons, but those might have to wait for a while.

Our house was in a planned area and is only about 15 years old, so the houses all look pretty similar. I absolutely fell in love with the backyard, and it totally sold the house for us.

 

[Rosebloom]

Wow!!!! What a phenomenal back yard! Congrats on your new home!

 

[jfo]

Freke, what an amazing yard! It looks beautiful and how fantastic that you have a swimming pool. Looking forward to seeing the rest of your place.

We're still 4 weeks away from closing, so it's only just starting to become a reality that we're really buying a house. Buying in the market where we live is absolutely crazy... I've literally seen the house we're buying twice. It makes me when I think about it. I don't have any photos on this computer, but we're buying a single family home in a large city where good green outdoor space is at a premium and this place has a great little yard. Nothing like what you have, Freke, but the backyard sold the house for me. That and the house is well over a 100 years old and has retained a lot of its original woodwork and character, which I love. It also poses some interesting challenges.

So far, the whole buying process has been slower than I expected. Primarily just that the communication between our attorney and the sellers' attorney has been a comedy of errors, and something that should have been resolved 2 weeks ago has taken until today to finally do so. Not sure--maybe that's typical. Just makes you crazy when you think about how much $ you're spending. DH has told me already that he might have a heart attack writing the closing cost check...

 

[mia1181]

That is a legit backyard for So(ish)Cal Freke! Congrats!

P.S. O and I are coming over to swim!

 

[JGator]

Freke, I love your yard! And, a pool too! Can't wait to see what you did with the paint before and after.

We bought a brick colonial house that was built in 1989 - we closed yesterday, and we're moving in on Monday. The kitchen has been updated in the last couple years with new cabinets, granite and stainless appliances so we will not be tackling that although for some reason they put in a new laminate floor which we will replace with tile in the kitchen and laundry room. We have a 2-story foyer which is covered in white striped wall paper and extends upstairs and covers the hallway between all of the bedrooms. I really do not like the wallpaper and need to take it down - thinking hire someone for that because of the height issue of the 2-story foyer. The living room is a blue that I do not like. The dining room is 2-tone blue with a white chair rail - I also don't like the blue or two-tone style. There is a salmon colored sun room that has to go. And, upstairs we have 1 bedroom covered in wallpaper and a ceiling border and another room with just a wallpaper border. We also have one royal blue bedroom and a grey/blue bedroom that are both dark for my tastes. A friend suggested some neutral tone (greys, beiges) Benjamin Moore paint colors which I need to look into. I am thinking neutrals for the foyer, hallway, dining room, and living room. And, maybe yellow for the sunroom and baby room. Any ideas for the other 2 bedrooms which will be used for guest and an office? What do you all think for colors? Oh, and everything is brass - bathroom fixtures and chandeliers. I think maybe the chandeliers go first and we deal with the other brass later. We also noticed a strong dog smell so we are going to have the carpets cleaned if we can before we move in on Monday. Here are some pictures from the inspection with the previous owners' furniture. Will post more later.

 

[jfo]

Argh, I just lost my post.

JGator--that looks like a great house with lots of space. You are so close!
JMHO, but I'd go with neutral colors for all the bedrooms and then use curtains/bedding, etc. to give the pop of color that you prefer. Are you going to keep the carpeting? I hope it's not too much of a pain to get rid of wallpaper. Isn't it funny how wallpaper and brass fixtures scream the '80's?

Good luck with the move!

 

[JGator]

Jfo, thanks for advice on neutrals. That reminds me - I hate all of the window treatments in the house. So, that's another project to add to the to-do list. We are going to keep the carpet for now. I made an appointment to have it cleaned tomorrow.

What do you all think we should do to cover the stair rails for baby proofing purposes? We think our daughter's head can fit through the rails as they are right now. See picture. I saw a mesh thing you tie to the rails and a plastic like cover that you mount to the wood. Our daughter is not crawling yet, but she will be soon enough.

Also, adding some more photos of the rooms. Did I mention the previous owners like blue?

 

[jfo]

I bet we all are going to have a long list of "to do's"/projects as we settle into our new places. DH and I were talking about all the things we want to do, but I probably need to focus on the baby-proofing stuff first!

The more photos I see of your place, JGator, the more I really like it! It's not my style of decor (and not yours obviously), but the room sizes and natural light coming in from the windows look fantastic!

Hmm, while we have a staircase, we don't have the same stair railing/banister concern as you do. It definitely looks like you'll need to do something.
Some things I found online: http://www.safestartbaby.com/ecomm_product_details.php?id=5284
http://www.amazon.com/baby/dp/B000056OUX
http://www.amazon.com/Kidkusion-Kid-Safe-Banister-Guard/dp/B0000E2DIE

Maybe someone with experience might be able to chime in as to whether any of these are any good?

 

[JGator]

Thanks for the links to the stair protectors Jfo. I will check them out. Yes, the current owners were the original owners of the house and they have grown children so they are a older, and they definitely have a different style than I do. Apparently, my DH likes the salmon sun room! I guess we have different tastes too! We picked the house primarily because it has large bedrooms, a sun room, an office since I work from home and a decent sized yard. It definitely gets a lot of good light too. We considered moving further out into the suburbs to get a newer house, but we wanted to be relatively close to the major city in our area so that was another factor in how we ended up with this house.

 

[dani13]

Love your homes, Freke and JG!!!

 

[jfo]

Trying to get some photos up, but been having some issues. Here's one of the backyard (this is what sold us)!!

 

[jfo]

Dining room

 

[jfo]

Staircase and upstairs view of hallway looking into a couple bedrooms. These were taken by the sellers, so sorry for the fisheye lens. That's all I got for now, but it should give a sense of what we love about the place.

 

[dani13]

JFo...its gorgeous!!! Do you have a pic of the outside? What style of home is it?

 

[jfo]

Dani, thanks so much! No photos of the outside right now, but it's an American Four Square house built around 1900. It's funny because we gravitate towards more of a Victorian style house (especially Queen Anne ), but this style of house is still great in that it still has a front porch and because it's a 4 square, the bedrooms are all about the same size and the liveable space is maximized, especially when situated in an urban setting with small lots. But yeah, it was the woodwork, the number of good sized bedrooms and the yard that sealed the deal for us. While the outside of the house is fine now, I think we could do a lot to enhance it and make it more our taste. Maybe I'll do a before/after...

 

[partgypsy]

The yards and the houses look great! when I saw the palm trees I was thinking is this Florida or California?

Paint and window treatments are so easily changed. The living spaces look beautiful. I actually like the salmon color in the lounging/sunroom area, gives it some drama.
The 4 square is lovely! I love all the woodwork in wood finish. We have a lot of wood in our house, but other than the floors all the woodwork is painted and no plans to refinish at this point.

 

[jfo]

Thanks, part gypsy! We love how the sellers did what they could retain the original woodwork while also keeping the house up to date. The only thing that is too bad about having hardwood floors everywhere is the bumps and bruises I'm sure my 9 1/2 month old daughter is going to sustain as she learns to walk in this house!

 

[JGator]

Jfo, your house is beautiful. I love the details like the banister and the inlaid wood floor outside the bedrooms. I really like your dining room built ins and lighting over the table. The yard looks amazing too! How long before you close?

Freke, how are your projects coming along? Any advice on wallpaper removal? We got a quote of $1600 to remove our wall paper which seems high so I'll probably get another quote to compare.

AFU, our move was yesterday. It went well - we hired some movers to move our boxes and furniture, and it took them about 8 hours to load and unload. Now, we are left with over 100 boxes to unpack. We are finding out more about the house like the master bedroom and family room smell like the previous owners' dog even after having the carpets professionally cleaned. The toilets all flush super loudly - they sound like public restrooms! And, I never have enough room in any kitchen for all my stuff! I need an organizer. We have a lot of great cabinets and drawers, but I still have a ton of stuff to unpack in the kitchen, and I am running out of space!

 

[FrekeChild]

I'm in NYC right now, so that's why I haven't been posting! The paint is being done while we are out of town, so I can't wait to see that when we get home!

Deets about our house:
3 bedroom, 2 bath, plus office
Great room
75% of the house has tile floor, the three bedrooms and a couple closets are carpeted
Tall vaulted ceilings
Built in the late 1990s

The laundry room was painted in a black and white cow hide motif. The master bedroom a bright yellow-green. The master bath was a bright yellow with a hint of orange. The office had a wallpaper border that was burgundy and other colors. The guest bedroom was gray. Soon-to-be A's room was gray with Seattle Mariner's wallpaper border midway up the wall, and a bright teal on the bottom half of the wall. The guest bath is brown. The majority of the great room was a neutral tan with a lot of brown, except for the dining, which has a chair rail, and below the chair rail was a dark forest green.

So yeah. The trim, the doors, the walls, everything is being repainted before we move in for logistic reasons, and we might as well take advantage of being out of town while we can! Not to mention not having anything in the house yet!

I'm on my phone, so I will see if I can add a pic from the night before we left, when the painters had just prepped the place...it's a very different style than has been posted so far!!!

Oh, and I removed the Mariners border myself. It took about 4 hours and some elbow grease, but I didn't have the right tools and I'd never done it before, but it was nice to do some of the work myself!

Next up on our agenda: seeing paint colors on the walls! Then moving stuff in for real! And then picking an actual move in date for movers and furniture!

 

[jfo]

JGator, thanks so much! We're pretty happy that we found this place. We are due to close September 4th. I think we'll be moving either that weekend or the following week just because I want to get it professionally cleaned and we don't have to be out of our current place immediately.

I'm glad to hear that the move went well, but, yeah, it always seems to take weeks unpacking and getting settled in to a new place. I'm scared to think how many boxes we're going to end up using. Hmm, I have a feeling we might face some of the same things that you are... namely the fact that the current owners have 2 dogs and 3 cats. While there's no carpeting to deal with, I'm wondering if the professional cleaning is going to take care of the smell and all the hair left behind. I love animals and hope to have a dog sometime in the next several years, but there's something about dealing with your own pet versus somebody else's! I hope you guys can find a way to get rid of the smell.

Freke, it sounds like the previous owners had, err, colorful taste? The new paint colors you chose look fantastic!! Glad that you get to be out of town while the painting happens. I love the vaulted ceilings in your house. Are tile floors pretty typical of southern California houses? One of my BF's from high school lives near San Diego and her 1st floor is all tile. Hardwood floors are pretty standard where we live, and the vast majority of the houses in the areas that we were looking to live are old old old. It'd be great to get a newer home, but they are really few and far between here in the city.

 

[FrekeChild]

So blah. We got back from NYC, and the pool went to poop. Hello algae. So we've been trying to deal with that while trying to get things set up to move. Did you know that getting rid of algae means a series of timed steps for a load of different chemicals?

We got the carpets cleaned, and then found out that the carpet in A's room was still pretty grubby, so at the last minute decided to change that out. So that's going to be installed Monday.

Called the movers, they are coming Tuesday for the big stuff, beds, cribs, etc.

We've been taking loads of stuff over to the house as much as we can, 4-5 loads per day since we got back, and unpacking boxes as fast as I can, and then going home to pack them back up again.

We've done a few things so far, like change out outlet covers, change out a yellowed smoke detector in the living room (why are there 6 smoke detectors? Some within about 4 feet of the others!), obviously paint

I have some comparison pics for you!

Jfo, the colors aren't as bad as I make them sound, I think. I'll add a couple pics with this post. SoCal floors are pretty much anything I think. I've seen a wide variety of carpet, tile, laminate, wood, bamboo, etc. Older homes seem to have wood floors, newer have a whole variety of flooring! I think eventually, if we are in this house long enough, we will change out the carpet and switch it for wood flooring. With two dogs and a kid, I don't have time for carpet! I do think that tile is a lot more common in the southwest because it stays cool and it's hot down here.

 

[FrekeChild]

Dining/kitchen and A's room

 

[FrekeChild]

Master

The paint looks so vanilla compared to what it was before, but it's a light oyster color that I think is a good blank slate to play with along the road and hopefully once everything is in there, once our curtains are up, etc, it'll look less boring.

 

[jfo]

Freke, sorry that your pool got all mucked up while you were out of town. I imagine it takes a bit of maintenance to keep that up. I love the before and after pictures. The paint job looks great! I love the color of A's room now--I'm a sucker for lavender. Your house looks really beautiful and spacious with a nice wide open floor plan. I love that you have an eat-in kitchen. That's definitely something that is a negative with our new place. The kitchen is kinda small and I'm wonder where L will play while we're cooking. Oh well, we'll figure it out.
Best of luck with the rest of your move today!

 

[JGator]

Freke, I love your color choices. I am contemplating a similar color for K's room - I decided that Purple is her favorite color a long time ago. I'm kind of in a paralysis stage on the paint colors though until I decide how we are handling taking down the wall paper, and we are also focused on the dog smell right now.

Jfo, not much longer till you close. Good idea on getting the place professionally cleaned before you move in. I wish we would have done that. We are having our place cleaned on Friday by the same people who cleaned the place we moved out of, and they did such a great job I'm hoping to continue to use them monthly in the new place. Our new house is huge (5 BR, 4.5 Baths) so it will be a lot of work to keep it cleaned with a baby and a full time job. Still dealing with the dog smell - we are going to look into getting the ducts cleaned, and I think ultimately we will have to replace some or all of the carpet.

AFU, we have boiled a pot of vinegar, shampooed the family room carpet professionally and with an at home carpet cleaner machine, pre-treated with pet carpet cleaning solution, put down Arm & Hammer and vacuumed it up, put out canisters of deodorizers, Febreezed a ton, etc. Still smelling dog in the family room along with a host of other scents from the cleaning solutions. We are going to get an estimate on duct cleaning and likely move on to replacing the family room carpet. Still have a ton of boxes to unpack, but our daughters toys are all out for her to play with.

 

[jfo]

JGator, you are too funny--I decided the same thing for L. Her crib sheets and changing table covers are all lavender/purple.

Wow, 4 1/2 bathrooms... that's fantastic! Yes, if you have good cleaners that you like using now, I would definitely recommend having them come once a month. I want to do the same thing... I have a hard enough time keeping up with our apartment, let alone an entire house with L all over the place and, yes, working full time. I just hope I can find a good reputable cleaning service. I used Angie's List last time to find a cleaning service in our area that we were going to use to deep clean our place before I had the baby. The company was top rated, etc, but they ended up showing up late (30 minutes) for our meeting and were, honestly, pretty sketchy. One of the owners asked to use our bathroom and peed on our toilet seat and didn't clean up afterwards. We didn't end up using them needless to say, and just skipped using a cleaning service altogether and did it ourselves.

I'm sorry that all that you've tried has not gotten rid of the dog smell. It probably makes sense to replace the carpet, but that's a good idea to find out about the duct cleaning. I never would have thought of that.

Yes, we're closing 2 weeks from today! Exciting and nerve-wracking! We actually went to our new house last night to see what the sellers are selling before moving out (i.e. furniture) since they are moving out of state and can't take everything. It was nice of them to give us an opportunity to get "first dibs" before they have a big sale. They have a lot of cool antique furniture, but I guess we'll see how much they want for stuff.

DH had a little when we were walking back though... Cold feet maybe? He was saying things like, the house seems smaller than I remember...

 

[JGator]

Jfo, yay for K and L both being purple lovers! I can't believe how sketchy the cleaners were that you talked to. We are using someone recommended by a friend, and she did an amazing job on our last place (I almost wanted to stay to enjoy it). In the past, my DH has said we should not get cleaners, and then we'll be able to retire faster! He says he will do the cleaning, but his level of comfort with dust, finger prints/smudges on glass, and disorganization is much higher than mine so that means I usually end up doing the cleaning because it bugs me. He does a good job when he does it, but he doesn't seem to think we need to clean that often! How much time do you have before you move in to the new house after you close? We didn't do anything other than the professional carpet cleaning as we had only 4 days, and we were focused on packing and getting out of our old place. I would recommend getting stuff you want done (like Freke did) when the house is empty. The duct cleaners are coming tomorrow - it apparently takes 4-6 hours. Should be interesting. I'm pretty sure the smell won't go away in the family room, but it will be good to have clean air. They said that animal dander keeps them in business when I called for the appointment. We ended up negotiating some furniture into our house purchase - like the sunroom furniture and some bar stools. We also got a gun safe which is in the basement because the owners did not want to move it. It's probably 5 or 6 feet tall. We are anti-gun people, but we'll use it for important papers and jewelry!!!

 

[jfo]

Hi JGator, I was able to find another cleaning service that I've gone ahead and scheduled to deep clean the house the day after our closing. If they do a good job, DH says that he would consider hiring them to come back for periodic cleanings, which would be awesome! He normally would say the same thing like your husband--i.e., we can do it ourselves and save so much $, but I think he's realizing the value of a service like that given the state of our current place after L arrived!

I hired movers to come move the big stuff 5 days after we close. We plan to start moving as much as we can of our smaller boxes starting the day after the cleaning and for the next several days. I figure that way if there is anything else that we realize needs to be done before the big stuff is moved in, we have an opportunity to do it hopefully.

How did the duct cleaning go? Do you feel like it helped? I hope so!