Here’s my new house!

First of all, there is no carpet in the entire house. Hooray! The previous owners had a puppy that peed all over the place, so they replaced all the flooring. Those boxes by the front door are “Puppy Potty Training Pads.” They don’t seem to work.

All the beige you see in the photos are actually gold wallpaper that are beige sponge painted on top. Why wallpaper your whole house in beige? I ask you!

This is the trompe l’oeil mural that takes up the whole staircase. The owner’s realtor said that the previous owners paid $10K to have this atrocity put up. The sad thing is that I can see the true artistic talent here. It’s a stunning mural, but who wants parrots and monkeys staring at them every time they climb the stairs? I’m probably going to be whimpering as I paint over this.

Here’s the room right off the front door that will become my studio. On the far wall there are floor to ceiling mirrors, which of course will have to come down. I love mirror applied judiciously, but I don’t plan on turning this into a dance studio, so I think it’s best to go in a different direction.

Here’s even more wallpaper. This is what’s on the other side of the mural covered door.

This is my new dining room. The whole ground floor is wide open, which I adore. There’s also two entrances to the back yard, one off the kitchen, and one here off the dining. I think I’m going to do my vegetable gardening here in the side yard, once we get rid of a giant sauna that the owners are leaving behind.

My little, but at least open, kitchen. Even more wallpaper in the border. We’re going to replace the countertops as soon as possible with some kind of solid surface, probably engineered quartz. Then I’m thinking of painting the cabinets black.

My master bedroom. Why would you paint the ceiling of a master bedroom like a sky? Super cute for kids rooms, for a master? Kind of weird. This is actually the least of the weird paint. Check these out:

We basically have to paint every single surface in this house. But hey, paint is a whole lot cheaper than flooring, so I’ll paint every single surface in this house with a smile on my face.

I Can Make that Friday will be postponed this week. Saturday will be spent doing out home inspection, so I have to sharpen my pencils, charge up the camera, and get the graph paper ready. How I’ll get to sleep I’ll never know. This is worse than Christmas morning.

Expect to be attacked by house pictures next week.

It looks like somebody finally decided to take our money. For a while there I was really starting to feel like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman as she’s sitting in the hotel managers office pulling out wads of crinkled bills, “I tried, but no one will help me. I have all this money, but NO ONE WILL HELP ME.” sob sob sob.

We put an offer down on our seventh house. 7th. In this alleged buyers market. In this housing market that is on the verge of collapse. 7 houses before somebody decided to cooperate. We kept asking our realtor if we needed to change our expectations, if we were the ones being unreasonable and he kept telling us no. We just needed patience. Yeah yeah yeah, and patience will bring me a kid, too. I’ve heard that one before.

I went to the hairdresser the other day, the appointment where I was sorely disappointed and was practically molested by a dog, and the one good thing that came from that is discovering a new neighborhood we hadn’t been looking in before. It’s closer to Bear’s work, it’s centrally located to all the surrounding communities, it’s closer to all the stuff we’d actually have to get to on a daily basis like grocery stores and junk, and the homes sell for cheaper.

We went back out with Mike our heroic realtor and looked at about 20 homes, and this one stood head and shoulders above the pack. For one thing, there is no carpet in the entire house. None. There is tile in the kitchen and in the bathrooms, the ground floor is all high quality laminate, and the whole upstairs, including the stairs themselves, are actual hardwood. It’s a little smaller than we’d been hoping for – 1699sf, but the layout is so smart that it doesn’t seem small. There’s an office right inside the front door that will become my studio, three bedrooms upstairs so we can have the guest room and future nursery, and an open floorplan that I can decorate in all my art deco, midcentury modern taste.

Of course, every single surface in that house will need to be painted. There are weird murals in every room, one room has two walls painted neon green and the other two painted electric blue, the ceiling in the master is painted to look like a sky, the entryway is covered in painted grecian columns, vines, and of course, monkeys, and in the master bath all the cabinetry is painted out in some weird faux-patina finish. I think we’ll definately be investing in one of those paint sprayer guns.

The kitchen is also going to require some work. There’s a wallpaper border up featuring griffins parading around the room, the cabinets are boring, and the countertops are covered in standard issue white tile. I think replacing the countertops are going to be one of the first things we do to the house. How are you supposed to bake on a tiny tile countertop? I’m thinking concrete is the way to go.

I am getting ahead of myself here, we technically can’t get excited about the house for another week and a half. There is the potential for a couple of snags with the loan that we have to get nailed down before we can start repacking our boxes and buying paint. But when has common sense ever stopped me from getting my hopes up?

I was describing the house to a friend so I pulled up the MLS listing again to get all the details right, and I realized that our hopefully future house will be on Courage St. Considering what the last couple years have required of us, I’m a little terrified to think what we’ll be called upon to do living on Courage st.

With Bear out of town I’ve been trying to take advantage of the time as best I can by doing all the things I love to do that he doesn’t. I love to go thrift store shopping, but Bear hates it beyond all reason, so I’ve been checking out little resale shops and boutiques all week. I walked into one yesterday that looked like the Golden Girls’ closet. I swear I saw clothes that Blanche would have been wearing as she seduced some silver fox out on the lanai. Everything had sequins on it, everything screamed, “Sassy Granny out on the Town.” The clothes were all long sleeved, long skirted, with shoulderpads. And then there were the feather boas.

Last Saturday Bear was a very good sport and came with me to nearly every thrift store in town while I went on a mission to find a ring with a big fat stone (I’m talking like 2″ tall) that I could pop out to reuse the setting. I found absolutely nothing for my ring hunt, but I found some amazing furniture that I’m still sitting here pining away over.

One was this low buffet dresser that needed some love but had the coolest bones. I could just see it painted a glossy black and my heart sang. Plus, it was only 50$. 50$! For a solid wood nine-drawer buffet. I nearly died. But, we don’t even have a house in escrow yet, so buying furniture is getting a little ahead of myself.

Then at a different store I found this armoire that was gloriously 70’s modern, real wood, but instead of having an open cavity for an entertainment center or closet, this one had all kinds of cubbies and drawers. As soon as I opened the door I had visions of it full of fabric and yarn. Oh it was dreamy. It was 350, but recently marked down to 250. It broke my heart to walk away from it.

I kept trying to come up with a way that I could acquire this great stuff. We could rent a truck, we could ask Bear’s brother-in-law to help get it up the stairs to our apartment, even if the current house we’re bidding on doesn’t work, we could use the furniture *somewhere*.

Bear hasn’t gone for any of my arguments, and it’s probably a good thing. Here we are in an alleged buyers market, and we’re now bidding on our third house. It’s driving me absolutely crackers. The first two houses had the same problem: their owners were on crack and wanted way too dang much money. House #1 I could walk away from OK, I was sad, but whatever. House #2 really hurt. It had the perfect layout for us right now. 3 bedrooms and a loft for my studio. Plus a fantastic kitchen, modern architecture, and everything needed to be redone so I could get what I wanted instead of paying for somebody else’s choice. There are five houses for sale in this tiny little gated community, so you’d think the owners would want to cooperate, but apparently they are either independently wealthy or just dumb. House #3 is their next door neighbor. He seems to be fairly motivated, so we’re crossing our fingers and hoping this one takes.

In the meantime, my studio is still all packed up so every time I want to make something I have to ask myself, “Is it worth taking apart the wall ‘o boxes?” Other than my quilting class, the answer has been no.