Update

So we have been in the house for a week now and boy does it feel great! We have gotten a lot done which has made our house smell nicer, but our bodies sore! We have painted both spare rooms, the hall and living room, and the dining room. We have some touch up paint to do in our master bathroom and the living room after a small repair and then some painting of our new baseboards and paneling, then we are all done with painting for awhile!
We have all the carpets ripped out and our new carpet will be installed on Wednesday this week. This is way faster then we thought it would be, so that made us very excited! Plus we are leaving for Hawaii on Thursday so it will be installed before we leave. I am looking forward to not having to wear my slippers because of the sub floor!
We had a landscaper come and pull weeds and mow, and lay some nice bark. It looks like a more presentable house in the neighborhood now.
I am falling in love with our home again and am looking forward to really moving in when we get back from our trip (no boxes and very few pieces of furniture have been brought in from the garage.).
We spoke with some of the neighbors who are glad that we are back and we heard comments like, "you've done more to the house then they did the whole time they lived here!" "They just kept the house closed up and you barely saw them." Sounds like and sure did look like they weren't the best neighbors. Lets hope Francisco and I can re claim good neighbor status with keeping our house looking nice!
That's all for now!
I will post some pictures when we get back!

The Damage

So we get our house back tomorrow morning and boy are we ready for it to be ours again. Recently our property manager Scott walked through the house and took a few photos of what we will be coming home to. The tenants have already moved out from what we can tell so the house is empty. Thankfully for what we can tell there isn't too much damage, what we do see we already knew about it from our walk through in June. Regardless of the damage we are so looking forward to our planned projects and making it our again.

Here are some of the pictures

The Kitchen looks good, just needs a good scrubbing. This is where a dog pulled up the carpet and the tenant "restretched" it.

The front yard just needs lots of weed and feed.

The guest bath needs a good cleaning, but we plan on totally redoing it.

The 2 smaller bedrooms, yeah that carpet is coming out!

So this is not how I would hang my curtains, how about you? Overall we feel positive. It is hard to see your home treated in this way, but it won't be this way for long! We can't wait to share with everyone our new and improved home, hopefully soon!

Sept. 15th @ 5pm

So it's official, we get our house back on September 15h at 5pm!!!! We are so excited to be moving back into our home and I can't wait to get in there and get to work! In fact I have been working on things for the last couple of months in preparation of moving back in. I have made some curtains, re-upholstered some chair cushions and made a chalkboard among other things.

I plan on taking pictures on Sept. 16th when we do our walk through so I can show everyone the damage that we will be dealing with. When we did an inspection in June we realized it may take awhile to get our house back to where we want it. But we're ready! I have my hand dandy Handy Man (Hubby Francisco) and all of my ideas raring to go!

We know it will be hard to see our house again in a not so great looking state, but the idea of making it uniquely ours again makes us excited and yes I will say a little nervous. I think Francisco is more nervous that I won't be able to stop with the ideas and wanting to change something in every room. I thought I would share with you my list of what I want to do in each room of the house and I will try and take pictures of the progress as we go so you can see us implement them.

So here's the list, I may switch it up at some point, 'cause hey that's how I am, plus I also forget things so I may have left some things out.

Kitchen (We don't plan on doing much here as long as the paint is still good, in the beginning that is the list for this room is more for in the future)

-Paint cabinets white

-Back splash, maybe wainscoting

-Counters

-Grass shades on windows

-Change faucet

-Upgrade appliances to Stainless

Dinning Room

-Board & batten throughout room

-Curtains

-Update light fixture

Living Room

-Paint, maybe a creamy white

-Built-in entertainment center in white

-Make slip covers for chairs

-Curtains

-Area rug

Guest Bath

-Tile floor, grey 12x24, it's awesome!

-Switch out vanity for a pedestal sink

-Board & batten

-Paint, b&b will be white, above it??? Any ideas?

Example of Board & Batten

Office

-New carpet

-Board & batten

-Paint, b&b white, above dark grey

-Curtains

Spare Room

-New carpet

-Board & batten

-Paint, b&b white, above leafy green or blue

Master

-New carpet

-Paint, blue or a sandy color

-Make upholstered head board

-New dresser and night stands

Master Bath

-Nothing as long as the paint is still good... for now.

Laundry Room

-Paint? That's a maybe on that.

-Hang chalkboard that I made.

Exterior

-Paint trim around front door back to white

-New flower boxes under kitchen windows

-Make rocker

-Put fancy house #s on the front door

Example of what I am going to do to the front door.

So that's my list so far! It will be a lot of work but we are up for it, I think. We did already have a vacation planned for the end of Sept. to Hawaii so only 2 weeks after getting the house back we will be gone for a week. I think will need the rest, but it will be hard to leave if we are making a lot of progress.

Right now I am trying to focus on packing up, I always feel, and yes I have had this feeling a lot since we have moved a lot, that I have plenty of time, but then moving day always sneaks up on me and I realize I haven't done as much as I thought I did! We will be spending most of our labor day weekend laboring over card board boxes.

Here we go, again

If you know me, you know that I love decorating my home, and that I love to do as much of it as I can myself, well with my husband's help on many occasion. It's a wonderful feeling to do it myself. I take my inspiration from all over, internet image searches, reading my favorite blogs, and what I see around me.
That all said, my love for decorating is hopefully going to be coming in handy in the coming months. My husband and I bought a house in 2007, built it from the ground. We chose everything construction grade with every intention of upgrading it throughout the years. Well then came the economic down turn. My husbands job transferd us up north and we had to rent our house out, as we were unable to sell it with out taking a huge lose that we could not afford. Well long story short we ended up moving back to the area and we plan on moving back into our house sometime this year. There is not a set date yet as our renters don't know we are moving back in and their lease is not up until November (*sigh*), we are hoping they will move out sooner as we are not going to charge them to break their lease. We are ready to have our home back.Though our orignal plan was not to move back in, but that did not work out, so we have adjusted and are changing our plans. We still love our house we now just want to make it an even more special home.
We recently did a home inspection with our property manager, so we could make a list of what was going to need to be done to the house we moved back in. Boy was that a difficult thing to do, understatement of the year. Before the inspection we had never met our renters, they were nice, but lets just say that their stander for a clean house are not the same as ours. We are not clean freaks by any means, but boy did we feel like we were after seeing our house in a not so clean state. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings so lets just say there will be a lot (*cough*, a ton, *cough, cough*) of work to be done when we move back in.
We are starting to make a list which has been getting longer and longer, of what will need to be done. We are trying to be prepared now so that we can do a lot of the work in a week when we get the house back. More on that list in another post to come.
So that's the long story, short. I plan chronicling our experience with this blog and also showing my decorating ideas and projects. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I love to do a lot my self. So stay tuned for more posts, and here's to DIY home improvements and decorating.

**Note, the picture in this post is the front of our house, probably taken in 2008, I think.**