We're officially home owners!!! We bought a condo in Taylorsville and moved in on July 16 (which also happened to be Jon's birthday).
Here's a bit about our place:
-2500 square feet
-3 levels
-4 bed, 2 and a quarter bath
-mostly finished basement
-Furnace, water heater, and air conditioner are all original. How they lasted 28 years, I don't know. But we'll have to replace them soon.
The main floor has a bedroom, quarter bathroom/laundry, kitchen, formal dinning area, and the living room. Upstairs is the master bedroom with a walk in closet, and the master bath has a tub and shower. Down the hall is another bedroom and a full bathroom. In the basement is the forth bedroom and the family room. The part that's unfinished is framed for another bed room, and there's rough-ins for a bathroom.
The previous owners had some very interesting color choices. The master bedroom is the "Green Bay Packers" room with dark green and bright yellow-gold walls. The other upstairs bedroom is the "Patriotic" room with red, white, and blue walls. The kitchen is an interesting pink or tan color depending on the light. And the old country cottage looking cupboards have got to go. And then there's the bathrooms, you've gotta give them points for trying, but they didn't do a good job. One was a creamy yellow color with brown sponged on. And the master bath is similar in color put instead of using a sponge they used a rag to brush on the other color.
Well in the 3 weeks that we've lived here we've found things wrong with the house and had some issues, let me take you through our last few weeks.......
Friday July 15, the day before the move -
Jon and I slept in till almost noon because we had gone to see the final Harry Potter movie at midnight. After we finally got up we packed everything we could until about 11:00 pm and then went to bed.
Saturday July 16, moving day -
We got up at 7:00 so we could be at the new place by 8:00 for Comcast to come and install everything. While taking the multiple trips from the apartment to the car we had Bolt on a leash so he didn't run away. At one point he jumped in the car while we were loading the TV and he refused to get out. Poor little guy, he was getting really nervous because he didn't know what was going on.
Jon's sister Diane and I had gone to the condo the night before to decorate for Jon's birthday. So he got a surprise of balloons and streamers when we walked in. Well I headed back to the apartment with Bolt to finish packing, and to tell everyone that was helping us move what was ready to take to the new place. Poor Bolt kept getting more and more frantic, he started to whine when we had to tie him up so he couldn't run out the door. And when he was off his leash he would either go lay on the pile of flat boxes or actually jump in a box that had some blankets in it and refuse to get out. It's like he was saying if the box was going, so was he.
Well we finally got everything moved out and we spent the rest of the day and most of Sunday unpacking and finding places to put things.
Bolt has since settled down, it took him a few days to realize that this was our new home and that he wasn't getting left behind.
July 17-23 -
We discover that 3 of the 8 lights in the family room don't work. We thought the light bulbs had just burned out, nope, we have to get a ladder and investigate above the cans. (Put on the to-do list).
Garbage disposal sounds weird, better check that out too.
Oh, and of course the water heater sounds like it's 28 years old, wonder how long that will last?
Friday July 22 -
I started painting the hideous bathroom/laundry room. We decided to go cheap and just paint it white. It's better than the sponged brown.
I was able to get a second coat on most of the room before I ran out of paint. We'll have to buy more so I can finish it next weekend.
Monday July 25 -
Jon broke the tip of his finger at work.
Tuesday July 26 -
Utah gets hit with rain. And I don't mean a little bit, I'm talking cats and dogs, cloud bursts, monsoons, streets turned into canals, basements flooded....
Speaking of basements flooding, we came home on Tuesday to find the carpet drenched in the basement. As bad as that it, let's add to the fact that it was the one room in the house that was actually set up completely.
So what happened was that our rain gutter was full, it over flowed and washed away the dirt that had been built up as a slope away from the windo seal. The slope now wend toward the window seal, which built up and then leaked into the basement. Since no one is aloud on the roof, we weren't the only ones that came home to wet basements. So far we've heard of 2 other condos that had the same problem. We later were able to find out that the rain gutters should have been cleaned out last Fall, but the snow came early so they weren't able to. Uhh...last I checked Fall came before December.
Wednesday July 27 -
We realize that the floor is a lot wetter than we thought it was and we end up having to move everything out of the family room that we had just set up the night before, and pull up the carpet. We borrow 2 gigantic fans and have them blowing for days.
Friday July 29 -
I finished painting the bathroom so now we can put in the used washer we got from family.
Sunday July 31 -
Jon finds out that not all garbage disposals are created equally. At least that's what I say, Jon says that it's old and would have been fine with a bunch of potato peels if it had been new.
Also we went and cleaned our old apartment since it was the last day of the month and we weren't able to clean it theday before. When we were about 5 minutes away from being done it started to pour. So we had to drop everything, run out to the car, drive the 10 minutes home, and run into the house to see if the basement was flooding again. The basement was ok for the moment, but we had to do something about the rain gutters. So we went out on the deck that's attached to the the master bedroom and take a broom handle to push out all the leaves.
Friday August 5 -
Our dryer that we bought a week ago finally arrived! I can do laundry without leaving the house!
Our projects:
-Paint the master bedroom
-Paint the "Patriotic" bedroom
-Remodel the kitchen (someday)
-Remodel the master bath (someday)
-Paint upstairs bathroom
-Pick a color for the bathroom/laundry room
-Set up the office/craft room (and possibly paint it)
-Figure out what's wrong with the lights in the family room and fix them
-Get Jon a work bench in the garage
So we're pretty much loving have a place of our own (minus the flooding, of course). It's so nice to have back the things you take for granite... dishwasher, garbage disposal, washer, dryer, and central air. Now if we can just get some painting done the place will look good enough to invite people over.
