Progress

Slowly but surely we are furnishing and decorating our new place. Shortly after we moved in we purchased a new couch and loveseat for the living room. We had planned for this, as we only had the one couch worth the cost of moving, and we wanted that to go in our bonus room upstairs. Unfortunately, due to the slope of the roof at the top of the stairs, the movers were not able to haul it their, so it is now situated at the front end of my long living room.  I had hoped to put a set of easy chairs with a small table between them there, but luckily the color of that couch coordinates well enough with our new set to keep there. The longer it's there, the more I like it. At any rate, it saves having to buy more furniture.

I still have not found the charger for my camera, so these pictures are of only a couple taken with my daughters Iphone.

A couple owned the house before us, the husband worked in cabinetry. He made the cabinets in the kitchen and elsewhere.  He also put in some custom shelves around the fireplace.  They were not what you would expect to see built around a fireplace, though. They were large and looked like they were built to hold backpacks, such as you would see in a kindergarten class. They took up a lot of the space in the room, and made it look like the room had been used as a preschool. (I don't know that it hadn't.)

 

This picture off the real estate listing shows the living room with the shelves in.  The first week we were there we tore those down (not an easy task) and repainted the walls. We tried to match the previous wall color as closely as possible, since we did like the color they had. When they built the shelves, instead of putting a back on them, they painted the wall behind it white. Since we did not find the exact color, we wound up painting the entire room.

 

This picture also shows the room in a much better light, as they obviously had a nicer camera. One with a wide-angle lens, which makes the room look huge. It also gives an idea of the challenge we had to arrange the furniture around the fireplace - somewhat obscured by the loveseat here - and furnish the front portion of the room without it looking cut off.  Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the room from the same angle. 

 

 

 This is a shot taken of the front area of the living room. You can see the dining room behind the staircase.  I will cover that in my next post.

 

Still more work to do, but we are feeling pretty happy with our downstairs. The upstairs is currently mid-painting, putting a purple on the one daughter's room and a light green in the other daughter's room.  Our master bedroom and bonus room needs furniture and lots of organization. We still have boxes to be unpacked, but right now a lot of the displacement comes from the painting projects and that need of more furniture.  Home wasn't built in a day, right?

 

Jane

 

 

 

 

 



WE MOVED

After prepping our home to sell for several months, in between selling my mother-in-law's place and moving her to a nursing home, we finally listed it November 12, 2012. It sold that day. As in, it didn't even officially make it to the MLS listing, our agent was getting ready to list it and another agent who was shopping for a condo for her clients heard about it and came over while our agent was taking pictures for the listing. That evening we got a verbal offering for $10,000 over the our original asking price, and by the next day had signed papers on it. Of course, there were still those several weeks of inspections and paperwork for the buyer's loan company. It seemed so drawn out at the time, but now seems to have flown. So while others were pulling out their holiday decorations, we were finishing packing and making final preparations to move halfway across the country.

Oh yeah, my hubby and I took a week to fly into Nashville, TN, to find exactly where we would be moving to. After scouring the general Nashville area to find a home which fit our desires and budget, we expanded our search to include Murfreesboro, a college town about 30 miles south of Nashville proper, home to Middle Tennessee State University. There we found a modest two-story colonial and put in an offer. By the time we flew back to Orange County the next day, the paperwork was proceeding, and we had a home. 

Escrow hadn't quite closed on our California home yet, and it was just a couple weeks before Christmas.  Not wanting to be at an airport on Christmas Eve, and being told that escrow could close anywhere from the 18th to the 28th of December, we packed up the family and two upset cats and flew into Nashville on the 18th.  We spent 10 days at a hotel in the Nashville area. Not the most ideal situation, but we actually were very pleased with the Residence Inn of Brentwood where we wound up. They not only had the two bedroom suite our family of four needed, they allowed for the cats to be there.

To make a long story short, our California home closed on the 28th, after some gentle last-minute pushing from our realty office in Nashville, as we were unable to close on this house until the sale went thru in Cali. We moved in on December 29, one month ago. As luck would have it, our moving truck didn't catch up with us until January 17, quite a bit later than originally advertised. We went a couple days sleeping on the floor until we got new beds in, a few more days before we bought a new couch and loveseat and had them delivered, and a good week after that before we had a table and chair set purchased and actually in our breakfast area.



The only picture I have taken of the new home.  I do not know where the charger is for my camera.  I don't know where many things are at the moment, even though I'm surrounded by things begging to be put away correctly.

Today we got our Internet and television hooked up.  I am finally connected again to my friends.  I won't have much time for blogging yet, as there is so, so much to do at our new place.  But hopefully I will be able to come back and catch up.  We've already made a few changes, it would have been nice to have had before pictures.  That charger is around somewhere, I know. 

Hope everyone is having a great time. It's wonderful to be able to catch up with everyone here, you all are such inspirations.  Jane

On Our Way - Almost

It has been a long several months of work, but the finished result is as nice as we can do it without
rebuilding from scratch.  Since July we have been in the final push to make our condo showroom ready to sell.  We painted, fixed, reglazed bathtub, laid new carpet, put in new lights, and tiled bathroom floors, just to name a few projects.

We eliminated as much of our personal tastes from the home, including getting rid of one of our couches to open up space in the living room. I'd been packing as many non-essentials as possible for the past several months, so it was relatively easy to keep the decorative touches minimal.

It seems to have paid off.  We received an offer on the home before we even officially listed. We are still in escrow and praying that it goes through smoothly.  After spending much of the year fixing up first my husband's mothers' home, then ours, we finally seem to be at a close.  It has taken much more work and time than anticipated, but doesn't it always. 

Wednesday hubby and I leave for a trip to Nashville, which is the new homeland we've been working towards.  It will be a six-day scouting trip, we'll look at some houses and hope to find the new home to call our own. We're both hoping it comes with no repairs needed.  Wish us luck!

Jane