Welcome Home

We closed on our first house one week ago today! While the process was a bit stressful for me and my struggle with the virtue of patience, finally getting to open the door on our new place was well worth the wait.

Our New Home (Before)

We wanted to paint the whole house before moving in, so within an hour of getting the keys I started tearing the chair rail off the wall in the living room. I thought it was just nailed to the wall. I was incorrect.

Unfortunately the chair rail was also glued to the wall with wood glue, and the wall, covered with layers of paint and wallpaper, came tumbling down. It was like the universe saying "Welcome to home ownership! You are an idiot!" It felt like the house was hazing me. And it felt AWESOME.

One text to Dave's Dad ("hey I broke our house, how do I fix this?") and one trip to Home Depot later, I managed to fixed the wall so I could start painting. Yay learning new skills! 

A generous friend from Behr hooked us up with all the paint we needed for the new place. After years of moving from neutral beige apartment to neutral beige apartment, we were ready for a new neutral. I wanted a color that would take full advantage of the light streaming in through our glorious, enormous windows in the living room, that would add to the vibrancy of artwork, and that would cool down a room filled with all of our orangey-colored wood furniture. We chose a medium gray for the living room and bedrooms, a light gray for the bathroom, hallway, laundry, and mudroom, and a rich indigo for the kitchen and living room accent.

I have to admit that after hours of trying to pick colors, they all started to goosh together in my mind as one big glob, and every tint and shade started to look so vastly different from each other than I just couldn't pick. In the end I went with the most awesomely named colors. I mean, could there be paints named any more perfectly for Dave and I than Granite Boulder, Dolphin Fin, Mood Indigo, and Beluga? No. No there could not.

This wall is the "After" of the damaged corner from before.

So far my expectation that home ownership would basically be like Build/Buy mode in The Sims is more accurate than I could have ever dreamed it to be. Yes, changing the wall color is a bit more strenuous than a shift-click, and rotating furniture is more challenging than a click-and-drag, but the virtual world provided by The Sims accurately depicts the overall experience of getting into an empty house and decorating the crap out of it.


After seven days of painting, moving, and unpacking, here is what our living room looks like today:

The rest of the house still looks like a pit of messy horror, but at least now we have a spot perfect for the morning's cup of tea.

Best of all, we got to celebrate our 4th Wedding Anniversary yesterday at the beach near our new place. While living in Tampa we made the hour-long drive to the ocean a few times for our anniversary, so it was wonderful to spend a full TEN MINUTES in the car between our new home and the beach parking lot.

Happy Four Years!

The next few days will be spent finishing up our kitchen and hammering the final nails in the coffin of our old apartment in Tampa. Goodbye forever, neutral beige apartment walls!