I wrote this post about a week ago and finally uploaded my pictures. Enjoy.
I feel like I have been very busy lately. Trying to move into a new home with two young kids is challenging. Alisa is loving our new home and is always wanting to help me by doing whatever I am doing. So unpacking or doing any sort of heavy duty cleaning while Alisa is awake is hard to do. Because we ripped out the old carpet and spread dust everywhere (and the previous owners didn’t clean when they left) I have had to do some pretty major cleaning. My hands and arms get very tired from scrubbing walls. I am probably half-way done scrubbing walls. (The walls I have cleaned look great!)
Alisa loves to be in our backyard. She wishes she could play more in our garden. My garden is another reason that cleaning the house is going slowly. My garden spot is 13′ by 35 ‘ and I am having a lot of fun planting it. We have really nice neighbors who lent us their tiller, so we were able to break up the soil. I didn’t do much to see what type of soil it is, I just figured I would plant it this year and see how it goes. I have so far planted peas, carrots, onion sets, potatoes, corn, beans, zucchini, and crookneck squash. I want to still plant tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and maybe some herbs. It has been really fun to finally have a garden of my own. Hopefully we will be able to harvest yummy veggies from our garden. I keep going out to check on them, but other than the onion sets, I can only see a lot of weeds. 
I think the picture makes my garden look bigger. The plot is 13′x35′.
I don’t have any pictures yet of my house, mainly because I am not moved in. I wanted to finish deep cleaning before I unpack my boxes, so give me another few weeks. However, we did take some before/after pictures of our house with the new carpet and vinyl. Wow, we sure love the change. I also took some of the outside of the house.
The carpet in the front room appears to be original-30 years old. We didn’t like how dark it was.
The new entryway and living room.
Our fireplace going into the dining room. We switched out carpet for vinyl in the dining room.
Yuck!
So much better. (Well, it will feel even better when we get new counter tops, but that’s a few years down the road.)
Our common bathroom previously.
Updated.
Our master bathroom previously.
Updated. (Do you like the yellow countertop?)
The old carpet in Hyrum’s room.
The new look. (sorry the angle is different)
The old master bedroom carpet–yellow shag. (and some nice cords coming out of the vent)
The new carpet.
A broken water softener that has previously flooded the house.
We got rid of it.
Our utility room before.
After
And now for the pictures of the outside of the house…
From the front.
Our front door (I can’t get the “Utah Jazz” sticker to come off. Good thing it’s Joe’s team.)
The shed in our backyard. I love it.
Our woodpile (probably spider infested).
Alisa likes our dandelions.
We have lots of them.
The back of our house and yard.
Some fun memories of our first two weeks in our house:
I was cleaning the master shower (we have two bathrooms now!) and began to clean the shower head. I picked it up (it was one of those handheld ones that has a long cord) and the shower head popped right off. It was pretty surprising. Joe and I laughed and we took the shower head from our common bath and put it in our shower. We threw the old shower head away.
Both our shower and the common bathroom’s bathtub have drainage problems. Ours backs up after about 5 minutes while the bathtub drains with a slow drip. I think we need a plumber. I would normally try to do something myself, but this tubs drain is really weird. We will first try Drano.
We have two exterior doors each with a deadbolt, and there were 4 different keys to unlock the house. What a pain to remember what key goes where. Joe bought new locks for our doors and didn’t realize that different locks might require different sized holes. It turns out that the set of locks and deadbolts he bought need a slightly bigger hole for the deadbolt. So Joe’s next project is to borrow a drill (he already bought a drill bit) and make the hole bigger.
We have two bathrooms and one room that used to be a half-bath. So 3 interior doors had locks on them (actually, our master bedroom has a lock rather than the master bath). Of those 3, only 1 actually locks and that’s the old half-bath (which is now our laundry room). Since Joe was in the process of changing doorknobs on our exterior doors, he replaced the common bathroom’s doorknob with our family room’s doorknob. So now our common bathroom can lock (and we taped the key to the top front of the door, just in case).
Joe went to open the door from our family room to the laundry room and the doorknob came off into his hands. So the old bathroom door that doesn’t lock replaced it. Joe is now a pro at changing door knobs.
Joe and I replaced our hall light fixture with a new one that is much nicer looking. It looks much better and no one got hurt (although my arms were really sore from holding it up for so long). Now we feel better prepared to take out that hideous chandelier I mentioned earlier.
We hope to someday change out the brown doors for white ones, but we first have to learn how to hang them.
Joe bought a Honda lawn mower and is in 7th heaven. He loves it and it makes our lawn look great. He also bought a much less expensive trimmer and attacked the 2-foot grass that was growing alongside the fences. Our yard looks a lot better.
We tore out the old wooden back step as it was rotting and beyond help. Our inexpensive step stool will have to do until we get around to building a deck.
The old deck … which was way past it’s prime.
We found this little/big guy when we destroyed the old “deck.”
Our current “deck” or step-stool.
I am sure there are more, but that’s all I can think of right now. We are enjoying our new house adventure, but hope to finish moving in soon. I will have a bit more time each day to do unpacking after our awesome new dishwasher is installed tomorrow. I am way excited!
