Although my birthday isn’t actually until tomorrow, I’m not planning to be at work tomorrow, so Tom sent these to work today instead:
I love getting flowers. 
They smell wonderful too. Definitely a happy thing for the afternoon, yes?
I figure it’s about time I post some house pictures. Bear in mind these are “before” pictures. Here is the house from the outside, front:
Living Room:
view from dining room into the living room:
Kitchen:
small “family” room off of kitchen (will be an office I think, for us):
Hall bathroom:
Master bath:
Backyard:
Garage:
Hall, master on left, dining room straight ahead:
The bedrooms are, well, bedrooms; nothing very interesting except that the paint color has changed (haven’t taken after pictures yet of those anyway).
There are several things we’ve done already: re-textured the living room, replaced the door casings and baseboards, re-painted the entire house except for the 3rd bedroom. We actually painted the hall cabinets white (to contrast with the walls and not look so dark) and hung rounded shelves off the top part. We have also replaced the appliances in the kitchen, and Tom fixed the horrendous plumbing mess in the garage. The previous owners basically has a fixture tacked on the wall for the washer and dryer hook-ups, and long pipes running across the length of the wall to and from the water softener, before being regulated at the main. The house originally had the Quest pipes (plastic things) and those were replaced after some class action lawsuit, but in the garage they weren’t replaced properly; the old hook-ups were just left in the wall but not connected to anything. It was so cheesy. Tom fixed the plumbing and it now goes into the attic, with new hookups on the wall, like so:
water main:
The only other “after” picture I’ve taken so far is of the kitchen (can click this one to make it bigger):
I don’t have a good picture of the oven here, but it’s actually a dual oven with a small one on the top and regular sized one on the bottom (no separate broiler or storage drawer). It’s awesome; the little oven heats up in 3 minutes. Oh, and that is the most awesome refridgerator; I’vebeen drooling over it for almost a year now, since we first started looking at houses.
A couple other things to note: the deck takes up most of the yard, and is infested with termites. Rather than have it dealt with by the seller we took a check and will be ripping it out and putting in a smaller patio so the kids will have some actual play space in the yard. We’re planning to rip out the yards also; the grass is very dead, as the pictures show.
There’s one other very big thing we have to do, and sooner rather than later. The master bath is atrocious. A previous owner put in a big soaking tub, but the room is far too small for it. There is no “elbow” room next to the toilet because a ledge sticks out, and there isn’t even room for a regular-size towel rod on the wall behind the door. Also, they did a crappy job on the installation; it’s not properly installed and the tub is cracked. The three walls that the tub touches were (badly) re-textured, but the fourth wall was left the original texture. This isn’t the only incompetence we’ve encountered, though; the hall light is wired incorrectly and doesn’t always work from both switches, and the whole living room was wired incorrectly also (the living room has since been fixed).
Since we’re planning to rip out the master bath, we are toying with the idea of adding on to the house to make it bigger and add a proper walk-in closet to the master. We’re still in the very early stages and waiting for plans to be drawn up, but we definitely have to do something and now would be the time.
The hall bath is going to be updated also (new cabinets/counters/sinks/faucets, new toilet and lights and fixtures, and tile instead of linoleum). So, the work is definitely NOT done. We’re talking about hiring it out since our brother-in-law is a contractor and does amazingly gorgeous work. We stand a chance of having it all done before the baby if we hire it out. If we do it ourselves? Yeah, not so much.
So, there’s the first round of house pictures. As I take “after” pictures I’ll post them. It may be awhile, though, if we’re pushing out walls…
