Home sweet home!!

Well we have been living in our house for three weeks now and it is beginning to feel like home! We closed on October 30th and have had a lot of work done to the house. Here is what the past month and a half has looked like for us!

The week of closing we had a huge snow storm and thank goodness for four wheel drive, we had a huge pile of snow plowed just in front of our driveway and could only get in with the Xterra! These pictures are from just after closing with our realtor...

Week one of renovations: our contractor tore up our kitchen,carpet, interior doors and started painting.

Matt also installed our new water heater, here he is reading the instruction manual...
By week two we had our appliances, but not a kitchen to install them yet so they sat in our dining room while they just worked around it all...Week three we had carpet, new interior doors, and most of our kitchen installed. Ready or not we had to move in by the end of this week.

Also during those three weeks, Matt had to get busy! He built us a new deck and did a lot of plumbing work throughout the house. I painted the garage doors, the front door and did lots of cleaning and caulking our bathroom. Our deck is amazing, he did such a great job!
Before... dilapidated and unsafe not to mention small as heck!
After: spacious and relaxing!! It comes just off our bedroom too. We haven't gotten to enjoy it much with our snow storms and cold weather but we look forward to it this spring and summer!

So here are some before and afters!! Oh and by the way I love my red door, it makes me happy... this spring we are going to put up black shutters as well...

This is the view from the end of our driveway. Kitchen... before... dull and missing most everything...After!! We love it, it is wonderful...Moving day everyone helping us get settled!
Living room before....

And After... it is a very comfortable space that we enjoy. Out of our bay window you have such a good view of the street and everything thats going on outside. Our Living, dining, kitchen area is very open with a great floorplan. Our master bedroom before...
And after... It's a great room for us, very quiet and good for sleeping during the day for me. It also is big enough for our furniture to fit comfortably which is great! Our bedroom opens up to a half bath that is also attached to our main upstairs bath.


This is our view from our guest room. I am pretty sure you can only see the mountains in the winter but still we like to say we have some mountain view!! The guest bedroom is actually one of my favorite rooms in the house. It has great windows with good light. One window faces northwest to see the mountains and the other faces east to see the city and the plains. Above is our basement room which is mostly storage. It still needs work, we basically just carpeted it for now and will address it later. There is another bathroom down here and it opens out to the garage which Matt is currently working on. He is installing garage door openers and organizing a work station for himself. We took the old cabinets from the kitchen to make a little workshop.

Things are coming together slowly. Our third bedroom is still a disaster as we have yet to get our desk to make it into our office area. With all the snow we haven't wanted to go out and transport it yet, hopefully we will get that set up this week though. We definitely have lots of projects to last us as long as we want!!!

Thanks for looking at our blog we love our new home and can't wait to finish getting everything set up.

Our New House...

Well I think this time is it!! We have a house.

This whole thing is actually a very funny story, as if our entire experience hasn't been one to look back and laugh at! So we were looking at houses one day and our realtor took us to this one. He told us that right now it is priced above our price range but there hasn't been interest in it recently and he expected the price to come down. So if the price did drop, he wanted to know if we would be interested. So we looked at it quickly (we had many others on the list to sift through) decided sure we could live here and moved on. We had found another home that day that we were placing a bid on and were excited about.

So we placed the bid on this other house and of course was outbid and didn't get it, we were used to that it was a weekly thing at this point. Then the next day we saw that this house had dropped in price, and the bidding period was ending in 24 hours (we didn't have time to go back and look at it or anything) Our realtor calls to ask us if we want to place a bid. Matt and I looked at each other shrugged and said "why not?" (of course we were fully expecting to NOT win the bid). The next day we get a call from our realtor, we won the bid!?!?!

Matt calls to tell me we won the bid and asks what house was this again? Where is it? I vaguely remembered the house, all I remembered was that it was in a good neighborhood, close to Matt's work and close to the mountains, but I didn't really remember much about the house. We decided we need to go look at this house as soon as possible to make sure we want to move forward with this contract.

We go back to look at the house and I am a little overwhelmed, it needs a lot of work. Matt is excited and thinks this is perfect for us and he sees all the work he gets to do and thinks it's just wonderful. Structurally it's in great shape and with some paint and carpet, and a few maintenance things it will be just perfect.

So now we have gone through the inspection and are sure this is our house and are moving forward with everything! We have been able to get an fha 203k rehab loan, that just goes in with our fha loan, to help with the expenses of fixing it up. We are working with a great mortgage broker who lined up a general contractor for us. We get to meet with him on Monday and talk to him about what we want to do and how we can do it all in the budget we want to work with. At first we weren't working with a general contractor and things were so overwhelming since we don't know what we are doing... so this guy is such a relief and will make everything go so much smoother.

We plan to close and move in towards the end of October. Then all the fixing up begins. Unfortunately since this was a HUD foreclosure home we aren't able to start on any of the projects until after closing, but right now we are gathering bids and lining everyone up to get the work done soon after closing. We will post some before and after pictures as we go through the process. We don't have many pictures of the inside yet, the ones I took just didn't come out very good. The house is 3 bedrooms, 2.75 baths, has a nice open floor plan for the upstairs living area. The deck in the lower picture comes off the master bedroom, but will be replaced soon, it is falling apart right now! There is a basement family room that has an entry into the garage. There are quite a few trees on our property with a nice secluded feel in the backyard. We have also met some of our neighbors and really like them.

Climbing Mountains and other Labor Day activities!

Over Labor Day weekend we hiked our first 14er!! For those of you who may be asking, what is a 14er? it is one of the many mountains in Colorado that are above 14,000 feet in elevation. For comparison, Pikes Peak is one of the 14ers in Colorado. After a relaxing overnight stay in Breckenridge we took off with our friends Diana, Jordan and their one year old Seth to Mt Quandry.


Diana and Jordan have climbed many 14ers, but not with a one year old! They were very excited for the challenge and joy of sharing this with their baby.

We took many breaks including diaper change breaks! Changing diapers on the side of a mountain is a little more challenging, luckily we found an open area off the path.

Just as we are coming above tree line you can see the peak for the first time. It is the far shadded one in the picture above and it looked very far away...

Oh but the views were just tremendous and more rewarding when you are climbing them rather than driving. These views are some that you can't drive to though, only a few 14ers have access to the summit by road.After we came out of the tree line we were pretty much just hiking on rocks for 3 hours. Very tiresome on the poor ankles. Even more so on the hike down!

So after 4 hours of hiking we made it to the top. It was no easy feat, especially for Diana who carried Seth on her back pretty much the whole way! It was only 3.5 miles up, but with 3000 ft elevation gain and very little oxygen it took us a long time.

Diana, Seth and I summited the mountain first. We sort of caught a second wind and cheered one another onto the top. She was so proud of her accomplishment, everyone passing us on the trail was taking pictures and making comments about little Seth.

Seth was such a trooper he really likes riding in his pack, but by the time we reached the top he was getting very tired and hungry!

Not too long after we summited Jordan and Matt joined us. Matt was quite certain that he would never climb a 14er again at this point but at least he did one! He is much more sensitive to the altitude and does not tolerate being at 14,000 feet much less climbing rocks at this height! But we celebrated for a few moments, until we looked around at the storms that were coming in. 14,000 feet is not a good place to be when lightening strikes.

It started sleeting on us and we had to pull out our rain gear, but luckily there wasn't any lightening.

The hike down on the rocks was actually very difficult. Your legs are already so tired and the rocks are so uneven. We all rolled our ankles and fell here or there. Jordan had a hard time keeping balance with Seth on his back.

Seth in his rain gear! Still looking tired.

After about 30 minutes the storm had blown over and we were once again blessed by blue skies! And mountain goats!

It was such a relief to hit tree line again. Even ground with dirt trails was so much easier to walk on. With each step the air was getting thicker and the green cover of the trees was welcoming.

At the end of the hike we were all very tired but we accomplished our task. Now it was off to Beaujo's for some well deserved Colorado pizza!!The next exciting thing this weekend was that Matt bought his snowboard! He is SO very excited for ski season. Labor Day is when everything starts to go on sale for ski season. We opened a new bank account at Wells Fargo and recieved a buy one get one free voucher for season passes to three ski resorts. So we are ready for snow to come and Matt could not be more happy with his snowboard find!Trigger posing to give advice out to his fans on Facebook!

Daniel and Robyn were in town on Labor Day, it was so good to spend time with them. Robyn had never been to Colorado before, so we welcomed her to the mountains that we love.

The first night we had dinner at Aunt kay's, yum yum...

Then I took them to Mount Evan's the next day so Robyn could get a good view of the mountains.

We did our fair share of some bouldering and hiking.

Their last evening here we drove up to Greeley to see Aunt Zoe, Uncle Randy and Anna. It was a lot of fun. Good food and good times with lots of laughter.

Well that was our busy Labor Day! It was great to hang out and get our mind off work and house hunting. We definitely spent some good time in the hot tub this week as our muscles and joints are still healing from the hike. We may have some house news coming soon...

Other than that I hope everyone is doing well and happy September!! That means fall is coming soon, very soon. I Love the Fall it's my favorite!