The Final Lap... of the First Race

(or second, depending on how you look at it)

I guess that the first real hurdle was closing escrow on the loan, and that did take some significant time (almost 3 months) Then, our objective was to make the house livable and "nice" again, and we were able to do that in a matter of two and a half months. And finally, our end goal is to make this house a home... to live in it, decorate it and really make it our own! And with that said, I am so happy to say that we are finally living in our new-to-us home! This last week was a mad rush to get things to a point where we were comfortable with moving in... if only at least partially!

We did some more painting... my mom painted our bedroom and closet...

Our bedroom ceiling (it's a dark purple, a shade darker than the living room accent walls)

...while I started in the bathroom.

Painting behind this sink was almost impossible, ugh!

In the kitchen, Kyla and I started the prep work on my plans for the only bare wall in the room (everything else in the kitchen will eventually be covered by either cabinets or back splash). I debated for a while if I wanted to do an accent color on this wall and I even played around with the idea of wallpaper, but no pattern that I saw caught my eye. Finally I decided to just go for it and paint my own stripes!

We measured, leveled and tapes off sections for stripes and then I painted on the first layer of white to seal the edges of the painters tape for the color.

The next day when the seal paint was dry, I was able to paint the actually colored stripes and peel off the tape when the paint was still wet...

I learned this trick online and although it might be common knowledge for painters to do stripes this way, I was pleasantly surprised at just how good our stripes turned out. They did need a little bit of touching up inside the stripes in areas that the paint was a little thin, but other than that, the lines themselves were basically flawless with absolutely NO bleeding underneath the tape, despite textured walls. I gotta say, these stripes turned out really good!

We used a lot of tape!

While us girls painted away, the boys continued their work on the counter tops. James has been putting layer after layer of Waterlox on the butcher block since we first cut them... in the end, we will have 3 layers on the bottom, probably about 5-6 layers on the tops and then a few extra layers on top of that around the sink area.

On Tuesday, they starting with routing the holes for the connectors...

After those were all done, Colt finished them off by gluing and leveling all the counter tops together. I might make it sound simple, but these counter tops were really hard work and we they definitely wouldn't have turned out as good as they did if it weren't for Colt's expertise! Although the counter tops are close, they still aren't completely done... we still have to do some sanding and a few more layers of seal!

So... then came the weekend, Saturday was moving day! We definitely weren't ready for all of our stuff but the guys (Justin, Ryan and James) did 2 trips from the in-laws in 3 trucks and a trailer and got A LOT of stuff over to the house. I was able to unpack a few boxes but other than our kitchen, our house is still seriously lacking in storage space. We plan on building shelves in all 3 of the closets in the house soon, but until then, a lot of our stuff is going to have to stay in boxes. Not to mention, the house is still under construction, we have quite a few projects still going on and unpacking unnecessary items would just make a bigger mess!

We were able, though, to bring in  and unpack our new refrigerator and stove and they looked absolutely glorious in our new kitchen!

It was a long day... but regardless of the chaos, we were finally able to end the day (Valentines Day) with our bottle of Dom Perignon that we got as a wedding gift and share it with our friends. We were waiting for a special occasion to open it and we couldn't think of a better time to pop that baby!

All we had to drink out of were the glasses that came with the champagne and coffee cups! haha!

But the best part about finally living in our house was being able to have our pups with us and to get to sleep with this girl again!

This week, my personal super heroes were Colt and Kyla, my mom, my husband and our buds, Justin and Ryan, for helping us finally be ready to move in! More to come very soon, like my dad and I installing our kitchen sink and dishwasher!