I get my life back (for five weeks!)

So the first semester of grad school is over. For the next several weeks (school starts again on January 19th) we are going to get lots done around the house. Today the plan is to construct a new enclosure for Thor and Valkyrie- I'll upload pics when its done- and to work on the office. If Greg ever gets up that is.

We're going to start attacking the living/dining rooms once we get back from Christmas in Iowa. Carpet, drop ceilings, wallpaper, your days are numbered.

We got new, fancy laptops for Christmas so we'll upload lots of pictures because I know that's really what everyone wants to see.

Bear with us

Elena has been very busy with school, so there hasn't been much to report on lately, but with semester break coming up we hope to have lots of exciting new things to post about. Please bear with us.

Eight chairs (and a table) in search of a dining room

Progress on the renovation has been a bit slow the last month with Elena in school two nights a week and various other distractions. We did however find a nice dining room set which should look good in the eventual dining room. We were killing some time at The Future Antiques when we came across a very nice Danish Modern style table and chairs.

We both like the mid century modern style and plan to use it as a jumping off point for the overall design of the living room and dining room. We also have some more eclectic pieces we plan to use. The goal is to give the rooms a clean modern look overall, without furnishing them solely in mid century pieces to the point where it looks like a set from Mad Men.

It felt a bit impulsive to make such a large purchase on the spot. But the set was in such good shape we didn't want to risk missing it, as it's unlikely we would be able to find another one like it. Not only did it have all eight original chairs (not all are pictured) as well as all the leaves, but a couple of days after we got it home the store called and told us the woman they had bought it from had found the pads for the top of the table and had dropped them off. We went over and picked them up the next weekend, under the condition that I was not allowed to buy anything else. So now we have some furniture, now we just need to make a room to put it in.

The Neighborhood

The neighborhood we bought our house in is very much a neighborhood of transition. There are definitely problems in our neighborhood, but there are lots of good things too. Ultimately it was because of those good things that we purchased where we did. The housing stock is very unique and there is a large variety of single family houses of different sizes, two-family and other houses. We've met fabulous people who care about the neighborhood as we do. There are business owners in their area who are investing to make this an inticing place to be.

It was largely because of our involvement in two political campaigns beginning in 2008, one national and one local we got to know our neighborhood and our ward better than we knew it in the first three years we lived in our apartment. (St. Louis is broken into almost 80 neighborhoods- most with subneighborhoods and 28 Wards each with an alderman.) As we looked at houses frequently one of us would say, I've knocked on this door, was it for Obama or Shane or both? Because of that we started to feel a real connection, not just with our apartment, but our neighborhood. I think I speak for both of us when I say we don't just want to come home and run into our house and not know anyone around us.

Currently the geographic subneighborhood of Dutchtown (our neighborhood) is without a neighborhood association, but our neighbors are working on that. Tonight Greg and I went to a meeting at to discuss forming a neighborhood association. I think people really get the power of doing this. There were some nay-sayers who attended the last meeting who didn't attend this one, but we will let them be the lazy dog and the lazy cat while we're the little red hen. We'll even let them share our bread when we're ready to eat.

Slowly a house becomes a home

As of today we have been in the house for a month. We spent much of today trying to clear some of the clutter that had taken over much of the house. (Which I had been eloquently describing as the apartment threw up all over the house. A bit graphic I know, but I bet you can picture it, right.)
Today, we ate two meals at our new dining room table. (Which Greg is supposed to blog about.) At breakfast it was in the middle of the living room and by dinner it had made it to the dining room. We also started working on straightening the basement.
Slowly things are making sense and starting to look like we actually live here, not like we're just squating. We've unpacked the CD collection and are slowly unpacking all of the barware. (Priorities, right.) Once we clear out the living and dining rooms the plan is to pa

int the basement so we have some room that is "done" and that we can hide in when the wallpaper starts to attack. Then we begin the big task of tackling the dining/living/hallway-room. It's a lot to do, but it's going to be so worth it.
-Elena

The Many Sides of Wallpaper

Today's entry is going to be a largely pictoral. In our house there are not one, not two, but SEVEN different wallpapers! (This is counting the three different color schemes of the same pattern.) Now we knew they were here when we put an offer on the house, and while I have cursed the presence of the wallpaper everyday since we've moved in, I hope that one day it will just be a big joke we tell people about when they come look at our beautiful house.

The entryway and stairs including the 20 feet up over the stairs. I guess I'm going up a ladder...

Living and dining rooms- really rather boring.

kitchen-extra ug-o!

Upstairs bathroom-the pink bathroom. Pink tile cool, metallic silver and black wallpaper-not so much. Especially since it's also on the ceiling of the bathroom.

Downstairs bathroom- really more silver metallic than it looks here, and actually the one I like the best. (Plus it's the smallest amount of paper- although it is on the ceiling!)

Guestroom-color combo 1of 3- Tan and Green.

Master bedroom- color combo 2 of 3- Blue and Green.

Office- color combo 3 of 3- Orange and Green (although it some places orange has faded to yellow.) This is the one Greg says makes him neurotic.

So yeah, that's a lot of wallpaper. I don't really know why it was necessary to put it on almost every wall of the house. (And the vast majority of those walls remaining have wood paneling on them.) I'm trying to look beyond the rediculousness of it all, because it really is a great house. It just needs a little love from the Sabrownins. (And a few of our closest friends...?)

-Elena

We really have the internet back!

Whoot, whoot! After far too long, we really are able to blog again! I've been storing up ideas in my head, so here is a forecast of what is to come:

• I hate wallpaper: Seriously, who thought it was a good idea.


• Wallpaper, be gone! Everyone has an opinion on how to remove it, and we have enough walls to try them all! (Also-three rooms have the same wallpaper pattern in different colors, pictures to come.)


• The Rabbit Room, or the Lagomorph Lounge- the new home of the foursome.


• The toilet-sink: you'll see.


• The rockin' pantry: awe-some!

There were surely many more ideas that have been swimming around in my head, but that's enough to keep everyone interested for a while.

As we were moving out of the apartment we of course spiraled into the phase of throwing random stuff into boxes and garbage bags to try to get out of the apartment. We were in limbo for about two weeks while we moved everything from point A to point H. It's been a huge relief to be done with that part of the process.

As exciting as it is to be starting this phase, leaving the apartment was really hard. We'd lived there for 4 years, which is half of our relationship and really the entire "adult" stage of our relationship. It's like leaving fake adulthood to go to real adulthood. Greg almost had to drive the four blocks home after we handed over the keys to our landlord since the tears were streaming down my face. It really was a great apartment. Our landlords are actually going to be renting it to the woman who rented it before us. Crazy. She recently moved back to the area and asked if they had any apartments open because she'd loved her apartment, and they were able to tell her that her old apartment was actually going to be open.

So now, what you have surely all been waiting for:


-Elena

Still no interwebs

We're still waiting for everything to get squared away with our cable company. Sunday? (fingers crossed.)

We've moved, but we won't have the internet at the new home until Saturday. Be on the lookout for updates then.

It's the final countdown! doodle-do-do, doodle-do-do-do, doodle-do-do, doodle-do-do-do.

We are able to start moving-in in less than six hours. I need to get Greg up here in a second because we can pick up our U-haul moving van a 7. There will be trips to Starbucks and Jack-in-the-Box on the way. We will try to post towards the end of the weekend once we live more there than here. My plan is to try to take lots of pictures. We have to make up for the first 8 years of our relationship, where there are very few pictures of us.
Oh, on a side note-the lion has a name. We decided to name him Ted Kennedy, after the late, great, liberal Lion himself.

It's a done deal. We have a key to prove it.

So after several months of looking at houses in person and on the computer, 2 inspections, applying for a mortgage and much waiting, we own a house. It's really sort of crazy, and I don't believe it, especially since we don't get to move in until next Friday. The old owners (since we now own it, and they are our tenents) have 42 years worth of stuff they have to clear out of the house before we can move in. It's a lot of stuff. (Seriously.) And this being said given that we have ungodly piles of boxes in our apartment, and we've only been here 4 years.
So what do the Sabrownins do after they sign over their lives to a house? Go to Disneyworld you ask. No. Eat an affordable lunch out? No. We bought a car. We've been cruising around St. Louis in my 1993 Nissan Sentra for the last several months because the Mazda 626 died an unfortunate death in May (darn you Layfeyette exit ramp), right before we started looking for a house. We've actually been doing really well at driving one car, but since I've gone back to school it's made things a wee bit more complicated. (School loan is loan #3 in the last month, might I add. I asked Greg today if he wanted to start a business so we could collect all four-house, car, school and small business. He said no; that's probably wise.) So we went directly from our realtor's office to the Mazda dealership. Unfortunately, much like the house, we have to wait before we get a our car. Lou Fusz (or Fuzz as my mom calls him) did not have a Celestial Blue Mazda 3-5 door with cloth interior on the lot. It will be in Monday or Tuesday.
However, we did enjoy a fantastic lunch at LuLu Chinese food on Olive St. on the way home, and it was by far one of the least expensive things we've purchased all day. And we got it when we ordered it.
So the lesson of the day is patience is rewarded in 3-7 days.
-Elena

crunch time

It's getting down to crunch time. One week till close and two weeks till we can move (the sellers asked to stay in the house a week after close to make their move smoother, so they are going to rent it from us from that week). The only snag has been the late notification that a window needed to be fixed for our appraisal to go through. It has been fixed but we have to make sure they get out there before Friday to confirm so we can get the loan. Not a big deal, but not really something we wanted to deal with.
Elena and I have been pouring over our collection of design mags trying to figure out what we want to do with the new house (yeah I subscribe to Dwell and Metropolitan Home, you wanna fight about it?). I am really looking forward to that part, even if pulling up carpet and pulling down wallpaper and drop ceilings is not going to be a whole lot of fun.
The apartment is probably about 1/3 boxed up now, so we have been concentrating on the drudgery of packing when we are not messing around writing blogs. I wish we had more pictures of this apartment when it was still put together, it really has been a great place to live.


Greg

Let the packing begin!

Over the last several weeks I have been rescuing boxes from work that were otherwise destined for the trash compactor. It's starting to look like we're building a fort in the dining room. (Which would not be the first time this year I've built a box fort.) Pretty cool, right.

That's what you get for going out of town in my office.

Greg and I are not exactly known for being minimalists, but we're looking forward to using this opportunity to clear out some of the junk that has been moving from dorm rooms to our parents' houses to apartments to other apartments. The tough part is decided where to begin. As of today we have 32 days until we close and 39 days (September 18th, which is incidentally my 27th birthday) until we can start moving things. So I want to do things methodically. I hope that happens. (I still remember helping Greg move out of his sophomore year dorm room scramblingto get everything out as they are literally locking the building doors.) In the meantime I am making lists of what we can pack now that we won't miss and can pack now (books, decorations, craft supplies) and what we can't live without and will wait until the last minute to pack (kitchen supplies, the rabbits.)


Speaking of our four four-legged children, I am so excited that they are going to have their own room soon! Thor and Valkyrie have lived in our kitchen since we moved here and during shedding seasons that's a little unappetizing to say the least. It will also be nice not to have trails of timothy hay through the apartment from carrying it to the little kids in the dining room.

Odin and Frigga, the little kids

That is pretty much where we are now. Getting ready to do the paking and fanticizing about the possibilities. I've been pouring over all our our favorite catalogs (CB2, Crate and Barrell, Ikea) and magazines. We've even made some visits to Lowes and HomeDepot to look at paint. But I'd better not get ahead of myself, the apartment won't pack itself.

Well it is finally more or less official. Our sellers agreed to the repairs we had asked for, so the process is mostly procedural from here on out. We are getting the house! It's a relief to be past the negotiation stage, but it's a bit intimidating at the same time. One of those strange moments when you realize that you are what society considers an adult. Redecorating the whole house is going to be a bit of an undertaking, but I think Elena and I are both looking forward to it. I am glad we found a place that really suits us, in a neighbourhood we have really come to care about and feel a part of. Hopefully in not too long we can really make the house our own. Wish us luck, it should be an adventure.

Greg

They don't show you this part on HGTV

So I am somewhat ashamed to say that I have watched my fair share of House Hunters, Property Virgins and the like. It makes the house buying seem so much easier than it has been for us. On those shows you make an offer, maybe negotiate the price and suddenly it's months later and the family is in the redecorated house.
They leave out the fact that there in a seller in addition to the buyer, who has needs and desires and has to move out of the house for the new people to move in. Plus there are banks, insurance companies, inspectors, two realtors, which makes for a much more crowded process than one is led to believe by watching HGTV. (Of course if the world worked the way it does on TV, it would be a lot easier all the way around.)
We keep reminding ourselves that this part will be over soon and then we can start the next stage.

Our House in the Middle of our Street?

As of today, we have been in our apartment for exactly four years. It's been a great home for us, but we decided in May to start looking into buying a house, enticed by the promise of $8000 from the government when we closed.
It's been quite a journey and we decided to start blogging, because that's what all the cool kids do these days, right? The blog will cover the end of this part of the home buying and then we will use this to record the process as we update a house that is structually quite sound but is a little behind in the times when it comes to decor.
As of right now we're under contract on house number two. Number one fell horribly to pieces (only figuratively at this point but I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually falls to pieces.) The current owner had "updated" a lot of things, like the plumbing and roofing, but he didn't do what one would call a "good job." So after sinking $800 into inspections we walked away with the piece of mind that we wouldn't be sinking several thousand dollars into the house when everything went to pot.
But sometimes they say things happen for a reason, and after that we found what will hopefully end up as our home. It is a lovely home which has been owned by an older couple for 42 years. They had taken great care of it, but haven't updated anything since shortly after they moved in. Now we're going through all of the fun of negotiating. The stuff they don't show you on all those home buying shows, but we're getting closer. Hopefully as of this week everything will be squared away. I hope.
-Elena