(New) Home Sweet Home

I know it's been awhile since I've posted an update on our home buying/selling process, but I didn't want to jinx anything...but now that papers are signed and inspections are done, I feel confident to share the news....we sold our house AND bought a new house!

To make a long story short, we put our house on the market June 30th...the first potential buyers came to see it on July 3rd (just as I was starting to panic that no one had to come to see it yet and that we were never going to sell it). They came through in the morning, made an offer that afternoon & we had worked out the details by that evening. Imagine my relief that I no longer had to keep the house looking immaculate!!

They had their inspection the following week and everything was fine, they're not asking us to do anything to the house, so that was one worry out of the way.

Now...onto our new house! You may remember me posting about the 1st time we went out house hunting, how we saw 3 houses and had weird experiences at 2 of them, but really liked the 3rd house we saw. Well, we couldn't get that house out of our minds, so as soon as ours sold, we knew we wanted to go see that one again...so we did, and we loved it even more the 2nd time around. We went to see some more houses, but just found ourselves comparing everything to The House. We discussed it at length, slept on it, thought about it another 2 days, then made an offer last week...after going back & forth briefly with the sellers, we came to an agreement, woohoo!!

The inspection of that house was yesterday & everything went well; a few minor problems, but nothing at all horrible or deal-breaking. We are waiting to get the results of the radon test, which should be done tomorrow.

So that's where we stand with the process thus far; we are so excited and I'm so anxious to get into the new house & really make it ours. It's the house that we see ourselves in for a very long time and we can't wait to get started. August and September are going to be completely chaotic, but it will all be worth it.

And now...the moment you've all been waiting for...the new house! Obviously, this is with the sellers stuff, so just picture us in here instead :)



Foyer:


Living room (2 shots of it, one side has built in bookcases & a window seat):


Kitchen...I'm excited to be able to fit a table in here (we currently eat in what is supposed to be our "formal" dining room):


This is the 2nd living room, which is in the addition portion of the house...we plan on using it as Jake's playroom, since it's right off the kitchen:



Other half of what will be the playroom:


Dining Room:


Screened in sunroom:



What Brian is most excited about...the bar area of the gameroom :)

Master bedroom:


What will be Jake's room:


Bedroom #3 (I forgot pics of bedroom #4):


And some outside pics:


Please keep your fingers crossed for us that everything goes smoothly over the next few weeks. :)

TA-DA!

The sign isn't up in our yard yet, but the house is officially up for sale! We had set a goal for ourselves to have it up by the end of June and it went up June 30th. That's pretty par for the course for us :) Phew!

Here are some pictures that the photographer took, I'm really pleased with how they turned out (how is it that they always manage to make the rooms look so big??)

Curb Appeal

If you've ever tuned into HGTV, you know how important curb appeal is. I will admit, I totally judge houses by their "cover". If it's an ugly front, I sometimes don't even bother to click through the rest of the pictures to see the inside. So we really wanted the front of our house to scream "YOU KNOW YOU LOVE ME! YOU WANT TO BUY ME!"

I already posted a few before/after shots of the front of the house, from when we bought it to recently, mostly showing off the new landscaping, painted shutters, etc... In the past week, Brian also scraped some chipped paint & touched that up, trimmed the tree, repainted the stoop and the garage door AND we took the screen off the door. I think removing the screen was the most dramatic improvement, we wish we had done it years ago!



And just for fun, here are some pictures of the beautiful hydrangea bush growing in our backyard!!

Lights, Camera, Action!

A few simple (and cheap!) improvements we've made recently were the light fixtures. I forgot to take pictures of the "befores" but trust that these lights are an improvement. They're probably not what we would have installed if we were staying in the house, but they are definitely a more modern look than what was there before and a cheap upgrade to make.

Brian installed this light in both the entryway and our hallway (these lights are a bargain on sale at Home Depot, 2 for $14!)



And this light is right outside of our pantry in the kitchen ($9 at Home Depot):

Don't quit your day job.

It's a good thing I've never tried to make a living out of painting. We wanted to repaint the baseboards and around the doorways of the kitchen. The paint needed to be touched up anyway, so we decided to just paint over the existing paint with white (we had previously selected a "latte" color that was not exactly what we had hoped for once it was actually on the baseboards, but wasn't so bad that we absolutely had to change it...so it stayed)

Here is the before with the beige:

And the after, in white (a much cleaner look):



I was really proud of myself, walking around the house all "Oooh, I'm such a good painter! Look at my masterpiece! In your face, HGTV!". My gloating came to a screeching halt when Brian pointed out to me what I had done above the doorway. I was too short to see it before. oops. It's all about the effort, yes?

Designed to Sell: Pittsburgh Edition

First, I guess this is me coming out of the closet and announcing to the blogger world that we are, in fact, getting ready to sell our home. (This is where I go and cower in a corner and quiver with nervousness at the thought of buying and selling at the same time)

Now that I'm officially out, I can tell you that we have been doing some little improvements here & there to our home, in an attempt to make it drool-worthy to potential buyers. This will start a series of posts with the improvements that we're making along the way and our progress on the home buying process.

I'll start with some pics of the house before we bought it and some of the changes we made when we moved in. Let's start with the outside, shall we?

Here is the before:




And after! Painted the door and shutters, ripped out all of the dead/overgrown bushes, tore down all of the ivy, planted new stuff.



And here's the back of the house before (those 2 huge things in the 2nd picture are rhododendron bushes growing in the MIDDLE of the yard)



And after! New patio installed, new landscaping, no more steroid-induced bushes. Look! There's actually grass underneath those things! And a neighbor's house behind us!



Moving inside, here is the kitchen before:



And after! New paint (Behr's Mother Earth), new flattop stove



Dining Room before:



After! Behr's "Toasted Oat" paint, new light fixture



Bedroom #3 before:



After! Painted the room (can't remember the color) and Brian pulled out the carpet & finished the hardwood floors underneath:




Those are some of the major changes we had made within a few months of moving in. Stay tuned for more updates!