Appraisal is coming soon!

Yikes! We are working really hard this weekend to knock out some projects to improve our appraisal. We went to the bank last week & applied for permanent financing, we've had a construction loan up to now. Now we are working and waiting for the appraiser to call us this week to schedule the appraisal.

I have been making good progress in the spare room, and the foyer is looking MUCH better. Yesterday I worked on mudding the spare room and Michael installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom and dining room. It is so exciting to finally have a light in the dining room! And although I've never been a fan of ceiling fans (ha!), now that we are living with almost no a/c in August in Kentucky, I have a new appreciation. It's so much quieter than the fan we were moving from room to room before.

We've had an eventful couple of months at the house since I last posted. We had a limb from one of our trees, the size of a regular tree, fall on our house during a wind storm. Which luckily did not do severe damage, but was not cheap. And then we had our second major plumbing disaster. Which involved sewage backing up into the cellar. But we now have 100% new plumbing from the water main to the sewer.

Here is the tree, and now that the limb is gone you can actually really see the front of our house for the first time, although you still can't see it from the street with all the other trees:







Here is some of my progress on the spare room, I swear they used super glue or something to put the wallpaper on, it took forever to get it all off and damaged the walls. I have been putting on a skim coat of mud to smooth it all out, which is turning out pretty well:








The foyer is looking great now that it has been cleared out and clean up. We're still trying to get the wallpaper off there too!




And here are Rosie and Charley. Michael says that Charley is his helper because she follows him around when he's working.




And ceiling fans!



Michael's little helper :)

Moving Forward

I am very slowly gearing up for some serious work. Today we created our game-plan to have the house ready to be appraised in 1 month.

We are almost done a lot of things, but there are very few things that have been actually completed.

This evening we did some cleaning up in the yard, which felt good. We finally got rid of the gate to nowhere, but left the strangely located netless soccer goal for another day.

Here is the gate to nowhere when we first moved in:



And here is Michael examining the big muddy holes it left behind when we knocked it over today:




The outside of the house looks pretty much the same as it did when we moved in, I think it looks at least a little better though!



Our main projects to take care of in the next month are (1) finish the details in the bathrrom (hopefully by the end of the week); (2) finish mudding the living room, prime & paint it, and try to organize, clean up and reinstall the mouldings; (3) finish removing the wallpaper in the guest room, put a floor & walls in the closet, prime & pain.

There are a bunch of other things I would like to do, but that list already looks somewhat ridiculous considering we have plans this weekend and next weekend. After that we will have to dedicate the rest of our free time to getting as much done as possible. I feel somewhat optimistic though :)

Here are some photos of the nearly complete living room, it will be exciting to move in!