11 Months Later...

I am officially the worst blogger ever. ha.

We have been in our house for almost a year now and we are loving it!

We haven't had to do any major renovations and (while we dream of many) there aren't any in the works for the near future.  We painted some of the rooms downstairs and stained the deck closest to the house - a big undertaking for those of you who have seen the multi-level monstrosity.  Most of our time working on the house this summer was outside.  Here are some quick updates...

 The first thing on my list was to get rid of the oak banister at the top and bottom of the stairs (or, in this case, cover it up with some paint).  It clashed with the floors.  It was ugly.  It is gone!

The first room we painted was the living room.

Then we moved on to the kitchen. We added handles, changed lighting above the island and table, added under-cabinet lighting, replaced a huge portion of the ceiling, and painted the walls... grey again... surprise, surprise ;)  I was going to paint the cabinets white but I'm going to wait for now.  I'm afraid the counters and floor will clash.  Someday we hope to have the dark bamboo floors extended into the kitchen with darker counters and white cabinets.  By the time we get to that we would like to rip everything out and start over :).

My mom gave us blinds for our anniversary gift to finish off the house (thank you!!!).  Now all of the windows have beautiful wood blinds!  I also finished buying curtain rods for the four upstairs bedrooms and installed them.  Now I just need to hem all of the curtains... we don't have 12 foot windows anymore.  We will always miss that. :(

The upper deck was next.  It looks SO much better (still wet in this picture)!  The other deck in the yard has about 3 posts done.  We started to work on them last week and about five minutes in Drew was attacked by hornets so we both called it quits and haven't gotten back to it.  Maybe when his leg heals :/.

After a LOT of thinking (we knew we needed ONE room that wasn't grey or brown), many sample cans, and one giant mistake (the same color used to paint school buses) we ended up with this.  It was still slightly brighter than I expected, but it has grown on me and I think I'll keep it.  That hanging light is on my list too... I hate boob lights and this one is the king of them all.

I love the entry to our neighborhood... the volunteers do a wonderful job keeping it beautiful (and this isn't even a great shot).  It's so welcoming to come home to at the end of the day.

We can still get to downtown Delaware quickly... 5 minutes (if all lights are red) in the car, about 10 minutes on bike, and about 20 walking. Being just a few minutes closer to Columbus is also a huge plus since we head that way almost every weekend for one reason or another.  It's also GREAT to be so close to a grocery store... It isn't the best Kroger in the area, but when you need something fast you can't beat the 2 minute walk down the path behind our house...

There is definitely a lot of yard to keep up with, but having summers off helps with that quite a bit.  We didn't plant much of a garden this year... we actually had more herbs and veggies growing every year we were at the apartment than we did this summer.  We were still learning where the best spots would be and what plants would pop up in the flower beds throughout the summer.  Next year we will expand the veggie garden and hopefully get the ground cover cleared out near the house for an herb garden.  We have TONS of hostas which I love!!!

                                                                       

Coming home to this place feels so nice.  Even though it hasn't quite been a year, in a lot of ways it feels like we have been here forever. 

We have experienced every season here so far except for most of fall... I can't wait to pass out candy on Halloween!  And if anyone ever feels to urge to rake leaves come on over!  I'm sure we have no idea what we've gotten ourselves into there! ;)