Kitchen Cabinets

Fixing the kitchen cabinets was one of the biggest things on our minds since day one! Everything in the whole house was sprayed over with a very ugly grey-ish white-ish flat paint, including the kitchen cabinets and their hinges. The doors did not all close properly and the kitchen was just very blaw!! After a few price quotes for new cabinets and hours spent on Pinterest, we decided we would keep the cabinets but paint and add new hardware. 

Here is a picture of the kitchen before we moved in...

One day while Morgen was gone somewhere I was fed up and ready to get going with this cabinet transformation. Did I mention the ugly paint that was sprayed over the hinges was like an inch thick? I could not get the darn cabinet doors off! 

My M.O. is bang it and force it. Morgen's M.O. is let's look up how to do it right on Google. Sometimes banging and forcing is necessary... but not in this instance. Check out the damage I did!! 

And this pic is after properly removing the door.      The trick was to take a small nail and chisel the thick paint off from around the screws and hinge. Then the screws would be unglued and would twist off... Which was very different from shoving a screw driver under the hinge and prying it off! This method still involved some banging, so I was cool with it. My thumbs weren't though! OUCH!

Here I am chiseling! ha ha

 After a couple days of chiseling we had this...

I can not wait until there is green outside my kitchen window again! 

The basement and washer and dryer

The first project that needed to be tackled was the scary basement so that we could get a laundry room going.

It is all cement with no ceiling, just open framing. Very dirty. Full of spider webs and dust! Yucky!!! We bought our first "new homeowner" necessity to help us clean it out... A shop vac! (which sounds a lot like a shock vac!) We took turns sucking all the crud up. It was gross!

These pictures do not show how dirty and yucky it was... you will just have to trust me.

As soon as we could stand being down there, it was time to get a laundry room going...

I am so proud of my hubby for getting everything all figured out with our washer and dryer! First he did a bunch of research on used appliances and we were able to get a very nice used washer and dryer for about $300 instead of new ones for more than $1000. It was a STRUGGLE to get them downstairs!! Devin saved our lives again by helping Morgen get them down the stairs. I think each of them left the scene with sore backs and feet injuries. Our stairs are very steep, very narrow, and have a right angle at both the top and bottom. I wish I had pictures of them getting the washer and dryer down the stairs! It was nuts!!

Morgen then set out to get them all hooked up. Like I said, I am so proud of him for tackling this task. The first thing that went wrong was the valves leaked. When he hooked them up and turned the water on it sprayed all over! So he had to replace one whole valve and just a part on the other valve and new hoses for each. Once the hoses were working the drain went crazy and we got a minor mudslide in our basement. After much work and trial and error our washer and dryer look great and work great! Here a a few pics of them all set up.

At this point we are figuring out that no job is a quick job. Everything takes much longer than we think!!!

Moving in!

We packed up the snowmobile trailer with all our belongings and hit the road! Moving is hard because you have to move everything like 3 times. You have to get it into the trailer, then out of the trailer, and then you have to put it all away. And then you change your mind of where you want it and move it again! ha ha a never ending process. We are still moving things around. 

Into the trailer.... 

Out of the trailer.... 

Devin helped all day moving stuff in.
We could not have done it without him! 

Now where does everything go??? 
Morgen's parents helped us get all set up. 

Dead tired of moving things!! 

All done!! Happy home owners!! 

It is ours!!

Wahoo!! We finally closed and this cute little house is ours! 

Here is my cute bearded hubby opening the door for the first time! 

(Notice the welcome sign right inside the door. I knew I was
going to love this house the minute I saw that sign!)

     

We found the perfect house!!

Morgen and I graduated college and were ready to start the next chapter in our life which brought us to Utah County. I found the perfect job in Lehi and was commuting an hour to work and an hour and a half home 5 days a week and getting sick of it.  We looked for a place to live in the Provo/Orem area for months! At first we thought we would buy a town home to keep it simple and low maintenance. We found the perfect one and it came down to the week of closing and it fell through. Dang! Not too bad of a dang though because we decided it would be a better investment and better all around for us to buy a house instead. A new search began... we finally found this perfect house and jumped on it! Perfect did not mean that it does not need work. It definitely does, and this blog is to track our progress. We love our little house!