..the latest..

well well, we have had quite the month so far. may 1st we kicked the renters out of our house and boy, what a blessed day that was. i seriously don't know how anyone can stand being a landlord -- it is a lot of work and the money you make off of it could be much more easily obtained somewhere else in my opinion. not to mention, the house was so torn up and disgusting inside, it was like walking into a bar! there was beer all over the walls, garbage bags full of cigarette butts. i even had the pleasure of cleaning someone's nasty vomit off of the bathroom sink, floor and walls. that was quite possibly the most disgusting two hours of my life!

after they were all moved out, we gutted the place. my painter husband repainted the entire house from baseboard to ceiling. my two favorite rooms are our very green master bedroom and my adorable red wall in the living room, but the whole house looks fabulous of course. i wanted to help paint, but lance wouldn't let me because, as lance put it, "i want it to look good." thanks for the vote of confidence in my painting skills lance!

we hired my handy-man cousin dallin to lay our travertine floors and he did an amazing job. he had never done travertine before, and according to the tile experts it is more complicated than tile, but you'd never know it was his first time, it looks SO good!!

we replaced our beat-up out-of-date trim with the more updated fancy schmancy version. when lance showed me pictures of the new trim i was a little uncertain bc it is way thicker than the trim around the doors, windows, etc... but it looks amazing and ten million times better than the old stuff. what can i say, lance just has an eye for these things!

we had an electrician come and put canned lighting in. get this - there were NO lights in the living room, one nasty light in the kitchen, and one light in each of the bedrooms. the house was so poorly lit! everyone tells me that was the style when the house was built (in the late 80s)...i guess everyone just used lamps. also, all of the light switch plates were GOLD & SILVER!!! yuck!! they were so ugly i could barely stand it. so the electrician also put in new light switches and per lances request he put dimmers in all the rooms! haha "mood lighting," as lance likes to call it. we got new lanters for outside, sconces and a new light fixture to hang over the kitchen table. of all the things we did to the house, i think this is among my favorites. the house is so much more up-to-date and the new lighting makes the whole house look SO MUCH BETTER!!

we got new kitchen cabinets, countertops and appliances and our kitchen is now looking fabulous and adorable! we also redesigned the layout of the kitchen - it just wasn't functional before and there was so much wasted space. now it looks so much bigger and better!

the past two weeks have been very exhausting and stressful, especially for lance. i have been pretty amazed watching him juggle the house renovations on top of all his other work...he survived though! needless to say, i hope we don't have to do any of this moving/remodeling business for quite some time! i always said i wanted to move into a new house - there is just something about new everything that makes it feel like totally your own. i feel like we got the best of both worlds with this bc the inside of the house is brand new and we got to do everything just the way we wanted it, but we are in a very grown-in neighborhood, which is also nice. and our location couldn't be any better!

we've got most of our stuff moved in, and a lot of it is unpacked but we still have a ways to go!

that's it for now!