Meet the Hanley Home (sans pictures which are coming soon!)

I realized halfway through posting last night that my posts so far are mostly excited ramblings.  Last night was more of an exhausted rambling, but a rambling nonetheless.  I've hardly mentioned anything about the actual house.  So here's the deets:

What we now call home is a duplex located on a busy street just a few blocks from the metro station.  The busy street definitely isn't ideal, although I admit I actually like the sound of traffic.  It's usually pretty soothing to me.  Between our duplex and metro there's a 7-Eleven, a couple small apartment buildings and a strip mall with a laundromat and couple of carryout food places.  It's a transitional neighborhood.  Several years ago it was a little rough but now there's plenty of young professionals (DC is full of them) buying places here.  We also have a bus stop directly in front of our house.  Again, not ideal, but I like the urban feel it has.  We're also thinking of placing a geocache somewhere at the bus stop for entertainment (any geocachers out there?).   We certainly have some colorful neighbors - more on that in another post when I can add pictures - but so far we really love the place. 

The home was purchased in October as a foreclosure and then flipped to us.  The inside really is pretty great! It's an older home - built in 1951.  It's solid construction.  That's one thing I really like about older houses is that they were built right and built to last.  It definitely feels more sturdy than newer constructed homes.  I love that our walls are real brick and plaster and not drywall.  It has great bones!

It's a two-level 2 bed/ 1 bath duplex with an addition behind the kitchen that could function as a large third bedroom, but we're using it as a family room.  The problem, we're learning, with the family room is that it's cold in there! Because it's an addition, it's heat is provided by electric baseboard heat and not the furnace for the rest of the house.  The baseboard units are inadequate to heat the entire space, however, so they don't really do much good.  It's on our list to do something with the heat for that room by next winter!

Since the house was renovated, the kitchen is awesome! While it's not incredibly large (the house was built in 1951 and kitchens were pretty tiny back then) it's about the same size as my apartment kitchen was, but better!  We have all new stainless steel appliances, maple cabinets, granite counter complete with a breakfast bar.  We also have a full-size stacked washer and dryer in the kitchen.  My brother pointed out that it's very convenient in case I get bacon grease on my new blouse, the washer is right there; and I can also baste my turkey while doing a load of whites.  My brother is very practical, if not weird.  I just love being able to do laundry without making it a full-scale production.  In the apartment, I had to haul my laundry down two floors in hopes that there were machines free and in working order.  Then I had the privilege of paying $1.60 to wash and another $1.60 to dry my clothes. (Laundry at my college was free.)  Ugh! Even if it's in the kitchen, having my own W/D combo totally beats the communal laundry room experience. 

The entry to the house is a beautiful space with wood floors, lots of windows and open kitchen with the breakfast bar defining the two spaces.  The front room was the original living and dining space in the house.  I can't imagine how that really functioned as the space isn't big enough (by modern standards) for both a dining table and living room furniture.  We're going to use it as a dining room plus.  For the "plus" we intend to purchase an incognito desk and a comfortable reading chair for the front part of the room.  That way the room can serve multiple functions. 

Upstairs we have our bedroom, and a second, smaller bedroom.  The bathroom was nicely redone with stone tile around the bathtub.  However, it's lacking a medicine cabinet or other storage.  The vanity under the sink is not very deep at all.  Storage is definitely going to be a challenge.  Right now, I'm thinking about putting up some open shelving above the toilet to at least store cotton balls and q-tips and whatnot.  The linen closet should help with storage except there are no shelves! We're working on getting those soon. 

I'll have to save the description of the front and back yards for another time.  There's quite a bit to describe.  The short story is, we're planning on entering for a chance to be HGTV'd on a new show of the same title on HGTV.  The yard simply requires more, time, money and effort than we're able to give right now, so hopefully they'll be able to help us with a big step in the right direction!

Boxes and Fireplaces

Wow! The last week and half has really been a whirlwind.  Luckily, we were so busy with the move, Mom didn't have a chance to notice the lack of cleanliness in either the apartment or the new house.  Thank goodness Mom and Dad came into town to help us out! We really would've been lost and confused otherwise. 

We made a major trip to Ikea on Thursday and left with an entirely new bedroom set including our new bigger queen-size mattress (we've been sharing our futon mattress with our two cats for far too long!)  Friday was the day of the big move.  I swear I donated a ton of items before getting ready for the move, but I feel like we have way too much stuff, but we still don't have the right things for the new place.  After moving the last load of things from the apartment last night, I feel another donation purge coming on soon.  Just as soon as I'm organized. 

Despite the new furniture, our bedroom, like the rest of the house, is still very much a work in progress.   I'm really anxious to get all the boxes unpacked and out of here.  Maybe then we can get a feel for how the place works and is coming together.  Pictures will be coming soon...just as soon as I find the camera again.  I have no idea where it is.

On another note, we got a really cool housewarming gift from a friend - an Eco Flame tabletop fireplace. I'd never seen such a thing before yesterday, but it's really neat!  Looks like this:

According to the description, it's supposed to be indoor/outdoor which would be great for our family room which is an addition with inadequate heat.  However, the directions had so many warnings and restrictions about where you could place it and what you could place it on.  We think it'll work better for us outside once we get our patio space set up.  We also need to order some fuel (it uses clean burning bio fuel) before we can test it out.  I'll have to post once we test it out.  The Eco Flame website also has fireplaces intended to heat whole rooms...maybe we'll look in to getting one of those for our family room in the future.  

Cleaning Wars

My worst nightmare: my mother is coming tomorrow and my house is dirty!

I used to laugh at my mom when she would obsessively clean before anyone ever came over.  For dinner guests we'd spend the morning vacuuming, cleaning the bathrooms and making sure the house was neat and tidy. For family we'd put in a little more effort - mow the lawn, mop the floor.  If grandma was coming over, my mom would scrub and scrub until the whole house sparkled.  As a child, I never really understood the compulsion.  Now, as an adult, I find myself giving it some elbow grease to get things extra clean when my mom comes to visit. 

Of course, I'm in the middle of moving and the idea of a sparkling clean house (or apartment) is just not possible.  Our apartment is a mess of boxes and items strewn around as I try to make some sense of what I'm packing.  Our house is relatively clean, although we've been fighting plaster dust wars.  When we moved in, the house was pretty dirty from the renovations and the people doing home tours.  So immediately my husband and I set to work to clean up the place.  He spent an entire afternoon thoroughly cleaning the wood floors on the first floor until they shined.  The next day, however, the contractor came to repair the ceiling where the leak was and plaster dust had once again settled everywhere!  I spent another morning cleaning off the appliances, counters and cabinets in the kitchen and sweeping the floors just to have more dust appear the next day.  Ugh! How am I supposed to move anything into a dirty house?  It's left me feeling like all I've accomplished so far since becoming a home-owner is mopping my own floor several times over. 

Between cleaning sprees, we've managed to move quite a bit of our stuff over to the new house.  I didn't think we really had all that much stuff in our 1-bedroom apartment, especially considering all the things I've set aside to donate.  Once you have to pack and move it all, it's another story! I really can't wait until we get the moving truck on Friday and we can really empty out our apartment. 

In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to accept that all I can do is vacuum and dust around the boxes in my apartment...and hope that my mom doesn't notice that my apartment and house are only semi-clean.  (I love you, Mom!)

Ice cream cakes & Leaky ceilings

Great news: We're officially home-owners!

Bad news: It's still raining and our roof is still leaking!

We negotiated with the seller and they had a contractor working on repairing the roof yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, it started to rain earlier than expected, so they were unable to finish the work replacing the roof. The contractor should finish up in the next day or two on the roof and they're going to repair the drywall in the ceiling as well. The best part - the seller is footing the bill! Hooray for final walk-throughs and a great agent!

We got to the title company's office a little before noon today and were done by 1 pm. Sure, we signed our names a bunch of times and handed over a sizable check but all seemed entirely too easy. Our wonderful agent ended it all perfectly with an ice cream cake and gifts for the new home-owners! I guess the weight will really set in when we have to make that first mortgage payment.

Once we signed the papers this afternoon and had our key in hand, we experienced the joys of home-ownership with a leaky ceiling. We now have a bucket in the middle of our family room to collect the rain water seeping through the roof. At least that leaky ceiling is all ours!

Let the move begin!!!

Jumping into the Deep End

My husband and I are taking the plunge; we're about to become full fledged first time home owners. We're on the eve of our settlement date and had our final walk-through the house this morning.

Everything has been incredibly smooth so far. We made an offer on the place a month ago - beating out two other offers - and we haven't hit any real turbulence in the process. Our lender was great and was available to answer any questions we've had and all our paperwork was submitted without anything to sweat about. The home inspection was a breeze. Nothing major really needed to be adjusted and the seller fixed everything we requested.

I wasn't the least bit nervous until this morning at our walk-through. After heavy rains this weekend and more expected overnight, we did notice some water damage on the ceiling of one room this morning. Hopefully the seller will at least agree to give us an allowance to repair the roof on that part of the house. We're still waiting to hear from our agent about what's going to happen. Fingers crossed.

For plunking down a huge chunk of change and tying ourselves to a 30-year mortgage, it almost seems too easy. As I step up onto the high dive and look down below, my knees are starting to shake a bit. What problems will we find tomorrow once the home is ours? Will the rain tonight make the ceiling damage worse? Will we be able to move in as planned next week?

I'll let you all know once we're home owners tomorrow!