We are very, very excited to have just bought a house! It’s a buyer’s market and we were able to find a very good deal on a very solid albeit dated house. Our deed was recorded September 19. I began looking last March so this has been a long time in the works! We move in this Friday night. The last 2 weeks have been 24/7 of packing then running to the new house to do work there.

A painting crew has been there 8 days now and has a few more days to go. He’s also doing some random things like closing a wall and eliminating a pocket door, removing paneling, removing wallpaper, lots of stuff. We (Doug mostly) have removed 4 rooms and a hallway of lime and blue carpet to expose gorgeous original hardwood floors. They are in great shape. We’re so lucky!

Flooring guys come in tomorrow to redo kitchen from harvest gold vinyl to a faux flagstone (until we can afford to gut the kitchen and put hardwood or travertine in we are just replacing vinyl as we cannot live with yellow vinyl). We are replacing 2 rooms of yellow and brown carpet with an off-white flecked berber.

Back to paint… I chose bold colors and it looks awesome! No more white walls for us. Our bedroom is red (a brick or adobe red) with white trim. Looks super. Moss living room. Taupe dining room… you get the idea. Adding 4 1/4" white baseboards in 100% of the rooms except 2 of the bathrooms (we are not touching those at all right now). Colorful walls with white trim and white baseboards… I hope it looks as good as I’m dreaming it will!

So, though I ordinarily post about stamping, our move is consuming us right now. We sleep there this Friday night!

Here are photos of the front and part of the backyard. What is that mound of ivy you see in the middle of the backyard lawn, you ask? A tree stump the former owner didn’t take out and then let ivy grow on it, huh? This Sunday our gardener starts a 2-day job with a crew ripping out about 75% of the greenery. I love gardening (like my Mom) and want to start over. There’s a lot of ugly stuff back there and hardly anything flowering. I want gobs of color in the spring so I shall start now and pretty much destroy the back yard as it is and give it Stella’s version of an extreme makeover!