Yikes. Five months later and no photos or posts. I'm a terrible son/nephew/grandson/brother/cousin. Every time I thought I had a moment to sit down to start this thing, I wanted to have another project done first.

Well no more.

A clever Alaskan once told me that you have to sit down to write and reflect in order to truly take pride in whatever you're sharing with the people you love. Or something along those lines, but that was five months ago.

Here's the brief update - We moved into the house pretty quickly after closing, sublet our apartment (there's another story here for later), and got to work on the major items: Replacement toilet/floor/subfloor, locks, a pen for the dogs, and of course the eternal painting. I've got to take this moment (which will be one of many) to thank our benevolent families and dear friends. We certainly wouldn't be here without your support.

Now for some "before" pictures!

So here's the front. We face a hill that divides us from the main highway through Madison (it takes care of most of the noise from the highway), and we back up against some very nice houses on lake Monona. The yard is going to take several years of constant work. It's packed down hard and more weeds than grass. Those pretty brown shutters are each hiding at least a few bats, and completely packed with guano and wasp nests. Taking them down was fun.

Here's the back (or most of it). We've got some great neighbors, and other than the left side of this picture all the back yards of our neighbors are open, so it feels very much like a community in our back yard. We plan to put up a fence for the dogs, but we'd like to keep it as unobtrusive as possible.

This is (was) our rickety, raised deck (you could see a tiny sliver of the lake from the corner of this wobbly structure), and the completely non-functional screened-in porch. The mosquitoes were absolutely atrocious this year - the worst I've ever experienced in Madison - and so unfortunately we did not use our prized outdoor space at all this summer. We plan to rebuild the porch with plexiglass-equivalent roofing so that more light can be let in to our kitchen, and to build a non-raised deck in place of this dangerous, rotting contraption full of rusty nails jutting out at every angle. We have fantasies of a stone patio as well as some dedicated grilling space.

 The dogs love running around out here, and have not yet figured out that they can easily escape through the holes.

 Under the deck we found many soda cans from the 80s and 90s, a vacuum, some animal parts and other random objects.

Here's the bathroom with the toilet removed, new floor by the toilet and new subfloor throughout. The toilet was that pretty color of the sink (as was the cast iron tub), but had a hole in the bottom, hence new floor required. We were told this job alone scared many people off, but I was able to do this in a couple hours (after days spent at the home improvement store, which is absolutely our least favorite place on earth by this point).

Behind/under the tub we found a shampoo bottle from 1980, an orange tennis ball, and this piece of newspaper. Yes that is Richard Nixon, although it sure looks like this was Eisenhower's time in office...

 Here's our pretty sink.

This is the state of at least one of the pipes in our house. That crack is from me simply picking it up. With my hands.

Here's what our bathroom looks like now. Far from finished, but looking much better than it did. My guess is that although the bathroom was our first project, it'll be our last to finish (upstairs anyway).

Here are some before and after pictures of the upstairs.

We actually found the two missing countertops that match the existing two, but the countertop ordering was a fiasco (again a story for another time). We plan to have an electrician update everything for us (there are many light fixtures that are covered up, and switches that don't work), which will include installing a new cooktop/oven, a hood, and some new lighting. Please take notice of the wood paneling that had at one time completely covered our upstairs. There is real wood paneling in the basement. Oh, by the way, our basement is a scary one.

Another view of our kitchen.

I'll leave you with a picture of our (mostly) repainted house, thanks to our wonderful friends. Thanks everyone!

I'm very excited to get to do some gardening next spring, which I think will really improve our curb appeal, and though the projects are seemingly never-ending, it really has been a lot of fun. Looking back, and especially talking to people that remember what our home looked like a month or two ago are the best ways for me to feel some semblance of satisfaction with this enormous project.

And the dogs love having more space!

Thank you for your patience. Now that I have started this (and figured out how to use dropbox with the ipad, and remembered where this blog is), I hope to stay more up-to-date with the project photos. We've got a long way to go...

Here we go!

Becky and I are purchasing our first home together, and we're closing on 5/31/13. It's a HUD property, which means we had to put bids in on it, and the owning bank accepts the highest acceptable bid. The first one we put in was lower than their cut-off, so they reported that number to us and gave us the opportunity to place another bid. We bumped it up quite a bit since the asking price was so low, and out of three other bidders we won!

HUD properties are typically sold as-is, and this place is in rough shape. It was bought earlier this year for a flip, but taken over by the bank midway through renovations for unknown reasons, so we have an incredible project on our hands - but also a great investment opportunity.

We're going to be using this blog to share our progress with everyone. I'll post an album after we close with 'before' pictures, and as we work our way through I'll add projects and the 'after' pictures. It's going to be tough living in a half-finished home for a while, but we're excited to get started.

We'll be back to check in after closing!