In the interest of transparency

This might be too much honesty, but I am going to give you all a glimpse into our lives right at this moment. I was so hoping to have a big 'ta-da' sort of post with pictures of completely ready rooms, totally unpacked and decorated and everything, but I am realizing that it might be MONTHS before we get to that point. We are real people who still work real jobs and have real (messy) kids who are living in the construction zone. You will see that one week of living here has not been enough time to get out of boxes. Holy cow, you do NOT want to see our basement. 800 sqft of boxes and clutter. <sigh> That is going to be no fun to deal with. So, look at these pictures and see past the clutter, mess, and boxes. I am still proud of how far we have come on this home!

First up: The bathroom/laundry!

 We need to build shelves for this closet. Once we do, the mess will be able to come out of the boxes and look orderly on shelves :)

 Cuteness break! Fritz feeding himself some dinner!

Joe installed mini-blinds tonight into our living room and kitchen.

This is how much our children help:

I think my office is coming along nicely. It is my favorite place in the house. It is quiet and the kids usually leave me alone (there is no tv in this room).

Obviously, we still need to paint our stairs. We plan on having it done by the end of this month.

The girls' room. They claimed it was "clean." I think we have different definitions of that word. I still need to hang their curtains, touch up some paint, and get Edie a platform for her mattress. We don't make her sleep on a bare mattress, her bedding was just in the wash :)

Yep, looks super clean ;)

Owen's room. We need to get a mattress for the bottom bunk so we have a spare bed. In our last several homes Edie and Owen have shared a room and slept on the bunk beds. Now Edie took her mattress to another room and Owen has his own space. I want to sew him a curtain for his window yet. Again, this is his idea of clean. Death by legos in this room.

Hallway. <sigh> So. Many. Boxes. I don't even want to show you the rest.

 Our room. Again, the boxes! The laundry on the bed is clean and freshly folded. Sorry I didn't put it away before snapping pictures, but again.... we are just regular people here. I have some pretty curtains tucked in our closet to hang over the blackout blinds. I just haven't gotten around to it quite yet.

Hallway closet:

Joe's finished blinds :)

We have started tearing off the deck to get that replaced. That is another job to get done by the end of the month.

The house was pressure washed today to get it ready for paint. It looks rough.

Joe tore off the tiny roof over the front door that was doing nothing. We will take down this tiny deck and rebuild it and also build stairs to get up onto it. I was to paint the front door at some point as well.

Here is our huge-normous backyard. I am showing you this just incase you couldn't remember why on earth we would ever take on a project like this :)