Our Old House

So its been cold.. I mean single digits cold!! Not that it never does that around here.. but not for almost a week!!

Anyway, my point is.. and I do have one.. is that AnJie and I fixed a heater!! 

As you know.. the house sat empty for a year, and who knows what kind of shape it was in before that.. considering what we have seen... probably  not great. This heater is in the kitchen... its an older unit but seems to be in pretty good shape. We didn't use it a lot for a while because it was behind something large... Just before Thanksgiving, we got rid of the nasty old stove and tried to use the heater. I noticed that the fan wasn't working. Since I wasn't sure what to do about it, I left it alone. On Sunday, I talked to my Grandpa (thank you Grandpa!) and he gave me some good tips.

First, these heaters are usually on two breakers. Sometimes one of the breakers will trip but not the other, which would have explained why the heat element was coming on but not the fan. So we figured out which breaker it was and flipped it.... nothing.

So, next was to take it off the grill and clean it up. And wouldn't you know, it worked! The vaccum and the fan. Now our kitchen is so much warmer! whoo hoo!

Can't wait to see our electric bill.

Our plan is to get a mini ductless system... such as this: http://www.minisplitsystems.com/cgi/display.cgi?item_num=09KHS71

Anyone know about these?

Our first Christmas tree in our new house... here is our tree!

We had Thanksgiving at our house... it was the first time since we moved in that the built in was clean enough to actually take a picture of!

So as stated previously,  we don't have a lot of counter space in our old kitchen. AnJie is a wiz at finding good bargins on Craigslist, and found us a large piece of Coriane. We paid $50 for it and then went to Jerry's and purchased some wood.... it took all Sunday evening.. but we finally made a sturdy stand for the counter.

So heres the before....

and here is the after!  Trust me.. its a lot more full than this in this photo!

I couldn't stand it... the yard was taking over and I was going crazy.... so here are the after pictures from that.... now you can see the front porch!!oh and the house numbers!Here is the holly tree denuded... looks better doesn't it??

Another angle of the front and the holly tree..

So to guage this pile... that is a 6 foot fence behind it... Most of it was the holly tree sapplings. Our really wonderful neighbor took it to Rexius for us.

So here are some pics from when we were getting ready to move in... This first one is looking in from the front door.

This is our bedroom from the front doorway. There is a door that goes into the bathroom.

This is our built-in in our dining room.

This is the kitchen... you are looking at the only permanent counter space at this point.

and this is our large bathroom with the (COLD) tile floor.

The Front of the house just before we moved in.  The big scary blob overshadowing the front poarch is a holly tree that spent the summer trying to return to a bush.

The Front Porch, again being taken over by bushes.... Leah tells me there will be flowers on some of them eventually.... though I'm suspicious since she recently chopped them all down.

More of the scary bushes trying to take over the front porch.... apparently that one by the post is a climbing rose bush, with nothing to climb on....

The View that most people saw, driving up... yes there is a house under there somewhere.....

The side yard.  The plan is to grade this so it doesn't have a big hump running down the middle of it and put in raised garden boxes, behind a half high fence.

The Fence along the side yard.  Chain link and plastic slats... one day we plan to switch is out for wood.

The side yard from the back.  Shall we play 'spot the addition'?

There is is!  Looks like two additions actually, one is the back half of the kitchen, the other is Mom's room, the family room and the laundry room... all vitally important parts of our house.  My secret dream is to fix that crappy roof so that it matches the original, and do the same with the siding.... one day.

Back of the house and part of the back yard.

The rest of the back yard... and the unfortunate shed.  One day that space will be our fire pit area.... or something less ugly then that.

Especially for this room... totally huge kitchen, but the counter space you see is what is there...  a total of 9 feet....

So stay tuned and feel free to throw out suggestions as we go along!