We bought a House!

Rick and I have been house hunting almost since we moved out to western Iowa. We'd been on several house tours and kept holding out hope that we'd find an acreage with a decent fixer-upper in the price range we were comfortable with.

We didn't.
But we did find a nice fixer-upper in town and with T's due date approaching quickly, we made an offer in January and had a very smooth closing on March 3rd.

Our first house!

It's a 1970's home with some very 1970's finishes. 

1970's finishes that had to go.

The living room for instance, was orange. 

Apricot orange

The master bedroom had these exciting green, plastic blinds... and one wall of wood paneling. 

part of our paint crew is lurking in the hallway

 And T's nursery was brown. With this cute, but distinctly feminine tree painted on one wall.

Also note the horrible hollow wood curtain on the closet. There's no bottom track so these horrible things are literally just swinging there waiting to fall off on you when you try to get out something.   

gotta love that plastic accordion door

This bathroom is huge and I love it.
What I don't love is the linoleum creeping up the wall behind the fabulous blue toilet 

Dining area in the kitchen, we've already had to replace that chandelier because Rick kept walking into it.

Our favorite room is this addition on the back! It's just under 500 square feet of gas fireplace and horrible mantel waiting to be turned into a family / playroom

Our sexy 1970's kitchen. It comes complete with un-level particle board cabinets and blue cheese colored flooring.

So right away we got to work painting. We didn't move in until the weekend after closing so we wouldn't have to paint around furniture etc.

Our top priority was the nursery!
The crib is so pretty and I love the watercolor animal alphabet on the wall (H is for Hedgehog!)

We'll have to wait for the weather to be consistently warmer before we can pull out the windows and finish painting them, but I love the curtain and rod we found

Rocking chair, Boppy, and lamp I made by drilling holes in an old globe

The mountain mural to replace the tree.
Rick and I found the plane at an antique shop in Omaha and having it flying over our mountains is one of my favorite parts of this room!

No more shitty wooden curtain! I couldn't find a way to make them tolerable so we just took them down and painted the closet instead

We also painted our master bedroom right away. 

No more icky green blinds,
but that wood paneling is still lurking.

We painted the living room, because apricot orange just wasn't doing it for us.

We like the sagey-grey a lot better

our Audubon paintings and curtains really classed up the living room

We got rid of the brown and the mantel above the fireplace.  I still want a mantel, just not the one that was there.

We also bought furniture! The coffee table is a giant chest that opens from either side and is lockable with a pair of skeleton keys. It's very cool! We've got all our board games stashed in there now.

We used the same paint color we used in the living room upstairs. It's funny how the light changes the color based on the room, but we really like it in both. We didn't however, like the way the yellow globes on the fans made it look a little dingy, but we like the fans, so we just got new white globes and the color when they're on is much better.  

We'd planned to paint the entire family room but an early arrival caught us off guard and we've gotten a little busy.