House.

Yup, we bought one.

After about a year and a half of plotting and planning, we finally sealed the deal. The home-buying process was a painful one, so much so that I don't really even want to speak of it ever again. It really tried my patience. I'll just leave it at that. But fuck it; we are now in our new place, so the road we took to get here doesn't seem so important anymore.

I have done a monumentally terrible job of documenting our moving in/first round of remodeling and repairs, so I'm just going to go through what I've got on my phone. That picture up there is the keys to our house two minutes after I got 'em from the title place. After all the invasive documentation we had to provide to get the loan for this house (check stubs were a hot commodity every two weeks), walking into the title place and having them hand me the keys without questioning for a second that I was who I claimed to be was just too perfect. It was the only easy thing about buying this damn house.

Speaking of the house, it is awesome. It was built in 1953, and has retained a lot of (what I assume to be) the original accouterments (yeah, I'm using that word) from that era. This was really important to Joy and I, as nothing bugs us more than people going into a place that has a lot of character and ripping it all out to bland it up with new shit from the same store where everyone else has bought their bland shit. It's why I had to stop watching HGTV. All the coolest things about houses from the 50's and 60's are being destroyed by people who insist on making their house look like some other house they saw one time. Lame. And boring. And wasteful.

Here are some crappy photos of some of my favorite things about the house.
This is the light switch panel in our bathroom. The switch turns on the light, but the knob controls the heater/fan/lamp that is mounted on the ceiling right above where you stand when you get out of the shower. FLH gives you fan/light/heat. FH gives you fan/heat only. FL gives you fan/light only. F is just the fan, L just the light. You already figured that out. One of the settings doesn't work, and I need to fix that. I have no idea how to do that.

This is a picture of Joy putting green paint on the walls before we ripped the carpet out.

This is a picture of the cats being awesome after we ripped the carpet out.
So yeah, the floors were in pristine shape. And that's my sweet new (old) recliner that I got for twenty bucks. (Also - ripping up carpet suuuucks. If you've never plucked hundreds of staples out of a wood floor – one by one – with needle-nosed pliers, consider yourself lucky.)

This is the built-in bookshelf in the front room that has lights built onto it.
There is a box of fluorescent bulbs leaning against it because our front room has this weird track of fluorescent lighting that runs along one wall and I had to replace one. And two in the kitchen. And two in the garage. Oh, the garage. I don't have any pictures of that.

This is fireplace in the kitchen.
I bought a set of vintage Advent speakers (at Vintage Pink, which is officially the best vintage store in town) and rigged them up to the main stereo so we can have music in both rooms if we want. The fireplace is pink, but that's not really coming through in this photo.

It's kind of hard to explain what this is.
There are two recessed picture-frame sized areas in our front room wall with glass bottoms that house these strange 17-inch Lumiline bulbs that look like fluorescents but aren't. Anyway, they're attached to this fader thingy and you can illuminate whatever's sitting in the little framed area. I've got a Talking Heads limited edition record in there right now. Only one of the lights works, so I have to buy another one. They stopped making them a long time ago and they aren't cheap. But I'm determined to get it working.

This is my new office. It's coming together.
We painted the walls gold, except for one, on which I peeled the paint off in hopes to salvage some old wallpaper that was underneath it. The wallpaper's too shabby to work, so I bought some Super Mario Bros. wallpaper off eBay that we're going to put on that wall. And I found a WWF Superstars sheet from 1989 that Joy's going to make into curtains for me. And yes, I am this guy.

This is our new washer/dryer set.
We had them delivered on Saturday, only to find out that they were half an inch too tall to fit in the cabinet where our hook-ups are, and that we had a 50 amp dryer plug instead of the 30 amp model that the dryer required. This presented a perfect opportunity for me to be a real homeowning dude and figure out a solution. I hit Home Depot for a 30 amp plug and a belt sander rental, and a few hours later I had a new plug installed in the wall, the doors removed from the cabinet, a half inch planed off the top of the cabinet frame, and the washer and dryer all hooked up. I am incredible.

Next up: tackling this leaky bathtub.