That new house smell...

... in our case its kind of a mixture of "previous owner smell", freshly shampooed carpet, and new paint. But it's new to us!
We've been a little slow on updating here, but we officially closed on our house on November 5, and we had the keys in our hand the next day. We have been painting and cleaning for about a 9 days now, and we are really liking the results. It's amazing what a few coats of paint and a little "elbow grease" can do!

So here are some of the "before" pictures of our new house.

We love the dining room! It has two beautiful windows that let lots of light in, and really pretty bead-board, but the walls, window frams and bead-board are all white. We are going to add some color on the walls to enhance this room.


The kitchen is great too, but again with the white walls, white window frams and white tile backsplash, there's just not enough color! The cabinets are great though! We have so much more storage than we need, although we'll surely fill it all before too long :)
Here's the space for the new washer and dryer that we got for a great deal (see previous post).
The living room has the oppisite problem of the dining room. There is too much color here. I love red and yellow, but all the walls in this room are brightly colored, and it's just too much, so we're going to tone it down a bit. Maybe some creamy white walls with one or two accent walls.
This is the yellow room. Sometimes I feel like we're moving into the Whitehouse because all of the rooms right now are just refered to as the color that they are. There is also a blue room, and the master bedroom is currently two shades of pinkish red and beige, so we call it the pink room. The yellow room doesn't look so bad in this picture, but when it's dark out and the the only light comes from the overhead light fixture, it is so yellow in here it hurts my eyes. Our plan is for this room to be the office, so we're thinking that we need to make a room we could actually concentrate in, with calmer colors. The walls are also really dirty and beat up in this rooom, so we think a fresh coat of paint will be a huge help.

And here's the outside. We have some plans for some new landscaping features, but those will wait for a while. What's there now is nice, and very low maintenence. The only irritating feature is the ivy crawling up the wall and into the gutters and roof by the front door. There are a few really pretty rose and hydrangea bushes around the house though! And they're still blooming. I love living in a temperate climate.

Hopefully by the end of this weekend we will have pictures of all the updates, and we might even have furniture in!