Headgame

SOOOO we bought a house! Haha. How is that for skipping over the past 4 months?

Lemme tell you about it. (Novel follows)

3 bedroom, 1 bath.  1,200ish sq feet. It was built in 1924. It was redone (really cheaply) in December and had been on the market for 6 months. It has original hardwoods that are patched all kinds of a horrible, but we are fixing them and they will look perfect in all the rooms except for the back bedroom, which will eventually be redone with a bathroom to be the master.  We had to sacrifice that flooring to patch the rest of the house. Different flooring will be installed once we figure out/save for the bathroom addition. For now, the back bedroom will be my cake room and have beautiful plywood flooring! Haha. But doing it this way will also allow us to even out the floors in that bedroom, because we can't fix the foundation in that area b/c of the bathroom (which is shares a wall with) so win/win!

We have already moved a wall to switch the living room and the front bedroom, making a small bedroom for our bedroom that will be soundproofed with special sheetrock that cost an arm and a leg so that David can have a nice sleeping cave for his vampire sleeping hours and I can actually watch TV or cook while he is asleep. Moving the wall also made the living room gigantic. I don't know if any houses built in the 20's had a living room this big. It was a stupidly big bedroom, but had a big closet taking up a ton of space. We don't really understand the layout of the house - we have been trying to figure out as we take apart walls and stuff what the heck the function of stuff has been but still don't really have a good idea! There are two front doors, and there are several duplex's in the area, but it was built as a single family and only has one bathroom and kitchen and the hardwoods are original in the two front rooms that we think were connected by a doorway at one time, so it is a mystery! But as is, we have a really good size living room (every time I have looked at it since we moved the wall I have had a slight freak out about how awesome it will be!) and 2 small bedrooms (the back bedroom is pretty small, but we think will work well as the master, as long as they don't have a king bed) and one pretty good sized bedroom that we will be using as the guest room! The bathroom is my favorite room in the house, except the vanity! So that will eventually be replaced as well.

This week, my Dad and I are finishing the electrical and the sheet rocking, the A/C guy is coming to move a vent and a pipe outside, they are coming to work on the foundation (they did a bunch of stuff last year, and we have a warrantee on it) to even out some floors and then the texture guys are coming next Monday, and then the floors guys will come after we get back from Minnesota to refinish the hardwoods that I am going to repair before the come with the wood from the back bedroom!

We closed on the 21st of July and are hoping to move in on the 25th of August!

We started going to our new ward today. LOTS of young couples, I think we will have good friends! We are apparently one of just a very small handful of homeowners in the ward - everyone else lives in this huge apartment complex called the Village or in other apartments in Deep Ellum or such. Lots of newly graduated ppl and a lot of students. Small youth, big primary and bigger nursery. A lot like Irving but WAAAAAAY bigger. They filled up the entire chapel and overflow and the gym! It was nuts.

My most favorite thing about the house is the area it is in. We are 3 minutes from Whole Foods. 6 minutes from Trader Joes. 7 mins from the church building. 10 mins from Central Market. 8 mins from Sam's club. 12 mins from my Roller Derby rink (oh yeah, I started doing that!). And the biggest selling factor was the proximity to White Rock lake. It is so close and I am so excited to live next to it! We are 3 miles (about 7 mins by car - 21 mins by bike!) from The Arboretum. The Santa Fe Trail, which opened in 2011, is a block West of us and goes all the way from Deep Ellum up to White Rock, and then White Rock lake of course has a trail that goes all the way around it. Two blocks west of us (after you pass the community garden!!!!) there is the Samuell Grand Park, which is a 78 (!!) acre park that has everything!!! It is where they hold Shakespeare in the park! They have 20 tennis courts, basketball courts, soccer fields, and an awesome, newly remodeled Rec center with a billion community programs and basically my dream life is coming true.  Haha.

Our actual neighborhood, Mount Auburn, is "gentrifying" which is a nice way of saying it is sort of the ghetto but it is getting nicer. We are one block south of Hollywood Heights, which is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Dallas (it is where I would love to buy our forever house after David is done with Grad school!) - it has tudor style homes form the 20's and 30's with fantastic yards. It is a historic preservation district. The reason we bought in Mount Auburn is because 1) Despite what the bank said, we couldn't afford to spend what it would have cost to live in Hollywood Heights and 2) I really do think Mount Auburn is getting MUCH nicer! It was just announced last month that the elementary school we are districted for is turning into a Montessori school (which will be run like a charter school, I guess - so public, but selective?) and as Dallas improved the trails and rec center and everything down by us recently, I do think that in the next 5-10 years, the most ghetto houses in the neighborhood will get sold and redone. I have my eye on the duplex across the street from us - it is def the UGLIEST house on our street, but would be awesome redone and I am just the girl to do it!

We have already met our next door neighbor (we are on a corner) and he is super nice. He is at the tail end of a 2 year renovation on his house, owns a Pizza joint right across from Fair Park, and fosters rescue beagles! Still have to meet the rest of the neighbors, but that will come!

Basically, our goal is to be in Dallas 2-3 more years before going to Grad School and then we will rent out this house while we are in Grad school, come back, live in it for a few years until we pay off our student loans, then move up into Hollywood Heights or another Dallas neighborhood.

My camera is at the house, but I took before pictures! I will take some during photos tomorrow, and the after photos, of course, will come as well!