The house...

Long story short...I promise....

I was outside one day when I noticed the house across the street was for sale. We really needed a bigger place now that my wife had her own business from home and her mother was moving in with us, so I decided to call about the place just out of curiosity. The asking price was magnificent, and the accepted offer was even better.

There is a significant amount of damage inside the house, but nothing structural - the majority of it is cosmetic. A few slabs of drywall and some fresh paint should do the trick nicely. I'm sure as time goes on, we will end up doing a LOT more than that however, so I have decided to keep track of it in this blog, just in case HGTV shows up for one of those cheesy home improvement shows, like "If Walls Could Talk" or, more likely, "In A Fix" - I have a feeling I'm going to get started on a LOT of projects, but finish very few of them, the In A Fix crew may just come calling on me....at least I get that nice red tshirt and Sheila gets a trip to the spa. :)

Another view from the front - check out the porch!

Another view from the front

Here's another view from the front. I have no idea what style this house would be considered - since we live in Illinois, I'll just call it a corn-onial. You can see that the porch is pretty good sized, so I plan on spending a few summer nights sitting out there, perhaps blogging from the porch if I have enough cable, or better yet - if I can invest in wireless!

Another view of the house

Side of the house - needs some love here too...

The previous owner was in the process of renovating the property when he passed away (yes, IN the house...hopefully this won't turn into a paranormal blog once we move in... *grin*)
As a result, everything inside is pretty well torn apart. Most people would think "Thats too much work - forget about it!" I look at it this way - he's already got half the work done, all I have to do is finish what he started. :) It's kind of hard to see in this picture, but one of the upstairs windows is broken. There are many, many other things that need to be done to the house, first of all is cleaning it out. There is a LOT of his stuff in there from when he was alive, and the stipulations of the purchase state that we are buying the property "as is" - in other words, we get all the stuff inside too...that's ok though, I didn't want to do anything this weekend but clean anyway. ;)

Photos and background

Front of the house - needs some paint...

As you can see here, its a three story house (well, two stories and an attic...) but it also has a full unfinished basement, so there are actually four levels of living space. I don't know the square footage yet, but as soon as I find out I will put it in here. What I DO know is that it has four bedrooms (all on the second floor) and two bathrooms - one upstairs, one downstairs. It also has a fairly large kitchen, dining room/office area (we're not sure yet what we are going to use it for...) a big living room in the front of the house, and what we call a "staircase room" - all that's in there right now is a staircase and some space for....something. It's in need of a LOT of work to make it look nice. We plan on doing all the work ourselves to give it that "us" feeling.

Back of the house

This is a view of our house from the back. As you can see, it needs some TLC - fresh coat of paint, some touch up work, but the overall condition is good.

Another dumb website

Apparently some people have too much time on their hands, and nothing better to do than take pictures of their cats watching other cats. Such is the idea behind www.infinitecat.com - it all started when someone posted a picture of their cat watching himself. Others joined in, taking pictures of their cats watching the previous cat's picture, and so on. Total cats as of yesterday: 336.

Of course, as much as I hate this idea and think its a huge waste of time, I have to admit I tried to register infinitedog.com, but someone beat me to it. Perhaps infinitegeek.com, where we have a bunch of geeks staring at other geeks, staring at other geeks...etc.

I wonder if there are more geek lovers or cat lovers out there...let's find out!