White-Siri Family Blog: The work on the house has begun!

An hour after closing Katie and I made the first trip to our new home.

We literally drove from our current home to the new one as soon as closing was done just to say we walked into the house...

We stopped off on the way home from there at Lowe's to pick up new lock sets and take a look at some appliances.

We need to replace the range and the dishwasher. They function but are very dated.

Katie wants a smooth top stove and is pretty flexible on the dishwasher.

While we were at Lowe's we priced laminate flooring. We found some Pergo for about $3.97 a square foot. We need about 550 sq. ft for the area we are doing. We felt it was a little pricey at over $2300.00!!! Plus the underlayment. There was another brand, Armstrong that was about $1.97 a sq. ft plus underlayment.

A friend of ours told us about a place called Home Emporium in another section of Chesapeake, so we took a trip over there. They had flooring but I wasn't getting a warm and fuzzy. The brands were unknown and the few pieces that were available for me to inspect just didn't feel good going together.

While we were there, a flooring installer told us about Ollie's. We took the drive to Norfolk.

WHAT A GREAT DECISION THAT WAS!!!

We were able to get about 560 sq. ft of Mohawk Laminate flooring and underlayment for $899.48!!! What a deal! 20 year guaranteed, name brand flooring for a third of the price!!! We were so blessed!

Anyway, we had it loaded in our truck and brought it to the new house and had our slave labor, I mean our son and his friend unload it and put it in the living room.

Then the fun starts. I started taking down the previous owner's hardware and stuff from the walls, removing the switch plate and outlet covers, patching nail holes and getting ready to paint.

The folks that lived here before sure liked to pound holes in the walls. I spent a couple hours taking down drapery hardware and filling holes from screws, nails and such. No real "damage" to the walls, just a lot of holes.

We plan on painting the walls a light tan color (like beach sand sort of), with the trim a brilliant white. It should really compliment the wood laminate flooring and the white will add a really neat contrast.

A good friend of mine is coming over on Monday and taking a look at some alterations we would like but not that we need. We want to shorten one wall and open up the living and dining room a little bit.

He's also going to double check my measurements on the laminate and help/teach me to install it.

This is going to be challenging!!!

Just so you know, this is Katie's first home (owned). While I have owned a couple in the past, this is the first time I have bought one and actually had time to work on it prior to moving in. It's really neat! A bit stressful, but NEAT! Hopefully, we'll be able to get the hard stuff out of the way prior to moving in.

Here are some photographs from today:

From kitchen into dining room