We did it! Here's our virtual tour.

Our house officially goes on the market this weekend. We've owned this home for four years and have put a lot of work in maintaining and updating it, so it's well-cared for! We've replaced all of the flooring in the whole house, replaced all of the bathroom sinks & vanities, replaced all the lighting, freshly painted all the walls, and replaced a number of appliances (furnace, refrigerator, and washer & dryer).

It's in a beautiful location, right on the Bear Creek Open Space with easy access to the Bear Creek Trail (just walk down the block, and you're there!). We have great neighbors, and our HOA takes good care of maintenance and updates, too (our exterior is actually being repainted this week!). They handle all the yard work, including watering, mowing, and shoveling. Whew!

Lakewood is just west of Denver. This home is in Jefferson County, which is nicknamed the "Gateway to the Rocky Mountains." We're a short drive (or bike ride!) away from Bear Creek Lake State Park. We're just a 15 minute drive from Red Rocks Amphitheater & Park and Mount Falcon State Park, and we're less than half an hour's drive from Lookout Mountain Park and Lair 'O the Bear State Park! This house is perfect for a nature lover and someone who wants quick access to the state's beautiful parks and mountains.

You can check out the virtual tour of the house here:

http://tours.tourfactory.com/tours/tour.asp?t=1005184

If you're in the market, then please stop by the open house this Saturday & Sunday afternoon. You'll find more details in the virtual tour I linked above.

Thanks for checking it out!

Home Improvement: Living Room

Here is our finished living room.

Almost everything in this room has been replaced since we moved in nearly four years ago. The front door was really old and rotten, and parts were held together with packing tape! We replaced it a couple of years ago, a generous gift from Andrew's parents. I painted the room a natural green color called "Witch Hazel." We pulled out all of the old, icky carpeting from this room, and Andrew and my parents replaced it with laminate wood flooring. The floor was a housewarming gift from my parents, so we really lucked out in some of these expenses. My mom helped me install new baseboards to replace the old, fake-wood ones. We hung new curtains, and I bought a new floor lamp from IKEA.

Here's a before and after photo that shows the old room color, old door, and old carpet.

Home Improvement: Stairwell

Andrew's an outdoorsy kind of person, and we like having a little "nature" in the house. You can't really see the detail very well, but the glass in our new light has a light leaf design in it.

We also chose this wall sconce from Lowe's with the leaf design.

Here's the finished stairwell! All of the changes we did included replacing the outlets and outlet covers from brass to white, painting the walls, putting on new handrails, putting in new flooring (including the carpet), adding new trim, scraping off the popcorn ceilings, and updating the light fixtures.

New Carpet!

We finally, finally got new carpet yesterday! When we moved into our house, there was a powder blue carpet that wound from the entry way, through the living room, up the stairs, and into both bedrooms. It was a outdated, but that wasn't the big problem. It had a faint smell of dog pee (better than cat pee!). It also had numerous stains and large bleach stains in places.

We removed it entirely from the downstairs when we put in our laminate wood floors. Of course, it had to be replaced everywhere else, but we kept putting it off. What's the point in getting new carpet when we were about to have a baby? Babies spit up and poop everywhere! So we waited. And waited.

I cleaned the carpet a number of times with a carpet cleaner. It helped with the smell, but, on rainy days, you could get a whiff in the air. It was so unsightly that we almost never had anyone go upstairs.

Now that we're planning on putting our home on the market, we couldn't put it off any more. Carpet was more expensive than we'd thought, but it had to be done. We went with the second estimate (Carpet Exchange). They did a really good job with the install, and I love the new carpet. I only wish we'd done it a little sooner so we could have lived in the house long enough to get some use out of it!

Here's a photo of our room looking very spiffy with the new carpeting. There's something else new in our bedroom, too. My friends Aminta and Olivia went with me to Whimsy Paint & Sip yesterday with some vouchers from Living Social. We had a blast, and I got a new piece of artwork for the house!

My painting:

Packing Up the Apartment

We're expecting our new home to be ready July 8, and our lease is up here July 14. Today, I decided to start some packing. It's weird to think we might be moving all this stuff out in less than two weeks.

I'm really excited about our new home and having a permanent place with Andrew. Still, it's bittersweet. This is the first place I've had as an adult, and the first place Andrew and I have had as a couple. Two years went by really fast, and I'm going to miss it.

I hope I like the next place at least as much. There won't be a big pond in the backyard and no ducks, but we will have forest and (hopefully!) deer. Our second bedroom is going to be a nursey instead of a computer room, and I wonder know where our bookshelf and books will go. In the attic? Weird.

It's amazing to me how much life has continued to change for us over the last few years. We went from planning a wedding and getting married to moving into our first apartment to losing a lot of people who were dear to us. We moved on to new jobs, started looking for a home to own, and now we're expecting a baby boy. This, all in the matter of a couple of years. While it's a little sad to move on, I'm looking forward to some consistancy... to being able to enjoy our current stage of life and hopefully not have to deal with too much at once.

It's going to feel so satisfying to move this stuff over to our new place and know that some of the big changes are coming to an end. We can focus then on one, big change... having a family.

Houses and Town Homes

Andrew and I have been on a mission with our house-hunting these last few months. We started looking before we were expecting and even put a bid in on a home. After re-crunching our numbers figuring in the cost of our upcoming baby, we made the tough decision to pull our bid on the house.

Now, we're looking for more affordable places to live in town homes and such. The problem is, all the nice ones always seem to have offers on them already!

Finding a home seems impossible, and now we have 60 days to move out of our apartment! Actually, the apartment people did say we can do month-to-month after our lease is up, but that'll cost an extra $100 a month. Bogus!