Four weeks later...

I am finally posting pictures of the inside of our house! We're still not completely unpacked, but I don't know if we ever will be, so I decided today that enough is enough and it's time to share some pictures! Our poor families have been waiting weeks to see this - sorry everyone!

I uploaded a gallery of images if you'd like to take a peek! If you click on the first one, it will open up to be a full-screen slideshow. And then if you click the little "i" in the circle, you can read a little caption so you'll know what you are looking at.

I really can't believe that I didn't take pictures before we started attacking everything - I'm just kicking myself now. It wasn't completely awful, but it definitely wasn't pretty. In the past four weeks we (with the gracious help of my mom and Brian's dad) have, among other things:

- painted the master bedroom

- painted my office

- painted the guest room

- painted woodwork and trim

- turned a basement room infested with cobwebs, spiders and mice into a pleasant, non-scary laundry room

- cleared the garage of a HEAP of junk that hadn't seen daylight for years, such as rusty skis, old ski boots, coca-cola lamps and street lights (random? yes!) We now call the garage our barn. We fell in love with barns while living in Pennsylvania last summer, and since this garage is detached from the house, it might be the closest thing we ever have to a real barn!

- fixed all of the doorknobs in the entire house (the adorable vintage knobs were locking us inside - definitely a fire hazard!)

- installed a gate in the backyard - now Stryder has a completely fenced-in yard

- planted a garden, killed some serious weeds and accomplished a lot of other yard work

- installed closet shelving in the basement guest room

We also got to host our first out-of-town guests last weekend, which was so fun! Brian's aunt, uncle and cousins (the Betchers) were driving from a family reunion in Kansas City back to their home in Virginia. Our house was the perfect halfway stopping point, so they got to spend the night with us and break in our guest room.

Since we've been here, we've been running out of hot water about 3 minutes into our showers - yikes! Today, our landlord had a new hot water heater installed. You better believe I'll be in the shower at least 20 minutes tonight! We're also getting a new refrigerator because most of the shelving in ours has broken. But other than that, and a few more boxes left to unpack, we're pretty much finished.

For 24 months, at least. :)