Getting to Work

Upon purchasing our house we immediately, you guessed it, got to work! We still had a month left on our apartment lease which made it a perfect time to tackle the only bathroom, and it pretty much needed an entire gut job. I didn't do the best job of taking before pictures, but it being a small bathroom I didn't have very many options for good picture taking angles.
The floor tiles were cracking and gross. The shower door was black mirrored glass. I didn't even know shower doors like it existed. The walls were wet behind the shower so we knew there was some sort of leaking going on. The mirror was rusty. There is/was knob and tube wiring throughout the house, and rusty pipes. I could go on, but pictures are more fun anyway.

That's painted black tile in the shower. The only light in the bathroom was the one above the sink. With the combination of no light, black shower doors, and black tile I'm amazed anyone was able to see what they were doing in there. I'm so glad I never had to take a single shower before we gutted it.

The first thing we did was spend a day spending oodles of money on supplies.

Next we demolished. Lath and plaster. Uuuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhh.

                                                                              

Then we cleaned.

Then new sub-floor.

Discoveries of buji tubs. That was a bad day.

Vapor barrier for the shower.

Cement backerboard for the shower and floor. (Pretty much everything was done in darkness since the only time we could work on it was when Josh got off work, and the electric still needed to be done.)

Waterproofing.

Drywall. Are you sick of pictures yet? :)

New plumbing and electrical.

TILE!

This was an exciting day, but boy was it was getting hard to work around that baby belly.

And then more work was done. After several more weeks we got to the other things. We replaced the door with a not disgusting one, and also switched the way it swung so we would have a little more room in the small bathroom. We made the sink base from a cabinet I found on Craigslist. The sink and faucet we got at Lowes. Trim, paint, light fixtures. Pretty much everything from Lowes. We still have a custom medicine cabinet in the works that will house our electric toothbrush and everything else still stuffed in the little cabinet. Currently we are still using this super attractive mirror I got years ago at goodwill. 

I stole these picture ideas from pinterest. I made them with rocks from our favorite park and really like how they turned out. 

The shower curtain I got from Wayfair and we kept the original shower faucet, but replaced the sprayer. So there you have it. The before.

After

 Before.

And after.

Big Changes

As things continued to progress with my pregnancy Josh and I began to realize we had quite a bit of money saved up, and the dream we'd had for years of owning our own home began to tug and tug at us. It hurts so bad to throw away money month after month on rent when you could potentially be building value in a home of your own. And Seattle's amazing real estate market combined with their ridiculous rental market only made it more painful. So in in March Josh and I found a financing company and got started on our hunt for an affordable fixer-upper. (SUPER challenging in Seattle in case you're wondering.)

Using an awesome app called Redfin Josh and I found lots of homes and toured several of them. Our financing made it tricky. We had to find a fixer-upper in our price range that wasn't too far gone, and whenever we found one it got snatched up by super rich people with cash who wanted to flip it or tear it down completely.

And then we got lucky and found a place we fell in love with. We put in a full price offer the day we saw it, and the next day our offer was accepted! And without further ado, here are a million pictures of the place.

Street view...there is a house back there. I promise.

See!

 Front Porch

Living Room

Dining Room

Basement Bedroom

Open Basement

Garage

View to the backyard

Fabulous derelict greenhouse

Kitchen

Back porch

Nursery

Master Bedroom

Bathroom

Oh, and right about when we bought our house we found out that we were having a boy! Pepe!

Growing Baby

After Katelyn left we finally started telling people besides family about our baby. This first photo was when I was just 9 weeks pregnant. In my mind I thought the first ultrasound would look like one of those grey screens where the technician is like, "there's your baby." and you're like... "I see nothing." My mind was blown when this little guy popped up. I can't believe you can almost make out facial features. Abortions. Ugh. Don't do them.

If only Fiz knew that he was holding such an attention sucker. Sorry Fiz.

Katelyn Visits!

After the exciting adventures of jail time Josh and I made it the rest of the way to Utah without any further mishap. With so much stress from the trip we waited until the following day to tell family about our pregnancy. We did it while we were out to breakfast and were chided for doing it at such an inopportune time. (What can I say? We were new to the whole "we're pregnant" announcing thing.) There may have been a scream from Lisa and tears shed by most and it was all very great and happy. We weren't going to see my parents until later on in the week, but I couldn't wait to tell them too, so we met for dinner that night and I filled them in on the exciting news. More tears and more happiness. It was all around a great time.

The rest of our trip was great pretty low key. Pregnancy is EXHAUSTING for me in the beginning so I did a load of napping. And Josh couldn't do much because of his broken leg. Soon our vacation had come to an end, but happily we were heading home with Katelyn.

Quick side story. All in all my pregnancy was amazing. In the very beginning I was incredibly tired, but after a few weeks that ended and I was mostly left with a pallet for very bland foods. Sometimes I would get slightly nauseated, but it really wasn't too bad. The worst of it happened on our drive home from Utah. We had stopped to grab a bite to eat, during which Kate and I switched places in the car. While climbing in I somehow stepped in some sort of weird goo that looked like snot and accidentally got it on Kate's backpack. I felt bad and was trying to clean it off, but couldn't stomach it. I kept gagging every time I looked at or touched the goo. It was funny and also pathetic, but in the end the goo won and my Panda Express ended up on the pavement.

Anyway, back to Kate's visit. Sadly Josh and I both still had to work, but Kate was cool with it and did her own thing some of the days. Other days she came on a few dog walks with me. When Josh had a day off we hiked Rattlesnake Ledge again. It was MUCH wetter this time. I was sitting two dogs that we brought with us and we all got thoroughly soaked. It was still great fun though.

At one point Kate tried "farmer blowing" to rid her of some boogers and ended up with the most amazing snot string EVER! Yummy. Clearly Fiz and Harlow were interested. 

Josh and Kate road bikes across the Lake Washington floating bridge when I was at work one day, and we spent some time at Seward park looking closely at rocks... and taking pictures of witchcraft... Seattle is always full of interesting things. We wished Kate could have stayed longer, but she left us for Oregon and cute kiddos after just a few days. Come back soon!