Our new home, almost three weeks in (aka: ripping things out and finding hidden dick drawings)

Well, we’re three weeks into home ownership.

And so far all we’ve done is break a bunch of stuff and find a bunch of dicks drawn in our walls.

Jokes aside, we knew when we bought our home we’d have to do a lot of work on it.

And also that we’d probably find a lot of dicks drawn in our walls.

And that work has started.

So far, we’ve ripped out several walls, installed several walls, removed almost the entire kitchen, and started scraping down popcorn ceilings.

In addition to the dick drawings, we also just keep discovering more shoddy construction work that’s been done in the past 40 years.

Our biggest priority right now is scraping down alllll the popcorn ceilings since that’ll be way easier to do before we move in at the end of next month.

We (Ryan) accomplished that pretty quickly! We were really surprised to find out that the drywall underneath had actually been taped and partially sanded. We were not expecting that at all.

We got all the popcorn ceilings scraped down in the entire house, and our next steps are to sand, patch, prime and paint.

We discovered upon ripping out some unwanted cabinets in the master bedroom that at some point, a previous owner had expanded the closet.

We do plan to keep the closet at its current size, but — as we discovered while ripping out a hastily-installed cabinet — the closet’s extension wall floats, and will need to be rebuilt and anchored.

We’ve also been making progress on our kitchen, which is our second biggest priority.

I can deal with mismatched flooring and poor paint choices, I cannot deal with a kitchen that doesn’t function.

We ripped out most of the cabinets and counters (we left the sink counters in tact to use them as a workspace) and are still in the process of ripping out the upper soffit (yay taller cabinets/ more storage space!), moving the gas lines (for some reason both the laundry room and living room have gas lines, but not the kitchen???) and ordering all new appliances.

If you were curious, the kitchen soffit is where we found our first friendly penis.

We’ve been working with a local designer to get renderings and quotes for our new kitchen. While we plan on doing as much work as we can on our own, we’re in a bit of a time crunch to get the kitchen done before we move in.

We had a conversation about whether we wanted to make our own cabinets, but for the sake of keeping our sanity, we decided to just work with a kitchen designer on quotes and layout, order them, and then do all the installation ourselves.

We also ripped out the “breakfast bar” so we could close up the wall between the kitchen and living room, slide a refrigerator against it, install more cabinets, and make our kitchen flow more efficiently.

We also started ripping out the loft wall so we could start some of the rewiring. This was literally the first thing Ryan did when we got the keys.

As it turns out, several parts of the weird loft-slash-third-bedroom were not up to code, and we don’t think that it was permitted construction.

So, since we’re keeping it, we’ll have to do a good amount of work to bring it in compliance with code.

And… that’s where we’re at! Ryan and I are still hoping we can get the major things done before we move in, but we imagine we’ll be working on our house diligently for the next full year if not two.