Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Home Sweet (new!) Home

Hello! Thanks so much to everyone who's called and sent well-wishes on the closing and the move! And for those we haven't gotten to yet.... Jason and I just bought a house! The new place is in Pacifica, at the top of a hill on the Ocean side, just south of SF. After closing on July 6, we began prepping the house for our arrival.... which basically meant painting the white walls something more appealing, a lot of indecision around where things would go, and much anxiety over whether the homeowners association would allow us to have a satellite dish (... Jason living without the Steelers games!? the horror!). We are now officially moved in but only slightly settled! It was a looong moving day.... We finished painting the downstairs rooms, and are now faced with painting the bedrooms whilst surrounded by boxes and furniture (and lots of Jason's engineering books which he claims he still needs b/c he uses them "all the time"). We have two master bedrooms & full baths upstairs (luckily ours has an ocean view!) plus a laundry room - which oddly also has an ocean view (consolation prize for doing laundry I suppose!). Downstairs is a half bath, kitchen, living room, dining room and patio. We also have two garages now which means that if we ever get ahead of that mortgage payment, we can buy (and have a place to store!) kayaks.

One other quick note on our move - for our friends in the Bay Area - next time you have to move, make sure you check out the Delancey Street Foundation moving company. They are incredible! Between the two of us, Jason and I have used them five times. They really do an amazing job (have you ever seen a mover RUN back and forth from the truck to finish your job as quickly as possible?!) and the rates are the most reasonable in town, AND they are a non-profit so it's tax deductible. Check them out, highly recommended!

OK, so on to the pictures.... we're still working on a lot of things (the brass lighting fixtures MUST be eliminated!!) but we figured some pictures were better than no pictures. You can kind of see the "before" and "after" effects of the downstairs rooms in the pics below, but we still have a long ways to go on the upstairs so those "after" shots will come (much) later!

We hope that we will have more visitors now that we have an official guest room... and, we live really, really close to the ocean and a great surfing beach. You may want to come for FogFest!! It's Pacifica's annual city-wide festival.... Pacifica is known for heavy fog during July-August but the rest of the year is pretty darn nice and we're looking forward to some sunny days on our patio! www.pacificcoastfogfest.com/

We hope everyone is doing well and we welcome any advice on merging two distinctly different "styles" into one house... otherwise, we might just be pitching a few things and starting from scratch, in order to keep the peace around here :-)

Dining Room before:















Dining Room in progress:














Dining Room after!















Kitchen Before & After


















Front entrance, looking toward back door:

More pictures to come soon!