I painted the cabinets, with regular paint. It was a big undertaking, I was on a tight timeline since I was working at the time, and I didn’t do it right. There are more steps involved than I took and the paint chipped a lot. Which is just as well, because I didn’t like the color either. But, that was the first big project, and this is how they looked when finished:

 This picture was taken at the start of this year, just before I used a cabinet refinishing kit to do them right. I was afraid to go with a dark color, which is why we lived with these for a while.

After switching the office to its new room, we got rid of a red chair from Aaron’s apartment and replaced it with one that folded out into a sleeper. We also got a way smaller desk, as the other one mostly collected junk and was never used. I believe the new one was a gift from my mom, from Target. The mirror there was waiting to find a purpose, as we had replaced it with one from Garden Ridge. We eventually hung it in the living room. A big ugly elliptical is located on the other side of this room. There’s also a bookshelf behind the desk.

I despised the elliptical, because it was large, expensive, and not used enough to justify it’s encumbrance on our home. There was never a good place to put it. The layout here is meant to initially detract from the elliptical, since you couldn’t see it when you looked into the room from the hall. I later used the same layout to “hide” the desk.

The guest room was really the first room to be completed. It has basically stayed the same over the last two years.
 
We intended to immediately put up a chair rail, but we didn’t get that done for another year and a half. In our defense, one of the walls is angled, and we had insufficient tools.
Actually, those pictures are a little older, because we had a smaller TV before. That flat screen was in our living room until Aaron finally found a big TV for a price I agreed with. And, before we got the big TV, the loft TV just sat on the floor. Crazy times.

I frequented the same places and many of the same products throughout this renovation. They are as follows:

Home Depot – Being the closest hardware store, they have an unfair advantage. The selection isn’t phenomenal, it will rarely be cheaper than the Menards, but I hate buying paint anywhere else. I went to Home Depot for the purpose of home improvement more than any other store, so for that alone they must be included.

Target – Their clearance is b-a-n-a-n-a-s. I knew this from an electronics perspective, as it seems they would rather give away last seasons video games than bother to sell them. What I didn’t know was the absurd clearance you can find throughout the store. 70% of the frames in my house are from Target, and I don’t think I paid more than $3 for any of them. Floating shelves, flame-less led tea lights, clothes hampers, linens, kitchen supplies, cleaning supplies, blankets, wall art, area rugs… all from Target, all on sale or clearance.

Garden Ridge – When you need some sort of household item today and don’t want to spend a lot, Garden Ridge has it. It is not an impressive store aesthetically; its metal shelving in a warehouse.  We’ve gotten rugs, mirrors, decorative accents, clocks, frames, and art, among other things.

Ikea – There are no trick or secrets to this one. Ikea is amazing. Ikea is cheap. So far, nothing from Ikea has disappointed. It’s hard to go without spending hundreds of dollars, so plan accordingly. I have long held that the dilapidated shopping mall near my house should turn into a flagship Ikea store for the midwest. We always go to the one in West Chester, Ohio since my sister lives nearby.

Clorox Cleaning Wipes – Buying a foreclosed home means you’re gonna be cleaning up other people’s messes. We buy the multi-packs and use them for everything. One of the most effective uses was when we needed to clean the baseboards. They had a layer of dust and dirt that only the wipes would remove.

Behr Paint and Primer in One – I’ve already mentioned this product, and I cannot stress it enough: it is a must. When you are determining a paint choice from your local hardware, look for Behr. To my knowledge, they were the first to do paint and primer at hardware stores and have created a new tier of quality for the average, weekend painter. It is amazing, you have a full line of finish sheen, available in a variety of sizes. And, it’s $10 cheaper than it used to be.

Scion xB – Aaron bought a 2008 model about a year and a half ago. It has been a lifesaver. We fold down the seats and use it as a makeshift truck. We have transported over 200 feet of molding, a king size bed, 12ft scaffolding, and so much more. And it’s shorter than my Chevy Malibu! That little car was probably the smartest thing we have bought. I almost think of getting one for myself when my car dies.

We painted the kitchen and downstairs bathrooms soon after moving in, as well as the dining room, which would go on to be painted three times. But upstairs, we mostly did in one trip to the hardware store. This was a project from late 2010, after the lost year of film. We bought all this paint (and PowerAde) at once, much to the amusement of Matt the paint clerk at Home Depot. I can also say that at this point, the dining room had been painted twice, because the yellow of this hallway was the first color. It looked horrible, I thought, and went for something softer. The cans shown here are all Behr Paint and Primer in One. The yellow paint on the wall was not, and it was that annoying experience that lead me to try something different.

There used to be a Menards and Home Depot practically side by side three minutes from my house. A little before we began this project, the Menards closed. I spent a good deal of money at their store closing sale, knowing there was so much I could stock up on for the house. Most of these painting supplies came from Menards, allowing me to start this project more organized than ever. At this time, the bedroom with the big closet was the guest room, and the bedroom next to the loft was the office. This was a bad choice for many reasons. I believe that moving everything for the paint made us realize we should switch the rooms.

The Behr paint was amazing. Our walls had never been painted and were scuffed and stained in many places. The paint covered in one coat, and with less paint than we expected. If you buy anything cheaper, you waste your savings by needing more paint, primer, and time. That said, the rooms were painted quickly! I lost picture taking steam as the project continued.

As a side-note, since that dresser is in the office, we must have bought dressers for our bedroom at this point. They were super cheap ones that we got from Target on clearance, and sucked. They were always falling apart and weren’t anything like real furniture. We kept them for a little while though, until we could afford new ones from Ikea, and gave the old ones to a friend moving into his first apartment.

I know I have some pictures from this time, but I can’t seem to find them. I think they are stuck on an old hard drive that failed about a year ago. I’ve been rather chronological so far, but that ends now. I’ll post roughly by project from here on out.

Now that the house is on the market, staged as best we can manage, its easy to forget some of the transitional stages. Like before we had a table:

Or when we bought a bed, but no frame

Those would be t-shirts posing as pillowcases on our bed. One particular purchase was a huge deal: getting matching furniture. New. From a furniture store.

 

Shortly after we had an accepted offer on the house, and still a couple months before we moved in, I got an idea about how to fill one of those rooms, namely the loft. It was something I had wanted since I first saw them in the mall years and years ago.

 

 It came in a discrete box, but with a little unpacking and a lot of fluffing

 It became a giant foam filled bean bag roughly the size of a couch, made by LoveSac. Luckily it was on clearance, as they are way more expensive than I imagined. We are still a little unsure of how we will be getting it out of the house.

March of 2009. I’m not sure what the exact day was, but we moved in our stuff and realized: we don’t have much stuff. In fact, We had bought a big, empty space and had nothing to fill it with. The only thing that was making it look somewhat full was our extreme lack of organization, shown in the following the photo:

 

 Once we got things somewhat cleaned up, it was clearer. We had a lot of mostly empty room, no decoration whatsoever.

We were home shopping in somewhat of a rush back in 2008, because we wanted to quality for a tax program that gave first time home owners $8,000 (thanks Obama!). We looked at quite a few foreclosed homes with a budget of $90,000.We stuck to the west side of Indianapolis because the homes offer more value per square foot. Also, as a result of the way the city developed, there was a massive inventory of new construction homes sold during the bubble. We were afraid to get an older home, as there is inherently more cost in such a purchase. We made an offer on this one:

The one in the middle, that is. It only had a one car garage, but we liked it all the same. Here it is on Trulia (which is a real estate website). We thought it would be perfect, but someone placed a higher offer than us and we didn’t get it. We were discouraged at the time, especially because it pushed us getting into a house closer to our wedding date. After looking at more places with our realtor, we found a common floor plan in late ’90s construction that we liked: two story living rooms with lofts. He took us to several with that basic floor plan, but one stood out. Maybe because the front looked so unassuming:

Half that tree was missing as well. The porch was so dark and small, I don’t think we were expecting to see this when we opened the door.

I think the biggest surprise was how bright it was. Because we were looking at foreclosed homes, they were often poorly lit. All the south facing windows and open floor plan filled the house with light. There was no noticeable damage either, unlike many of the other homes. To our standards, it was move in ready.

Except for appliances. It did need appliances. And some upper cabinets. Feeling the stress of work, planning a wedding and looking for a home, I told Aaron that we should put an offer on this house and if it fell through, we would just wait till after the wedding. Not wanting to stay in an apartment, Aaron agreed to offer near the top of our budget to ensure we got the house. We probably overpaid, but it was accepted, and soon enough it was ours. Soon enough being the four months it took for the paperwork to be cleared.