Our Home, the first year.

We have now been homeowners for just over a year. Here is what the house looked like when we bought it.Here is what the house looks like today.Lets take a look at how we got there.

The first major project we took on was painting the house, which we actually did last summer. The paint was in really bad shape and it required a lot of scraping. Seth did everything pretty much by himself. Last summer, as soon as Seth got home he was outside scraping the flaking paint.Our wonderful neighbors let us borrow their paint sprayer and Seth did the painting himself. Here is the house with all the windows taped off and the first coat of paint.Then finally the finished project.This summer we replaced the roof. When we bought the house we knew that the roof would need to be replaced in the next 2 or 3 years. Our insurance company however, decided that our roof needed to be replaced right away. They initially gave us 3 months before they canceled our insurance. We fought with them a bit and they agreed to extend our insurance coverage to the end of the year. At that point we either had to have a new roof or a new insurance company. Luckily, we qualified for the big new-homeowner tax credit and we earmarked that money to go straight to the roof. They completed the job a few weeks ago (it only took 3 days) and we are very pleased with the result.
There is some landscaping work that needs to be done before we are "finished" but it still makes a pretty good before and after.