Ever since we first saw the house, Rick and I knew we wanted to remove the walls between the two formal living spaces and foyer, in order to really open up the floorplan downstairs. 

You can see from this original picture of the house that the two walls really close in the space in the foyer.  By opening up those walls, the staircase will have room to breathe, and you won’t have to walk down a windy, angular corridor to get to the back of the house.

So, here we are, about a week after moving in, and Rick is just itching to pull the walls down (despite the fact that we have a number of other, more pressing, DIY projects to do first).

In addition to pulling down the bottom walls either side of the staircase, we’ve also decided to remove the left wall upstairs, opening up that bedroom and making it into a large sitting area.  I am envisioning walls of bookcases, overstuffed chairs and maybe a flatscreen TV )

The dogs weren’t able to get out and run because the house didn’t have a fenced in yard.  The weekend we moved in, we used the Uhaul truck to get about 20 fence sections to make a temporary dog run.  Our intention is to fence in the whole of the back yard (approx. 1/2 acre), but for now, all we need is a small fenced in yard for the dogs to use.

Our friend, Pawel, was kind enough to help Rick unload all the fence sections and 4×4’s from the Uhaul, plus operate the two-man auger. Somehow, the measurements for the front section of fence were off (instead of 8 ft gaps, they were 10 ft 8 inches!), but we were able to rectify the situation by building a slightly larger gate in front.

The fence took about a week to put up – Rick and I worked on it between 6-8pm during the week after work, mostly in the rain and pitch black!  We quickly found out that our motion-sensor floodlights are very temperamental. Often we would be working outside and they would just go off, and would not come back on no matter how much we moved around.  We resorted to parking the car in front of the fence sections and working under the car lights.  The rain didn’t do much to help us in our endeavor, but the upside is that I found out that our clay soil acts as a very efficient self-tanner! It took me a good few days to get the orange tint off my feet.  Orange feet, white legs.  Sexy.

Ok, so I didn’t listen to my own advice about the whole carpet dust/asthma thing.  Rick and I pulled up the carpet in the two front formal living rooms and the dining room yesterday, and now my asthma is really bad.  I have since bought one of those dust masks, but I think it is the equivalent of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.  An appropriate idiom to use seeing as we are living in the Black Horse Run community )

Another must do task is removing the carpet in the house.  I don’t think it has been changed since the house was built in 1993, so it is  n a s t y! We are going to try and remove all the carpet – all 3500 sq. ft of it – before we officially move in at the weekend.  Rick will have to do most of the work because the dust and dirt will aggravate my asthma.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

After closing on the house today, the first thing we did was take down all the dodgy window treatments left by the previous owner.

 
She was a smoker, so we wanted to make sure all the stale smoke smell was out of the house, pronto! (that, and the treatments were ugly!)  Rick got to work and I started documenting with photos (well, someone has to do the hard work )