Home Tour: First Stop

One of the first things that we had to take care of before starting in on the real work for the new house was doing away with its many occupants.  Between the spiders and the ants there was nary an inch of house that had not been claimed by some critter or other and the effect was just as unsettling as you would think.  Every surface was a complex matrix of heavily trafficked ant superhighways intertwined with colossal spider webs meant to ensnare their many travelers and generally contribute in an entirely unfriendly way to what I imagine was some pretty extreme and hellish rush hour traffic.  (No matter how bad your commute is; I feel I can speak with great confidence that it doesn’t stand the least chance of resulting in your becoming someone else’s lunch and, it turns out, for that you should be grateful.)

The first step in our attack plan involved a general cleaning which included an unbearably fun afternoon of vacuuming the walls to rid them of spiders.  This, among other, similar atrocities, I will have to remember to include in my list of reasons why I should consider reallocating our food budget to a maid service and just eating nutritious grasses and foliage this year.  It also included a round up and removal of the ants and their infrastructure and was followed by the thorough dousing of every visible surface with an array of deadly chemicals.  Naturally then, I was just pleased as punch after cleaning up pile after pile after drift after dune of ants when we came back the next day and found this:

 

 

Or maybe the real joy didn’t set in until that had been cleaned up and the next day there was this:

 

 

The bright side is that these ants are all dead.  The dark and depressing side is that they are EVERYWHERE and apparently they intend to keep showing up to die.  I am less than thrilled.  But I am more than thrilled to begin posting pictures of the new house.  There is still a fair bit of work to do, but the bottom line is that in its current state it is now totally habitable…at least for people…not so much for ants.

 

Now the story of this house is that it was built by our company about five years ago and after sitting unoccupied for a couple years was finally sold to a man I will kindly refer to as the Pig-Dog who treated it very poorly before defaulting on a loan and having to give it up.  If you were a reader of this site when I did the tour of our current house, you’ll notice a trend since having been built by the same company the materials are quite similar.  Take for example, the kitchen:

 

 

The cabinets are similar and the counters are the same solid surface material in a different color.  The problem is I kind of hate both of those things so we we’ve been toying with the idea of refinishing the cabinets with a darker stain and upgrading to granite.  I do, however, LOVE the wood floors.

 

 

I’m also happy that it has the same glass pantry door and we’re planning on bringing our laundry room door from the other house because it matches.

 

 

In our current house the cabinets and counter end right after the dishwasher.  In this house (though I didn’t get a good picture of it) the cabinets and counter continue for another three feet or so.  This pleases me in a way that is only slightly less pathetic than the way I am pleased by the sink in this house being two inches wider than our old one.  Also like our new house, the kitchen is open to the family room.  Unlike our old house, it has a large and fairly useless built in…thingy.  This is a source of some irritation.

 

 

Also unlike our current house, it has a planter shelf that goes around the entire perimeter of the room.  If you remember the old house, we had put up a shelf in exactly the same place to create a kitty highway so we’re supremely happy to have a house with built in infrastructure to accomplish the same thing. 

 

 

Further, I am completely smitten with the paint colors we chose for this house.  While I didn’t much care for being forced to repaint every wall of the house in one shot, I do have to admit that I really enjoyed the opportunity to play with colors again and I’m pretty thrilled with how it all turned out.  I’m not sure that these pictures are entirely true to the feel of these colors but either way this is one of my favorites.

 

 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Comments

[Kim]

I LOVE that green and I totally covet the kitchen! The ants, dude, I hope they are all dead now. I've got the creepy crawlies after seeing the pictures!

[Kim]

I want you to know that I dreamed last night that there were floating bugs in my bathwater. I hold you responsible.

[Monkee]

Seriously, the ants keep coming. It doesn't matter how many times they get cleaned up, the next day their back. I'm beginning to wonder about what constitutes a plague?

[Kim]

Maybe you need to call in the big guns with an exterminator. Or maybe once the ants meet all the cats, they'll decide the outside is A-OK afterall.