Highs and Lows

Well, as we approach our final closing date on the house, I think it makes sense to wrap up the home tour.  These are the last of the "before" photos!  After we close on Tuesday (fingers crossed), and then take a brief vacation, we'll start tearing this place apart.

In the meantime, here are the last of the photos.  First stop, the attic:

Look, it's an attic.

Not a whole lot to see or do here.  It's unfinished and not a very usable space with the A/C unit and all of the vents, so we'll probably just leave it be.  We could potentially try to move stuff around and finish it down the road, but that would probably be expensive...it's last on our list.

The basement has a little bit more to see:

Just what I wanted...more wallpaper! (The cabinet thing isn't ours and hopefully will be gone before we move in.)

This is the main room when you come down the stairs into the basement.  It's finished, with ceiling, carpet, and...oh yes...wallpaper.  It's a decent-sized room, and while I wouldn't want to make it a bedroom or anything, it could be usable as a game room or craft workshop.  Honestly, the basement is pretty low on our priority list, so we'll probably just use it as storage and laundry for a while, but it has potential to be fixed up.

I would take down the wallpaper in this room and paint.  The wall on the right side of the photo is all wood, and it isn't particularly nice looking, so I think painting it white would brighten things up considerably.  There are quite a few built-in shelves down here, which will be nice for storage.

Blurry picture of the storage room.

 Off to one side of the main room is a little room that would be perfect for a home workshop and storage.  I'm hoping to fill this up with POWER TOOLS!

These are just screaming, "Please, Lindsey...paaaaaaaint meeeeeee..."

 Then, on the other side is the laundry room.  Look at the fabulous built-in shelves!  Again, they need some white paint to brighten things up, but this will be awesome storage.  The laundry chute also spits out into this wall unit (have I mentioned how excited I am to have a laundry chute?  I really truly am).

The washer on the right is saying hi to you.

 I am still not over the joy of having a washer and dryer in my own house that does not require the use of quarters.  I don't know if I'll ever get over that.

To the right you can see the water softener, which is old and will need to be replaced.

And then there's this...

 While looking at houses, we saw a LOT of houses with bathrooms in the basement.  I'm not really clear on why this is such a trend in Minnesota.  We saw more than one house that ONLY had a shower in the basement, and they weren't even nice showers.  But, seeing as we're currently living with only one bathroom, just the fact that we have a second toilet is a bonus.

Here's the inside of the bathroom...surprising cute for a bathroom kind of shoved into a corner of a basement.

Fixing this up isn't going to be a huge priority, but I will probably splash some paint down there eventually and hang a shower curtain and attempt to make this part of the basement look presentable.

The floor is a laminate that, while not exactly stylish, is livable for now.  The toilet has also been replaced since these photos were taken.

If all continues as planned, in three days time we'll have a key and be on our way...to a vacation out of state, but THEN we will return and start the attack.  We already have some contractors scheduled to give us quotes, and I think the first thing I'm going to do is start tearing down wallpaper.  From there...who knows.