Cheers

Finally it's...

    

AND IT'S DELICIOUS!!

so we decided to share :)

Photo taken by Ally at her and Sam's Bayside testing

Verdict = TWO THUMBS UP

We are LOVING our new hobby!

A Family Affair

Our blog is a little behind as most of you have probably figured out since we've been living at the condo since June 1st. But its coming down to working on the house verse blogging about the house...and we know which one trumps.

Chris and I are very family oriented and are lucky that we live close to most of our family. We are also extremely lucky that our family is as pumped about our new place and fixing it up as we are. So a condo project for us has turned into a condo project for all!

The first weekend we had a full team ready for anything!! Our goals for the weekend:
 Paint:
* Ceilings
* Medallions
* Wainscoting - and for those of you who don't know what wainscoting is (as I didn't) it's the bottom panels of the walls in our dinning room

With our project manager dishing out orders (in the most pleasant way of course) 

we were good to go!

Ceilings were broken into two tag teams:

Tag Team A - Whitney and Nicole

  

Side note this picture looks a lot like a picture of us from 2007 doing Habitat for Humanity in Springfield...guess we were destined to do home repairs together :) 

Tag Team B - Chris and Alex 

(Louisa was kind of enough to loan us her fiance while she ran wedding errands)

      

When repainting any room you always want to start with the ceiling. It allows you to be a less careful when it comes to the edges that meet the walls but it also splatters EVERYWHERE and would be a nightmare if you got it all over your freshly painted walls. **Note it is really important to put drop cloths (old sheets or painters paper) down to cover all the floors to prevent paint splatter which is a pain to try to remove from wood floors (lesson learned). 

Next steps - you want team member 1 to paint about 1- 2 inches out from where the ceiling meets the the wall (also known as cutting) this makes the rolling process easier. Then person 2 is right behind ready with the roller.

Since we had such rock star ceiling painters and Louisa joined our paining crew we were able to split the master into ceiling and crown molding painters.

    

We had Uncle Joey on Medallions and Living room Ceiling

 

and Dad and Grandy on the Wainscoting 

      

Then Jill showed up and the fun really began :)

Let the cleaning begin

The first thing we did when we got in the condo was clean clean clean. This of course you think would be quick and easy...but like everything with this condo it turned out to be more of an adventure than we planned for.  Chris' mom Jill decided to start with windows and man was that an awesome decision. Such an immediate improvement...we could finally see out of windows which probably hadn't been cleaned since the renters moved in years ago. My mom picked the bathroom to make it usable and Chris picked taking down all the shades, nails, other leftover hardware. I picked the kitchen hoping to get the cabinets cleaned quickly to move things in....quickly turned into about a combined 6 hour session and help from Jill.

Smiling in this one because I just started the cabinets

All of the cabinets were covered in a thick layer of pure cooking grease that did not just wipe away. Started with fantastic and ended with industrial goo be gone. I had to use a puddy knife to scrape it all off. It was on top, on the outside and inside of all the cabinets. After hours of cabinet cleaning Jill put the finishing touches on making the cabinets pretty and usable by adding contact paper to all the shelves and badly stained cabinet walls.

Jill's masterpiece

The importance of this post is what we discovered when the new appliances came (future post).  Chris and I bought a recirculating over the range microwave because the other side of the wall is the back hallway not outside, therefore we couldn't do an externally vented micro. No brainer right? Well apparently not. When the new appliances were installed we were told that they had incorrectly vented the previous micro as if it was an external vent which means the microwave had been filtering into the walls, cabinets and counters. SO take it from me, you want the microwave to be venting the way it should be or you're going to have a nasty mess to clean up.

Bayside Blondie

A little bit out of order but only by 1 post. The way we kept our sanity during the whole waiting process was deciding to brew our own beer!! As some of you know Chris and I are HUGE beer fans...no girlie drinks for this girl just straight craft beer. So when I got a Groupon email for an Introductory Home Beer Brewing Class at Beer & Wine Hobby I of course HAD to buy it. Chris and I went, loved it and bought our starter kit that day. We decided to do the Blonde Ale...named it Bayside Blondie...AND it was going to be ready to drink the official first weekend we would have the place. We used the instructions this time around but are looking forward to experimenting with different flavors and come up with the next Sam Adams Boston Lager :)

    

 The Home Brewing bible and all the brewing gear

       

Creating the Wort by adding the muslin bag full of grain and then the malt extract

Adding the Wort to the primary fermenter, checking the specific gravity and we're good to start the fermentation process!!

10 days later... 

 

      

Our beer reached the necessary specific gravity and we moved to the secondary fermenter

About a week later...

 We are ready to bottle!!

 Bottle Number 1

 2 weeks and counting til we get to taste our masterpiece!!

The Gameplan

April 27th was a huge day!! And as soon as we were out of the law office post closing we were on to condo stuff.  It's a good thing we started that day because reality soon kicked in and reminded us that we had 35 days to get the condo ready and move out of our current apartment.  Normally people would think 'oh a month to paint some walls and move your stuff, awesome no big deal.'  This was not going to be your typical move.

Here is our initial Phase 1 list:
DIY:
*Clean condo top to bottom- every inch no matter how small (thank you Grandy for passing this OCD down the line)
*Paint ceilings, moldings and walls of 3 bedrooms, kitchen, hallway, living room, dining room, pantry
*Sand and paint all interior doors (total count = 8 doors)
*Replace all door knob...as i said before not a single one works
*Paint and rebuild shelving in 4 closets (Chris' favorite part...Coop you better be ready)

As much as we wanted to be all Do It Yourselfers, let's be serious there are some things you should just leave to the professionals.
*Replace all appliances
*Completely renovate bathroom
*Get hardwood floors redone

Boy did we have our work cut out for us...and little did we know that when we actually started Phase 1...each of those bullets gained 5 extra sub bullets.

It's times like these I wish Tool Time was still around. I think i would appreciate the actual tools/what to do & more frequently NOT to do lessons from Tim the Tool Man Taylor and Al Borland.

 Just in case you were curious what the old gang is up to:
ABC News Entertainment Special
Fox News Entertainment Special

The Waiting Game

Buying a house is like applying to college. First you have to get pre-approved for a loan, similar to taking and getting your SAT score. You get reviewed based on your W2's, paychecks, employment history and your credit score. These items determine your pre-approval amount and set the bar for the price of house/condo you can afford.  Then when you find the house/condo you like you put in an offer and hope for the best. Sometimes your offer gets rejected, sometimes you get put on a waitlist as a backup offer and then that one time you get accepted into your dream school or in this case house.

 Filling out the offer application with our All Star Realtor

Last signature - Asking Chris if he's really ready to sign away his life with me :)

The time waiting for the seller to get back to us was the LONGEST hour of our lives. We all just sat or paced in my parents kitchen in silence anxiously waiting for my mom's phone to ring...and then it did and we all held our breath.  My mom is not known for her poker face but man she kept the straightest face of her life.  We for sure thought we had lost it but then she announced WE GOT THE CONDO!!!! We pretty much stalked our condo waiting for the loan to be finalized.

        

And then FINALLY it was closing day!!

 To celebrate, Chris got me this...I'm the luckiest girl in the world

       

WELCOME TO BAYSIDE

 

The lady who made it happen!!