New House

Well we finally moved in to our new house about a month ago. We have been so busy that we are just now getting a chance to put it on the blog. Thanks to everyone who helped us move, especially Zack (Josh's brother), who came up and helped move the majority of our things. When we moved in we left a lot of our stuff in the garage because we knew we would start renovations soon. We wanted to work around as little stuff as possible. We lived in the 1980's decor for about a week before we started with the renovations. We (mainly Josh) have been extremely busy the past 3 weeks working on the house. What we've done so far:

• Dishwasher installed--there wasn't a dishwasher, so we had to do electrical, plumbing, and cabinetry work to get it installed.
• New sliding back door installed--we had to take out a fake fireplace, remove 2 windows, and tear down a wall to put the door in.
• All wallpaper and paneling removed--this was a big task. There was paneling (bottom part of the wall) and wallpaper (and border) on every wall in the house. Some of the wallpapers came down easily, others with a little bit of work, and one room the wallpaper wouldn't come down at all. We also had to take down all of the baseboards.
• Sheetrock patching and texturing--since all the walls had wallpaper on them they weren't finished for painting. We hired some guys to fix the sheetrock where the wallpaper messed some of it up and texture the walls so we could paint.
• Painting--the whole house
• New flooring in the kitchen

We still have a lot left to do: finish the flooring in the rest of the house, update the countertops and update the kitchen, put up new trim, new lights, and lots of other small stuff. But the end is in sight, hopefully just 2-3 more weeks and we will be done with the major house stuff.  Then we get to start on fixing up the farm which could take a year or two. Hopefully we will get more time to put more updates up on our progress.

We are really excited about our new place and what the future holds for us here. We tell everyone that this is our last house. In reality that is probably not true but we do plan on staying here a long time, hopefully at least until the girls (and if we have other kids) leave home. It is going to take a lot of work to get this place fixed how we want it and finances may be tight for a while but it is worth it. And with 20 acres we can do a lot more farming which we are excited about. Our address is Prairie Grove and we are in Prairie Grove Schools which we are happy about.  We have always liked Prairie Grove and have always said if we lived in a small town in NWA it would be the one we would want. We can't wait to see how our lives unfold here at our new home.