The North Carolina Casa

I guess I should have posted these pics after the post of our "adventure" to get to NC! I'm still trying to figure this blog thing out...that's another reason why my pictures aren't always arranged in the best order. Anyway, here is our first house we bought together. We were glad to have finally decided on a house. Jeremy had gone out several times with our realtor looking at lots of houses and narrowing down areas before I flew out for a weekend. We had a list of about 100 house to look at in 2 days. We hit it hard Friday and Saturday checking out houses North of Charlotte and South of Charlotte...narrowing it to our top 10 and looking at those hosues again on Sunday. I was scheduled to fly home Sunday night, but ended up changing plans and staying until Monday afternoon because we needed another day (or 10). Monday we looked at our top 3 houses and then went to lunch with our realtor to make an offer on one of them. Then Jeremy took me to the airport and I flew back to Utah to wait and see if we got the house. Of course it wasn't that easy...they counter offered, we counter-counter offered, they counter-counter-coutner offered and I said "we quit, you can keep your house!" So we decided to move on to the next house we liked and Jer & the realtor wrote up a new offer and we ended up getting a better/bigger house. The only reason this house was our second choice was because it was bigger than we really needed and more money, but we liked it the mostest.

This was our main eating area in the kitchen. One of my criteria when we were looking at houses was to have silver fixtures and door knobs etc (because I don't like gold) but it was rare to find a house without gold. So Jeremy surprised me by switching out all the door knobs and hinges since he was living in the house a few weeks before we got married and I moved there. We changed out all the light fixtures from gold to silver as we fixed up the house. Notice the chairs...I refinished the cushions with different material (there is a before pic somewhere below).


This is a picture of the guest bedroom. We didn't have many guests, but a few lucky people got to stay in the room. My mom and dad were the very first visitors we had. They came to see us after we had been there about 2 months because my mom was going to have a knee replacement and they wanted to get there before that. We hadn't lived there long enough to know all the "main attractions" and places to go, but we knew where the Cheese Cake Factory was and that's all that mattered! We had fun tending Macey and Emma while Junior and Alicia went on a vacation...they stayed a day before they left their kids with us and stayed a few days when they came home from their trip. Then Anthony and Courtney (Jeremy's half brother and his wife) came to visit us from Alabama. We had fun hanging out with them and enjoyed going mountain biking with them. Jeremy's dad was in SC on business for several weeks and we enjoyed having him drive up to visit us a few times. I would make dinner and we got to spend time with him before he had to drive back to his hotel.

This is our master bathroom. It was nice and big. We finished off the LARGE mirror and framed it with decorative wood.

Our master bedroom

The living room was open to the dining room and was to the left of when you enter in the house. We enjoyed the nice gas fireplace on cold evenings.

Jeremy unpacking boxes and loading up our kitchen! We loved our big kitchen and cabinet space...its sad to say we still didn't have enough room! Don't worry, that hideous wallpaper boarder was one of the first things to go.

Here are the chair cushions I recovered...It was my first attempt at doing this, but I figured "how hard can it be? A little mateiral, a staple gun, and there you go." I was happy with how they turned out. This was a table and chair set Jeremy had before we were married...we compromised and came to the conclusion that we could keep the chairs and table IF I could recover them with material that looked good and matched other things better :)

Adios ugly wallpaper boarder! I hope to never tackle this project again. Taking down wallpaper is bad enough, but when its 10 feet up in the sky and you have to move a ladder every 5 minutes to get to the next spot, it makes for a difficult project to do without swearing :) I was really gung ho about getting the house all fixed up how I wanted it. While Jer was at work everyday I was working at home, taking down wallpaper, scrubbing walls, painting every room in the house (except the bonus room & dining room wall), and hanging pictures & shelves! Nobody could belive the whole house was put together and newly painted within the first 2 weeks we were there.

Disaster hit on 2/1/2007 when NC was hit by a enormous snow storm! Charlotte shut down...they pretty much declared it a catastrophe...businesses were closed, Jeremy didn't have to go to work, schools were closed, nobody dared go outside. So, I'm being slightly sarcastic because as you can tell by our pictures I think it would be pushing it to say we got 1" of snow. I had to laugh at the situation since I can remember maybe 2 or 3 snow days when I was growing up and school got cancelled.