Wow, I can't believe my last post was almost 4 months ago! I need to update a little more frequently!.

Things are going great out here in Portland. We've gotten to know the area pretty well and we even bought a house! We had a hard time finding http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifthe right place, and we actually had 3 failed inspections and each time the house got taken off the market. But we finally found the right house and closed at the end of September. It's been a rental for a long long time and needs a lot of work. But the house is really great, and it's in a fantastic location. We're just a few blocks from Mt. Tabor Park and just down the street from one of the best neighborhood shopping areas in Portland - lots of good food and fun stores. I just realized I don't have a picture of the outside, so some inside pictures will have to do for the time being.

This is the dining half of the front room:


and this is the living room half. That's a wood burning fireplace!


Off the front room is a wide hallway leading to 2 bedrooms, a bathroom and a staircase that leads to the second floor (for some reason blogger keeps flipping my pictures over, so lean right...):


Here is one of the bedrooms. We were very excited to pull back the carpet and find hardwood floors - in great shape too!


Next up is the bathroom. It has the original honeycombed floor tiles which are really cool and we definitely plan on keeping them (again, lean right).


Upstairs is an unfinished attic space that we plan on making into a master suite.


Everything really looks better in the pictures than it does in person. All the windows are painted shut and the walls are pretty damaged. But the floor are gorgeous and will be even better after we get them refinished.

Our first project is the kitchen. Since the house was used as a rental for so long, the kitchen has none of its original charm left and we've decided to gut it and start over. Our goal is to be done an moved in about a month from now. Here are some before pictures.

To get from the dining room to the kitchen you have to go through some saloon doors...


And here is the kitchen in all it's rental cabinets, ancient appliances glory:







So this weekend Brian and I dove in a started the demo process. We did save the cabinets and are going to either sell them or donate them to a build it again center. First the cabinets came out:



Brian had to really get in there to get some of the screws out. But Diesel was able to find him!



Then we started to rip out the old hood that was over the stove and refrigerator. It really made the room feel closed in.



And here is the end product after our weekend of demo:










Clearly the walls were not in good shape behind the cabinets! We're going update the electrical, plumbing and gas line (with help from the appropriate professionals!) before we fix the parts of the walls that will be showing when we're done.

My big job today was ripping out the thousands of staples that they used to attach the plywood to the original floors. Our reward? Some pretty decent looking softwoods. We'll know more once we get the rest of the subfloor up.




At the end of the day, we were tired. Especially Diesel: