hello titus: Our First House

Wednesday, February 1

Our First House

I wrote back in this post more about having our offer accepted on a house in Simpsonville, which happened to fall on Josh's birthday! The next month consisted of trips back and forth between Columbia and Simpsonville, seeing the house, filling out paper work and eventually closing on the house! We were so blessed to have everything go so smoothly with the closing. The sellers were eager to sell (the house had been empty for several months) and so the process went a little faster than normal. We closed on December 19th, just in time for Christmas. And the best news came with the appraisal. Our house appraised $20,000 over our purchase price.

Signing papers!

There were people under contract with our house just before us that walked away just before closing. Never a great sign. But we soon realized why they backed out. In the master bedroom, just above the separation between the dining room and living room downstairs, there was a significant squeak in the floor and upon further inspection, a pretty deep sag. We think that the previous owners removed a load bearing wall between the two rooms without realizing. Our guess was that the ceiling dropped a couple inches as soon as they knocked the wall out.

Thank goodness Josh and his brother Morgan are handy and knew how to fix the problem without hiring anyone to help. As soon as we closed on the house, they turned it into a construction zone and started the structural work. They took a jack and jacked the ceiling up where it was sagging. They jacked it up just shy of 3 inches. once they had it in the right place, they ran 2x10s across to create a header and 2x4s down the sides to frame the whole wall out. They finished it with trim and casing.

Once the big construction was complete, it was on to painting. We had colors picked out for every single room in the house. It was a big job, but the colors in the house were awful and we knew we wanted the whole thing repainted. And there really isn't a better time to paint than before you've actually moved in.

We didn't get all the painting finished before we moved in, but we did get some of the rooms upstairs done so we could get some stuff in the house. Josh's parents helped us move all of our things from Columbia, load up the garage here in Simpsonville and even move things into the house and upstairs. We were so thankful for all the help we got with the house and the move.

First family photo in our house!

The weekend we moved in, Josh's parents stayed a couple days and even helped us clean the whole house. We really couldn't have done it all without them. They were such a huge help!

The house has been a slow, steady project and we are still working on little things throughout the house, but that first couple months were definitely the hardest and we had the most projects to tackle!