The door has closed, and a new/old one has opened.

Today, if everything goes to plan [ha!], we should have closed on our house. [I'm writing this a little in advance, so hopefully we closed.]

Today, I also left for Las Vegas.

I assure you, I am doing plenty of creative things today, but they need to stay in Vegas [it's a law.]

Instead of sharing a project for the next two days, I'm going to share pictures of our new/old house!

For many of you, this house may look familiar--at least it should look familiar. We started seriously thinking about buying a house in December 2011. After a lot of research, we narrowed in on two locations in Portland that we would like to live (based on where we work and where we play.)

Then, call it divine intervention or a happy coincidence, our church decided to sell one of its properties. This property just happened to be in the location we were looking at, had the perfect bedroom-to-bathroom ratio, and had a fantastic floor plan.

So, Ben and I had the, "well...why not?" conversation--and we submitted an offer to the church to buy the house.

Awesome things about this deal? We didn't have to get a realtor involved. Incredibly frustrating thing about this deal? Neither of us had ever sold/bought a house. So...we all learned a lot and we're finally at the point that the deal is closed and we are ready to move in.

Today and tomorrow, I'll share some 'before' pictures of the house. Some of it is in really awesome shape, most of it is stuck in 1975. But in the next year, Ben and I will share our journey to make this house 'ours.'

Here's the outside. Nice, right?
Project 1: Remove juniper jungle. 

Now you might say, hey nice staged picture! You opened the door a bit to be welcoming.
And I would say, nope. It's just broken and stuck open.
Project 2: Replace screen door. 

And this, a secret passage way into the hugest most biggest garage you have ever seen.

Alright! now we're inside.
Look at that carpet, yum.
Project 3: Replace all the flooring.

Now here we have our little problem child.
This is no place fit for Kelly Ripa's appliances--the laundry 'area' needs a face lift.
Project 4: Gut it. 

Those cabinets are nice, but they are leaving us in lieu of some open shelving.
Also leaving us--that nasty mop.

Another gratuitous shot of the laundry area.
Pay attention, because this very well might be the first finished product. 

Nice, right? OK--it's a lot nicer than the picture descriptions--I'm mainly showing you the areas we are fixing first. It's a really awesome house, it just needs some updating and a lot of paint/flooring.

Tomorrow, I'll show you our death trap.