What style is our new house?

So, I was reading the back posts at NewlyWoodwards.com and she posed an interesting question. What style is my house? I have been wondering that exact same thing. From the front our house looks like a cute, little cottage or something.

But from the side it is monstrous-looking, almost Victorian.

It was built around 1951-1953 and is full of character. Do all houses have to have a style? Is it possible to have a freak house that does not fit into a category?

We are buying the house from the grandchildren of the original owners. Apparently, according to some friends who know the area, the woman who lived in the house until recently was incredibly strange. The house sits fairly close to a busy two-lane road. The speed limit is 25mph, but most people do at least 50mph. Supposedly, to dissuade people from driving so fast, she would put trash in the road and hang roadkill(I hope it was roadkill) from the trees lining the road. Then, in October, she died suddenly. At the age of 72. Active people rarely die suddenly at the age of 72. What if she died in the house? What if she, like, fell down the stairs trying to do laundry and she thinks it is the houses fault that she died? What if my new house is haunted?!?!

Okay, so my fiance does not believe in ghosts, but I totally do. He also doesn't believe in vampires, werewolves(were-anything, for that matter), possession, etc. I totally do. I think anything is possible. I am not a math/science person, so even "scientifically explainable" things seem as though they could be supernatural. What about you guys? Do you believe in the supernatural or do you think the unexplainable is completely the opposite?

Closing

We close on our house on Thursday. It has been such a long time since we saw it and put the offer in, I barely remember what it looks like. I was hoping to have some ideas in place before we had to start moving our stuff in, but I didn't take any exact measurements, so I don't know where everything is going to fit! I know it will, this house is twice the size of the one we are in now.
I think I start to get an idea about where things will go, but then I remember another piece of furniture... Should I make a list of all the big pieces we have, what I want to keep, then what rooms they might go in? Or should I just wait until we start moving stuff in and drive the heavy lifters crazy?
I took advantage of the Glidden free paint giveaway that Katie announced on Friday, so I have to wait and see what the colors I picked will actually looked like in person. Problem is, I wanted to get some painting done before we move too much stuff in and the Glidden people are saying the paint will take 3-4 weeks to arrive.... Hmmm.
It just seems like there is going to be so much to do and I know we have the rest of our lives to get it done, but I am all about instant gratification. I want it all done now! Grr. And I want somebody to make the paint color decisions for me. My family is not all about redecorating every few years, so a paint decision seems very final to me. I know it's not, especially after ready about G&D repainting the kitchen four times! I would very much like to paint the ceilings and the radiators with a cream tone instead of a white, but I am worried that I will pick something that will not match all of the wall tones. Okay, now I am whining... Nevermind. It will all be great! I just need to grown some patience.

Brilliant...

So I was reading(lurking) {freckles chick}'s blog and clicked a link to this website. They have a Look for Less section that is brilliant. You know sometimes your reading a mag and they have those sections where they show you a beautiful pair of $1000 "splurge" shoes, then go "here's a steal!" and show you a really shitty, $20 payless version? Well, this is the total opposite. The "steals" are just a fab, sometimes better, than the original. And while they still may not be thrift store budget, they are considerably more reasonable.

I am drooling all over my desk for this piece:

Only $187.78 with discounts here. The discount is apparently automatic at checkout.

I know this piece is a little questionable by itself, but you have to put it in context. My fiance's family is from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, where the favorite pastimes are high school football and hunting. Now he is not a hunter, thank god, but the rest of his family lives for it. They shoot things from their front porch. Seriously. His 8 year old nephew has already been inducted and wants to kill anything that moves. It's disturbing to say the least. Anyway, his parents had a pair of mounted steer horns in their basement and they were going to get rid of them, but they belonged to his grandfather and I couldn't let them toss 'em. So, we have steer horns in our living room above the arched doorway to the dining room. Classy, right?

It gets better. The only time Mr. ever went hunting, when he was 15, he killed a yearling. His father had the horns mounted. Of course, I couldn't allow these to languish in their basement either, so they are mounted on the opoosite wall of the living room above his chair.

THEN Mr. found a shed antler, this is when they fall off naturally, at on of his work sites and, of course, brought it home. So it lives on an antique side table in the dining room.

So, in conclusion, I think this mirror will really tie together all the random dead stuff in our house. And seeing how all of it is a.) an antique, b.) a replica, or c.) fell off on its own, I don't feel bad when looking at it. Plus, my couch is leather so, really, where do you draw the line?

Bee Sting?

This is what happens when your poor puppy pooch gets stung by a bee...

Isn't that the most awful thing? My poor baby. It was 15 min. after the vet closed last Sat., so I called my mom, who's next door neighbor works for the Humane Society. She told me to give her two Benadryl and listen for breathing problems. I called my fiance, who was out at the bike shop, he told me to put baking soda and water on it. I did both, then she puked up the pills, so I had to take her to the emergency clinic. Luckily Veterinary Specialty Services is about 1/2 mile away, so we got there in no time. They gave her a shot, checked her vitals, and we were good to go. $105 poorer.
Then I came last Monday and the whole right side of her face was swollen! Argh! Mr. had come and gone, letting her out and back in, not noticing(although there was probably nothing to see when he left). So I gave her two more Benadryl and the swelling went down, yay!!

Arg.

Got an email from my realtor yesterday evening saying the survey company cannot survey the property. The woman at the survey company said our deed is "ugly and bad" and the deeds around us are also "ugly and bad". What the hell is that supposed to mean? How can they sell a house where the deed is mucky? We are supposed to close in a week and a half and now they can't survey our property. Lovely, no?

Impatience...

We don't close on our new house for two more weeks. It is so frustrating to know that you have so much work and fiscal hemorrhaging ahead, but to not be able to do anything about it. I want the Decor fairies to visit and make my house as beautiful as John and Sherry's or FC's. I know it doesn't happen immediately, but it is hard leaving a perfectly well decorated home to have to start all over. To make matters more complicated(in my head, at least), the new house is a totally different style and gender than our current house. Our house now is a small, white, 40's bungalow with stained glass and strong masculine bones. Our new house is an over sized, pink, 50's shingle and stone (I don't know what style) with a frilly, pastel quartz fireplace and it is definitely feminine, albeit a big-boned female. We don't have enough furniture to fill it and we don't have money to buy more.
Which, actually, wasn't really a problem with the first house. I think we paid money for like 4 furnishings in the entire house. The rest are hand-me-down and antiques(also hand-me-down, actually). Mr. picked out a chair for our living room all by himself. Now I know what you're thinking, but you'd be wrong. The chair is covered in flowered embroidery fabric. This chair has beautiful carvings in the wood surround, but it is the bane of my existence. What goes with a pastel flowered-y arm chair? It works now because the green of the leaves and stems coordinates with our walls, painted Sweet Annie by Olympic, which is a deep olive green. But this color paint will not coordinate in out new home. Plus I really prefer simple fabrics on furniture.
I bought our couch after a year of us watching T.V. on the floor or in separate chairs with the Christmas money my grandmother gave me. I was supposed to invest it. I consider brown leather sofa with brass studs an investment. Don't you?
Tell me... What pieces of furniture do you consider investments? Anything your significant other has brought home that you dread decorating around?

No theme for me

Every successful blog seems to have a theme. A very specific theme. Shoes, home improvement, clothes, dogs... Well I am much too ADD to focus on a theme. I like waaaay too many different things equally. As you could tell by yesterdays post, we just bought a house. So home improvement, decorating, and general house obsessing are going to be unavoidable. And shoes.... Mmmm shoes... I love shoes... Our new house has an "attic" room in the upstairs 1/2 story because there is really no hidden storage in the house, the basement is finished. But instead of using this much needed area for storage (the horror), I am turning it into a shoe closet. Complete with pink walls, white shelving and little dainty chandeliers. Ah, heaven. I also have a dog. And she is like my child. I am obsessed with every little thing she does. She's even cute when she rolls in dead stuff. How can you not love this face?



When my fiance takes her with him to the bike shop he spends time at, she melts hardened bikers into cooing puddles on the floor. Apparently, she had some crazy regular so smitten he was rolling around on the floor with her. Picture that, if you can... 50 yr. old "scary" tattooed biker man prone on the floor making out with a 35 lb. mini pittie. I wish I could have seen it.

So anyway, my point to this rambling is I will not succumb to the pressures of themed blog success. I will spew out whatever randomness enters my brain and focuses my thoughts each day...

Our New Home

After a year and a half(!) of looking for a house Mr. and I can both agree on (and afford), we finally found the perfect house. A story-and-a-half stone and pink shingle 1953 'bungalow'. Pink shingles! Does it get any better than that?

We had been to see so many houses. We only put offers on two others.

One would have been perfect, right by my parents, an acre of land, a tiny swimming pool, a tiny pool house, and a two bay, double-length garage for Mr. It was ab-fab! We filled out the paperwork that day, on-the-spot, then found out there were six other offers on the house. Boo-hoo...

The 2nd offer we put in was for a 1963 rambling ranch that had never been updated. It had no internally accessible basement, only a cellar; wall-to-wall shag hiding beautiful peg-and-plank flooring; and what our realtor liked to call "the Elks Lodge", a rec room that was probably 26 x 26, with wood-look linoleum, dark-stained wood panelled walls, a wet bar, and a pass-through from the kitchen(which you could actually open and close). Crazy. But it needed to be hooked up to the city sewer system and was going to end up costing an easy 30 grand. Argh. Which was really fine with me because what do you do with 1,900 sq.ft. and only 5 rooms? Total. 2 bedrooms, the living room(which had no place to put a couch), a kitchen, and the "bar" room. Plus, a bath and a half. AND, the half bath was blue, all blue. Blue toilet, blue sink, blue tile walls.... Like peeing in an ice cube.

I knew the day I saw it online that the pink house was the house for us. We had an appointment that evening to re-see a house that I loved, but Mr. hated (he would have had to build a garage). I saw this one while I was trolling the real estate pages and I fell in love. I called our agent (the lovely and patient Mrs. Nancy Dumeyer) and cancelled the appointment we had in favor of seeing this one. As soon as I pulled up to it, I knew. People always say a house is like a wedding dress, when you see it you just know. That was the argument I kept getting from Himself whenever I liked a house and he didn't. Well, this one we both just knew. This is it, our house...

Of course this one has issues as well. The fabu pink shingles are asbestos, as is the plumbing insulation and the basement floors. It has (had) active termites and carpenter ants, radon, leaky bathroom plumbing, a failed septic system, and needs part of a new roof, but check out this fireplace...(see the black thing on the wall? Apparently that is to keep your couch from scuffing your walls.)

Fabulous, right? Totally makes up for all the elbow grease that will need to go into making our home our own. Well it's hard to tell from this stolen MLS pic, but that fireplace is made from quartz. Pink, purple, and grey quartz and bright yellow sulphur chucks... Here is a closer shot.

Crazy, right? See the date on the close-up? That is when we put the offer in, it was accepted the next day and we were scheduled to close on June 4th. Then we had our inspection. We found out about all the work the house needed, but we weren't willing to give it up, so we asked them to fix all of the about mentioned items. And they agreed! For a higher asking price. So we countered their counter and once again they accepted. Weeks had gone by at this point, so by the time they accepted the countered counter offer, we had to extend the closing date! Now it's only two weeks away and they haven't started the county sewer hook up(!) or the roofing project(!!). Plus, the day we finally do close, we can't even savor our new home, because that is the same night as the Willie Nelson concert!! Yee-Haw!