In the beginning

Okay - I'm just going to quickly start from the beginning.

My darling husband and I are the type who say:

"Lets think about looking for a house next year" Then start looking that month

-or -

"Lets look for a long time, we don't want to settle on something to soon" Then look at five places and choose the 2nd one we saw.

The thing about our place is the location. It is on the third floor of a three family house, just outside of the historic district (as if everything weren't historic) and a 10 minute walk from downtown and hubby's work. I told him "If this is even semi-livable I want it."

Fateful words.

It WAS semi-livable when we bought it.

Here's a picture of the outside...





















So we bought the condo on August 25th, 2004 (which was one day after our soon be be cat was born...awwww...). We didn't do much on it for a few months. Hum...I don't remember why, perhaps it was because it was SOOO darn hot!! (For those of you from the west, the humidity is a killer!) We had a friend come visit us the end of September, we hadn't done anything on our house by that point (expect put paint swatches on the wall and stare at them). After she left I tore up the carpet in the Living room.
















We were pretty disappointed to see that sometime in the past 80 years someone had plunge cut into the floor, probably to do wiring on the second floor. That, combined with the huge gash in the floor where a wall used to be made it pretty impossible to reuse the existing floor. The linoneum that was under the carpet came up really easy in that room, ironicaly. In later rooms (the bedroom in particular) where the floor was in good condition the lino is stuck tight.