Welcome to our home

Jen and I are now home owners. This picture was taken the day we closed on the house (July 31, 2008). I wish I had a pitchfork for the picture, but alas.

We loved living in the city, but we really love Libertyville, and our house (which we think we got for a great price). Based on what some of the other houses are going for in the neighborhood, we think we can safely spend about 100k on improvements. That's not counting furniture, artwork, or anything that wouldn't stay with the house if we decide to move.

I am pretty new to blogging, so I'm not sure if this is going to work the way I want. Basically, I want to blog about a few different kinds of things. Home Improvement is one of them. I'm sure I'd also like to blog about Vacations and Family Events as well. I'm going to try to use Labels to handle the breakdown, but we'll see how that goes.

I probably won't be posting many Family Events entries any time soon. It'll likely be a heavy dose of Home Improvement, and some long-overdue Vacation posts. Someday, the Family Events will start to occur, which may mean the demise of Home Improvement and Vacation posts, but I don't want to worry about that now.

Consider this post a mix of a Home Improvement post and a general Welcome to the blog.

On the Welcome side, well thanks for reading.

On the Home Improvement side, this is the "before" picture for the outside of the house. The outside picture, besides the potential for a few color changes and me hopefully being thinner, will look basically the same. We don't plan on doing anything to the outside of the house besides possibly removing those shudders or painting them a better color. There's a slight chance we'll be putting similar ones on the other windows, but I doubt it.