So, our new house is obviously pretty traditional in style. While it is not actually a historic home, I do like the character and how it looks like it could have been around for hundreds of year. In these traditional colonial homes windows with grids (also called muntins) are the norm. The style stems from the old times when glass was only available in small pieces and little window panes had to be pieced together to make one big window. 

Today those grids are purely decorative and meant to complement the traditional style. The front of the house would look completely different with plain windows and lose a lot of its charm.

One thing I would never do again, is to start renovating while moving. It just made so much sense to make over the laundry room while there were no machines in it, but we only had 4 days to move and throwing a renovation into that mix was just a little bit too much. 

Anyway, it had to be done. It was started at an inconvenient time, and then we finally finished the project two weeks ago. Our first full room make-over here. The laundry room came with a very old washer and dryer. Otherwise, the room was generally gross. There were old socks and piles of lint behind the old machines. This is what it looked like after we cleaned it:

Four months later, and we’re all settled in. Surprisingly, our townhome had just the right amount of furniture and stuff to fill our new single-family home. Moving our stuff in and decorating made it immediately so much more ours. The refinished floors also helped. Here is how the house has changed so far just by us moving in. There is also a video tour at the bottom of this post to see how everything connects.

Improving the energy efficiency of a house is one project that is better done sooner than later. The initial investment can be deterring right after you just dropped a lot of dough on buying a house, but it is one of the only home improvements that will actually put money back into your pockets right away. Energy savings will start to kick in immediately and continue every month over the life of the installed measures. Since this is is our long term home, it made sense to get the home more energy efficient right away.

And the great thing is that in MD there are pretty good rebates available that you will get back from your utility after the project is done. In our case we are expecting to get roughly $2000 back in rebates. You can check here what rebates are available in your area:

Never say never, you don’t know what’s gonna happen – but whatever the future may bring, we are very very hopeful that this new crib of ours will be our forever home.

The plan had always been that our first house was a “starter home”, something to get us used to homeownership, that was low maintenance for while the kids were little, and that could build up some equity for our forever house. And it did all of that. After seven years the time had come to part with our first house. Thanks to the rising housing market and all the upgrades we installed, we were able to sell it quickly and at a good profit.

In July this year we said goodbye to our first house. The first home we bought and had made our own, where all our memories as a family were made to that point. While some of us were excited for the next adventure, we all were sad to leave this beautiful place behind. Some serious tears were shed. 

There is just something about all the memories in the home, about all the work that was put into making it perfect for our family, that made it very hard to part. Not a single surface, fixture, or piece of equipment in this house was left untouched after we were done with all renovations. It took us seven years to optimize this place to its fullest potential and going back to the very beginning in a new house was pretty rough for me. It took me about four months before I had left the old house behind enough that I could start liking the new house and write this post.

I just love taking ripping old stuff out and putting new stuff back in. Sometimes it’s just not that simple. We thought we would just be able to simply buy a bathroom vent and do a simple swap. Nope. The new ones are shaped differently and will require a bit of drywall modifications. Ugh. I. Hate. Drywall.

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