Well, it’s official; we are now happily (and with HUGE relief) ensconced in our new home, our very first house! I was honestly starting to doubt we would ever see this day come about, as for years we have watched home values around our once-dumpy (and fairly scary) neighbourhood climb steadily into the stratosphere due to a sustained overheated housing market (THANKS A LOT, HIPSTERS), while the purchasing power of our dollar became steadily weaker. But we’re here now, we’re doing the unpacking-forever thing, and we are thrilled!

And exhausted.

On the morning of our move (and most of the night before…I didn’t get much sleep from the stress and excitement and uncertainty of it all), I had a series of contemplative thoughts ranging back over the last near-eleven years of being together with The Hubster, and our decade of living together in rental apartments. One of these thoughts being the inevitable mental calculation of just how much we have spent, individually and together, on rent that could have been put towards a mortgage, and knowing that that rental money could have bought us this house probably twice over…urgh…whatcha gonna do…

Another thought was wondering how easily we were going to settle into being homeowners, knowing that we are pretty much responsible financially for anything that breaks (though we are covered by the property management company if it’s on the outside of the house, like the roof). If the faucet goes “poink! SPEW!!!!”, we have nobody to call but a plumber on our own dime. If the furnace goes “BOOM! *deadsilence*”, we’d best get an HVAC tech here before we either freeze or fry to death. Hmmm. Scary stuff, all this Adulting.

The third, and most pleasant thought that ran constantly through my mind was both scary but kind of exciting too, realizing that, never mind the things that could go wrong, what about the fact that we can DO VIRTUALLY ANYTHING WE WANT to this house because IT BELONGS TO US?!?

Bonkers to give us that kind of power, letmetellyou.

Well, 7 weeks in, and I can happily state that we are loving it all.

Even when we (thought we) heard a dripping sound in the dining room, we knew we could fix it. (It turned out to be a ticking noise in the stackpipe that the drywall was built too tightly against. Yay.).

When we did a thorough inspection of the downstairs bathroom and pronounced the disturbing Cherub border and fake-Venetian-Plaster-on-a-budget décor “hideous”, we just started ripping off the ridiculous wallpaper and bought some paint in anticipation of making it our own style.

We’ve looked through colour catalogues and mused over paint chips until our eyes crossed (ok, that was George…I could have done it all day!), then we bought paint samples for different rooms, and painted big square blotches of colour right in the middle of the wall, to see if we liked it enough in both daytime and night-time light to live with it for a while.

This sort of power is sheer lunacy, my friends. It’s so much fun, it should be illegal.

So, anyway…this is a bit of a long-winded post to say I apologise for my lack of bloggery lately, but I’ve been going B-A-N-A-N-A-S getting this house juuust the way we like it. Obviously still a work in progress.

However, in more relevant news, I *have* been cooking and baking this week in my enormous and awesome kitchen(!!), and I will upload recipes and photos to prove it! Watch this space for more posts soon, and thanks for putting up with me in all my frazzled blogginess. MWAH!