The best laid plans...

Below is the email everyone got about the plans for our house.

Jesse and I have left the beach and bought our first house. We closed escrow last Thursday, March 26th. It's been a long and crazy process - it was a short sale - but we had a great team of pros behind us to shepherd us through.

The house is 820 square feet, stucco exterior, two bedrooms, one bathroom, with an attached single car garage. It sits on a canyon in a beautiful little neighborhood. It's located in City Heights (in the city of San Diego), which is an up-and-coming area with a TON of character.

The house itself is a fixer-upper. It's got a solid foundation, new windows and a new roof...other than that, it needs work. It doesn't have a kitchen yet, but our appliances arrive on Tuesday and we'll hopefully get our permits and be able to start work on the new layout of the kitchen and ordering new cabinets next week! A friend of ours who is a general contractor came over yesterday to help us firm up our plans and to give us a reality check about how much we should take on at once :) Luckily, there's a Home Depot just a couple of miles away!! (We've already made several trips...)

Here's all of the things we're planning for it:

Kitchen (new everything, move one wall, take out another)
Entire Interior (paint, flooring in bath/kitchen/dining, window treatments, etc.)
Bathroom (move a wall to make it bigger, move toilet and sink, new everything)
Master bedroom (make a new closet by expanding into the living room a few feet - creating a linen closet in the process)
Second bedroom (small addition behind garage to accommodate a new closet, other part of addition will be laundry room accessible from the garage)
Deck (build deck out into the canyon)
Exterior (patch stucco, new flashing for foundation, paint, trim, new front door)
Landscape (remove grass/weeds in front yard, replace with drought resistant plants and ground cover)
Garage (insulate, Sheetrock, add organizational elements)

It's pretty ambitious but don't worry - we're taking it step by step. We'll be doing bits and pieces with breaks in between each of them so we're not always living with drywall dust and debris.

Also, once the kitchen is in, we should be able to accommodate guests! Preference for the next year or so will go to anyone who brings tools with them :) As the crow flies, we're about nine miles from Pacific Beach...as the car drives, it's more like 14.

Here's a slightly older version of our plans -- we've changed just a couple of things since this draft.