First Week Upgrades!

I bought the house on May 25, 2016. I immediately started working and improving on it!
It's a nice sized house in a nice neighborhood with a great pool. It also needs a good bit of work to bring it up to date!

First meal after closing - Taco Bell

Alex Dyke, one of my roommates, and I started work on scraping popcorn ceiling immediately. The plan was to remove popcorn inside the entire house, sand, primer and paint before moving in, and we had four days. We got one room done. It was much more time consuming and messy than expected. We did one bedroom, and it looks alright, not amazing. You can see where the different panels of drywalls meet, but I'd rather that than popcorn. I think in the future I'll texture the ceiling, possibly throughout the entire house.

This is what it looks like now, post primer and paint. 

Cleaning dust/drywall off the closet doors

I've also replaced every light bulb inside and outside of the house with Philips daytime LEDs. They were on sale for about $1.50 a bulb at Home Depot. For some reason, the previous fixtures had painted over glass, and were hardly giving out any light at all. The new LEDs are small enough that the inside of the canister is still visible, so I'll be replacing/upgrading those fixtures sometime.

New light on the left, old light on the right

Painted glass fixture covers

The two sets of sliding doors headed to the Florida room were tough to open, and some WD40 helped that out a great deal.

I've also installed a doorbell (the house didn't have a doorbell!), which was a simple two wire install, since it was already wired for a doorbell.

I've ordered a dishwasher, a GE Stainless Steel model, with an LCD timer and water bottle washers. The rest of the kitchen has white appliances, but I'll upgrade them to stainless over time.

One of the bedrooms had a huge library shelving unit installed in the walls, and I took that out. It made the room seem so much larger.

This is gone

And I had the carpets professionally cleaned, but they still really need to be replaced -- there are still wood stains and holes in some of the carpets. I'll replace that with some wood laminate flooring sometime soon.

We also started filling in some of the critter holes (where animals are living) around the pool area with some top soil.

Later this week, I have to diagnose a plumbing issue, where the guest toilet has weak suction, and fix some duct work going to the master bedroom.

I've ordered some stemware holders and wall mounted spice racks for the kitchen, and an inflatable hot tub for the Florida room. And I'm getting the 1980s Sylvania electrical panel replaced soon as well. Many more projects to come!