The Stevens Family

Well, the bank is coming on Tuesday so we can get the ball rolling on turning our Construction Loan into a Mortgage. For those of you who don't know, if you buy a house that you plan on renovating before you actually live there, you can usually get a Construction Loan. A Construction Loan is the same type of loan people get when they're building a new home, basically you are approved of a certain amount of credit, usually a bit below what the appraised value of the home will be once it is finished. From there, you use a checking account out of the Construction Loan, and the loan goes up as you write checks. Once the construction is finished, you turn your loan into a mortgage and start making your typical mortgage payments. We've had our house for fifteen months now, and still have not had to make one mortgage payment. Does that make any sense at all? I only write about this because it seems like a lot of people have never heard of this, and it keeps them from buying "fixer uppers."
That being said, we've really got to get moving this weekend. The bank is going to want to see a house that will bring them back the amount of the loan should they ever have to sell it (Lord help us that that won't happen!). Our bank is very small town and personable, so they won't be hard on us or anything, but I still want it to look as nice as possible. So, here is the list of things that should be done by next Tuesday:

• Sand, primer, and paint the upstairs bathroom, sitting room (I don't know if it counts as a sitting room, but that's what I'm going to call it from now on!) and the downstairs bathroom. This will give us two more rooms that are almost completed!
• Primer and paint the woodwork in both bathrooms, and sitting room outside of upstairs bath.
• Hang medicine cabinets in both bathrooms.
• Get as much woodwork put up as possible. This is a pretty big job, but it needs to be done sooner or later.
• Finish putting away the Christmas stuff. Yeah, I'm a bit late getting there. But it's really hard to gather it all up when you've got a one year old stashing half the stuff in with his toys! We need to take the Christmas tree to the landfill, I'm sure our neighbors love seeing it laying out on our front porch.
• Something that really doesn't "need" to be done but I'd like it to be done: finish painting the chairs that will go in said sitting room, and finish painting the other little pieces of furniture that will go in the upstairs bath. I know my mom will scoff at me wanting to do those things because they aren't all that important...It'll just make it feel more lived in.
• Clean up the yard, we have two sizable piles of demolition stuff that we need to get rid of. But, with the storm coming, who knows if we'll be able to tackle it this weekend.
• And of course, the obvious cleaning stuff. This probably won't happen until Monday, because if I do it now, I'll have to do it all over again after a weekend of working on the house. The work makes such a mess.

So, that's that. Wish us luck! Hopefully I'll be reporting back this weekend with positive results and pretty pictures...hopefully...