Our New House

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Well, I announced last week that we have decided to move to South Dakota and I thought it would be a great time to show off our new (Uh-hum!) place.

My husband has always dreamed of owning some land, so we looked for acreages in the area and found the most beautiful lot. It was a rolling 5.1 acres, covered in trees, wildlife, and a nice sized stocked fishing pond. Sounds great, right? Well, the only problem is the house. The house on the lot was built in the 1970s and still looks like it's in the 1970s. For the last three months we have been thinking of buying this property and finally were able to negotiate the price down to basically the value of the land.

Now as you can tell from my wording, we are not a fan of the house. In addition to the bad roof and bad decks, the whole house has a really choppy layout and each room is very closed in. There is only one bathroom for the three bedrooms on the main floor and it is very outdated and small. On top of all that, I am scared of the basement. It's dark and gross down there! It has low ceilings and smells like mildew (not to mention the spiders and dead mice!!) We have brought in a few contractors to find out the cost of a major remodel, but due to the low ceilings in the basement and the strange utility layout, we found out that to cost to remodel the home would basically be more than to build a new one and take a longer time. So our plan is to live in this house for a few years, until we can pay it off, and then build our own custom home. I know I make the house sound horrible, but it's really not that bad, it's just not what we want to live in for the rest of our lives.

Without further ado, here is the new place:

A very strange entryway don't you think?


This awesome 70s fo-stone wall, wood paneling, and shiny brass lighting.


Our somewhat fireplace


View of the dining room and the windows overlooking the pond


Looking from the dining room into the very small kitchen. (Anyone have any ideas on a cheap counter top? I would love to extend the counter top to make a bar.)


The very small kitchen.

The master bedroom. It's very small but has a deck looking over the pond, which is nice.

The only full bathroom on the main floor. (Don't you love the lights?!)


Ok, whoever thought of a brown bathtub?? At least we have one I guess. It's the only working shower in the house!


The stairs to the scary basement...I am not going to show you that because I plan on never going down there unless there is a tornado.


And the whole reason we bought this place, the yard. This is a view from the street (aka dirt road). I pieced this together from a few photos.

Shoveling snow should be fun this winter with this long drive.

A view of the pond from the deck off the living room
The east side of the water

The boat dock and west side of the water. See the rings in the water? There are frogs and fish everywhere!
And hopefully my solitary confinement bench until we can build a nicer one :)
Anyways, that's the new place (click here if you would like to see all the photos). I could have put up about a million photos of the yard, but you get the idea. There is a lot of work to be done on the place. My mission this last week and next week will be cleaning up the place, spraying for insects, and baiting mice. Luckily, I haven't found anymore mice in the house other than a dead one, so I am just thinking he might have been a lone ranger in the house and expected because the house is in the country and was empty for two years.

I plan to paint a little to make the house feel more homey. Even though I am not impressed by the place, it's not really that terrible of place to live. We plan to really work on the yard for the next few years. We would like to add a fire pit, garden, stairs down to the pond, and kill all the millions of dandelions in the yard. Let's just say, even though we won't be doing much to the inside, we still have a ton of work to do on the outside!

~Beth