Moving Day!

The day has finally come...moving day!! It is hard to believe that we left Texas 6 months ago (on August 1st) and are just moving into our home in San Diego on February 4th.  Almost 6 months to the day!!  After living with my parents for 2 months and in a 2 bedroom condo for the past 4 months we are definitely excited to have some space, see our things again that have been in storage for the past 6 months and just start to get settled in our new life here.  We actually closed on our home on January 20th but we had contractors in for the next two weeks doing some pretty serious renovations before we moved in.  The biggest thing that we did was to knock down a wall between the family room and dining room.  The wall was covered in mirrors on one side and really made the house feel closed off so we are so glad we made this change.  We also knocked down a bizarre half closet in Joseph's room, extended the master bedroom closet about 2 feet deep, had a new railing/banister put in, painted the entire home and a few other smaller scale projects, like changing all of the door knobs since they were all mismatched, changing a lot of the lights since they reminded us of an 80's dance party and getting the garage floor epoxied (Rich's treat to himself!)  Our list of things to do still seems like a mile long with the pool needing to be resurfaced, fixing/extending the fence and landscaping the front yard- Rich is convinced that we just bought a money pit but we are happy to be here and look forward to really getting settled in.  

I can't wait to do a before/after blog post but I'm not quite ready to post the after pictures yet so that will have to wait a while longer.  

Here are some pictures of the work in progress though...

The wall that was knocked down was right where you see the wires hanging-there was just a small door on the right side to get through.  Our long term/save all of our change project is to knock down the wall with the fireplace in this picture and make that an island to open up the kitchen even more...one of these days!  

View from the side of the kitchen looking into the dinging room and family room during the painting progress

Downstairs bath

Downstairs hallway leading to Rich's office and Julia's bedroom on the left and the master bedroom on the right

Master bedroom

Master bath

Garage

Working on the railing/banister.  It was a white wrought iron railing with huge spaces in between the rails which was just an accident waiting to happen!  

Moving Day!!

Once the trucks were gone, this is what we were left with!  It seemed totally overwhelming at first but we got through everything much faster than I anticipated.  Laura and Dave took Joseph and Ella for the night which was a huge help as we were able to clean and pack out of the condo much quicker and then get over to the new house to start with this mess.

The kids had a blast hanging in Coronado for the day, too!!

Laura sent me this picture that night and said she walked into the room to check on the girls and freaked out for a minute when she couldn't find Ella.  She was totally hidden underneath the pillow, which, thankfully Laura moved!

While Joseph and Ella had a blast with Sydney and Cole, Julia helped me tackle the kitchen.

The kids were really excited to come back to the house and to discover all of their toys and things that had been in storage for the past 6 months.  They really were great playing with all of their "new" things while we worked pretty hard at unpacking and organizing especially the first few days there.  

We bought the home from a family with 4 kids who were really great-they left us a really nice note saying, "Welcome Ducote Family!  We could not have asked for a nicer family to live here!  May you create awesome memories in this house, just as we did.  May God Bless your family."  

We are so thankful to be here and excited about all of the memories that will be made in our new home.