Hello, World!

My husband, James, and I have recently purchased our first home--an old farmhouse built in 1870.  This blog is an attempt for us to journal our adventure of first-time homeownership and restoring/renovating our home.  Our intentions are for each of us to blog at least weekly.
Some of the things we've done in the 3 weeks we've been here are:

• Given the rooms we are currently using a good cleaning.  These are essentially the entire downstairs and the master bedroom and the full bath upstairs.  There are still 4-5 more rooms we haven't cleaned yet.
• Taken down all the cobweb infested shutters in the living/family room.  The previous owners saw fit to give that room a pioneer decor which also included a pioneer themed wallpaper complete with muskets, horses, bushels of apples and red barns (I'll post a pic in a later blog).  This wallpaper competes for focus with a faux brick wall on the opposite side of the room.  To top it off, the bricks are differing shades of pink!  This room will definitely get a makeover, but for now our Asian style decor will just have to clash.  ^_^*
• Sealed the family room windows with Frost King window insulation since this is one of the few remaining rooms that has old windows. *See our review of this product on our Review page.*  
• Removed the carpeting and molding in my future craft room/office.  The carpeting was worn and rotten which made it easy to remove and tear up into smaller bundles.  My MIL helped with carpet removal.  James and I also removed the molding in that room since it didn't fit with the rest of the molding in the house.  The craft room is the newest addition to the house, but we want to make it fit in better with the rest of the home.  We will add new molding once the walls have been painted.
• Cleaned and sealed off the kitchen cabinets.  Some of the cabinets didn't have a proper back or floor to them, so they were pretty much open to the floor and wall.  The previous owner had done some "repair" work, but there were still some gaps into the wall cavity that any ol' creature or creepy crawly could crawl through.  I did not like the thought of creatures crawling on my dishes or pots, so Jim closed the holes up.  After fully cleaning my cabinets and drawers, I also contact papered the entire inside surfaces.  There was peeling paint everywhere inside the cabinets, but since we are planning on remodeling the kitchen in a year or so, I didn't want to waste my time and energy scraping and repainting everything.
• Jim has done a bit with the electric, but I'll let him blog about it in more detail.

We've been slowly unpacking, but a lot of our stuff still remains in boxes in the library and dining room since we want to finish restoring a room before we move items into it.
Today I plan to finish repairing the walls in my craft room so that we can start to paint later this week.  The colors I chose are Valspar Freshwater for the walls and Valspar Downpour for the ceiling and closet.  I'm looking forward to getting all my craft supplies out of boxes and into their very own room.