Welcome to Netherfield

July 10, 2023 Katherine Smith Comments 0 Comment

Surprise! Andrew and I bought another house at the end of January and moved into it at the beginning of March. (Yes, we named it Netherfield, like in Pride and Prejudice because we basically are Jane and Charles Bingley.) It was essentially in good shape, but since we didn’t have to leave our apartment quickly (a perk of being the landlord!), we decided to invest some time into updating the inside while we weren’t living there. The main complaints were the shag(ish) carpets and the mostly painted-over wallpaper cracking in some places. The previous owner seemed to love scotch tape because there was tape stuck on many of the cracks to hold it together…even the cracks on the ceiling! (Because, yes, the ceiling was also wallpapered and painted over!)

Some of the lovely carpet and painted-over wallpapered walls and ceilings (in what will be my craft room, the only room upstairs still unfinished besides the hallway).

Thankfully, we knew the walls were last papered in 1969, so we could be pretty sure that the paint wouldn’t have anything too toxic in it, which was a blessing!

Our other house is in town, but Andrew and I grew up in a smaller township outside the town limits that is much more rural, so we knew we wanted our single-family house to be in that sort of area, preferably in the same township we grew up in. Well, we managed that! We’re now only five minutes from my parents and maybe two from his parents. I missed having trees and a yard where I could be myself without worrying what the rest of the block would think of me, and we also wanted more space for our husky, Sasha. Major plus: this house already had a fenced-in area pretty close to the size of our grass yard in town! Now when I take Sasha for a walk every day, I don’t even have to leave our property. The house is at the lowest level, and there’s a bit of an incline going to the back of the yard, but it’s not too bad of a hill and the exercise is good for us! (And I can have Sasha pull me up the hill…)

The trees are hiding most of the house from view from the back of the property. This is one side of the backyard, probably only about a third of it can be seen.

A picture out a window of a yard with springtime views. — A picture out my study window in which you can see some of Sasha’s yard as it looked this spring. I loved getting to watch the trees blossom, not knowing what color they may become!

Before we moved in, we removed all the carpet and got the floors in the bedrooms and dining room down to the original pine floors. We also removed all of the wallpaper (special shout-out to everyone who joined us for Andrew’s surprise wallpaper removal birthday party!), cleaned, fixed, and painted three of the rooms (my study, our bedroom, and the living room. The bathrooms and kitchen don’t have wallpaper and are in decent shape), and ran new PEX waterlines since it would need done eventually and it’s much easier to not live there while replacing that, although it only took a day because my husband and brother rock). And, of course, we cleaned A LOT and moved everything from our apartment to our new house. There were only a couple of meltdowns involved.

Working on removing the carpet in the dining room. We were surprised to find a layer of linoleum that looked like wood paneling underneath the carpet! This room was one of two that the wallpaper wasn’t painted over.

Andrew’s birthday party and some of the helpers we had that day working in the parlor!

Andrew and my brother working in the parlor.

Using drywall stilts to reach the higher places in the dining room.

Our old apartment is rented out, so the triplex is filled and paying both mortgages, thank you, Jesus!

Getting this house was an interesting situation because even though we’d been looking at houses for a few years, we’d stopped looking for one for us to move into and were looking into more investment properties instead. At the beginning of November 2022, we entered into a contract for a duplex that we were set to buy in the middle of December. Late November, it fell through, and around the same time, I realized I had to quit my job because the preacher I was working with was toxic and seemed to be purposefully doing things to activate my church trauma. At the beginning of December, Andrew saw this house was going up for auction, so he went to the open house and came back saying, “We need to get you a private viewing because I think you’ll love it.” So we did, and he was RIGHT. However, since we’ve gone for several other houses and they’ve all fallen through, I refused to think too much about it or dream about what would go where because I didn’t want my heart broken again. The main thing I remember from my first walkthrough was that my study would be the one with the balcony door in it and that the spot in the kitchen for the stove would PERFECTLY fit my beloved Frigidaire Flair oven from the 1960s that I refuse to live without. I saw the house on a Thursday; the auction was the next Thursday. Since it was December, I was in prime Nutcracker mode, so as I was driving to tech rehearsal on auction day, Andrew called me saying, “Well, I guess we’re going to have a lot of work to do. We won the auction.”

My 1960s Frigidaire Flair fitting perfectly in place.

It was the day before we were supposed to sign for another investment property.

It was the week before I was quitting my job.

But God decided it was the right time for us to buy our home. We even got it for exactly how much we were willing to spend on it.

Won’t He do it?

So, we’ve spent the last several months working on making this house a home. Here are some links to pictures different rooms of the house, along with links to what we used to create the rooms!