Happy New Year friends! The holidays are behind us, we've said so long to Christmas decorations and lazy days. It's a new year, and with it comes the prospect of new goals and a fresh start....right?!  Isn't that how it's supposed to be?  Well for us there hasn't been a whole lot of that.  Truth be told I had an entirely different post planned for today.  Actually if I'm being totally honest, I had a different post planned for last week, but I digress... We're battling a serious case of post holiday funk in the Dreamhouse. 

This is going to be embarrassing... When we attended BlogPodium a few weeks back, one of the announcements we were pretty excited about was that PARA Paints was launching the search for their 2014 Para Blog Crew.  We knew instantly that we wanted to apply because we thought it'd be fun to shoot the submission video - that AND we do have an ENTIRE house to paint, so figured we'd have no shortage of content to blog about should we be chosen.

Every cloud has a silver lining... As you know, our closing got delayed by one day. Boo right?  We thought so too.  The upside however, is that because of that ONE seemingly insignificant day, our first mortgage payment has now been delayed by ONE MONTH! Woo hoo!!! I guess it's true what they say - everything happens for a reason.  :-)

We know it's been a little while since we blogged and you're probably as excited to see the plans for the Dreamhouse as we are....well maybe not quite AS excited as us, but still. Its been a busy month full of settling in with the parents, budgets, drawings, quote gathering & securing finances; all while balancing the day to day of work and raising a 3 year old. Oh yea - and we managed to throw in a couple of trips and celebrating 4 years of marriage.

It's been a busy couple of days.  We got all of the offer paperwork signed and finalized, made a quick trip in to the bank to pick up our pre-approval letter to satisfy our financing condition, then topped it off with a road trip to Ottawa to visit a friend and celebrate the Canada Day long weekend. It was our first time spending the holiday in the nation's capital and we had a blast!  Definitely recommended if you've never experienced it before - so much to do and the fireworks on Parliament Hill were a spectacular end to the trip! Now after a little much needed R&R, we're back and down to fulfilling the final condition of our offer - the home inspection.

So after expanding our search area, we've found an interesting property in the West Shore neighbourhood. The house itself isn't much to look at.  In fact it probably hasn't been updated much since it was built in 1962.  Now in saying that we don't mean the cool 'retro chic 60s', we mean circa 1962 textured plaster walls, parquet & vinyl floors, avocado tub in the bathroom - we're talking full on time machine the second you walk through the door.  Not exactly what you might envision us looking for in our dream house.