Okay so as promised I took a couple of pics of the first floor. It took me so long cause well it meant I had to straighten up. I said to heck with it and took the pics anyway.
Well the first thing that attracted me to the house besides the location and property was the uniqueness of it. The entire first floor is covered with real old chicago brick. In addition to that there is cypress wainscotting over the bottom half of every wall on the first floor. I'm not sure i like the wainscotting and I'm certain we will do something with it in the future but for now it will stay.
Here are a couple of pics of the living room. As you will notice the there is some serious issues with the brick floors. They are totally different colors in some places. Some places have a thick waxy surface some are right down to the brick. Luckily we have a floor guy coming in Wednesday to refinish the floors. He will completely strip them and then reseal them. We think the brick above the fireplace will be a good indication of what they will look like when they are finished.
Notice the set of cabinets in the living area in the distance. Those will be coming out, in fact they will come out this weekend as we need to refinish the floor underneath. We think it was intended to be a bar of some kind. That area will be somewhat partitioned in the future and will be an "Away Room". We hope to sound proof it somewhat and make it an office/ guest room. A place where one can go and do some work but still feel like they are apart of the family room without the noise.
Next up, the kitchen and dining room. It's pretty big and the cabinets are custom built and in good condition. Only problem, we hate that honey color! Here is where I want some viewer participation. We can not afford to completely overhaul the kitchen right now. We are thinking about just putting something over that hideous white formica for now and painting the cabinets, probably white. I'm a bit clueless on wall color and i think the red makes that room so dark right now. Any suggestions? Also, note the huge window seat. We think it's pretty cool too.
In addition to these huge rooms there is also a half bath, linen closet, stairwell and mud room on the first floor that are not pictured. We'll get to those in time.
Anyways, that's it for now. I may post a short blog later tonight as I got Willem a new toy and I've yet to get a picture of him on it. I'm writing today cause we are about to be displaced for the next week. The floor guy comes Wednesday and the process takes 6 days. Two of which we can't even sleep here. So it's back to Mom's house. In addition to that I have jury duty starting Monday, ughhhh! But next week we'll have new floors which I'm sure will be a dramatic difference. Bye for now!
We got tired of stacking them after a while. And by the way there are more in the front yard! The pic on the right is the beginnings of the girls club house. Maddy had two friends over to spend the night and they decided to help by finding good use for the bricks. I'm told you're looking at Aubrey and McKenzie's room, Maddy and Savannah's rooms will be completed at the next sleep over. The girls were actually a ton of help. They hauled branches to the trash pile and helped us by catching every earth worm that was under the 
brick pathway. Those pesky earthworms!
Savannah taking a ride with daddy 
Willem and Maddy bush-hogging
The after shot of the front three from the house
We've got blackberries!!!
So here it is. This is the view from the front. It took us a while to get the grass cut enough so we could get a decent picture. And in case you're wondering the rest of the three acres i'm standing on is still uncut behind me. That's this weekend's project.
Shortly after that we also discovered another water pipe that had been busted by the crew workers' machinery who had put in the septic tank. 
