31 Sherman: Old People Talk Loud

I'm Greg. My wife Amy, son Jake and I have just purchased a house out on Long Island. It's a smaller, ranch-style home, built in 1940. It's on a quiet residential street. This is our first house. This is our blog about it.

The house itself is about 1,500 or so square feet. It's brick and wood construction, painted red and white on the outside. There's three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms that are actually butted up against each other, a 'living room' or 'family room' as we've agreed to call it, a real living room with a fire place, a formal dining area and a small kitchen. For me, I'm absolutely beside myself to finally have a garage to work on my cars. There's also a "Florida Room" or what's otherwise known as a screened-in porch. I think we may be out there every single night as soon as the temperature rises above 70º. The yard is one of the larger ones on the block at .37 of an acre. There's grass, a few nice trees and a fence that separates the front and back yards.

We're buying the house from an elderly woman named Victoria who has lived there for about 10 years. Victoria it turns out, really likes antique white as just about everything in the house is painted this color. She also likes to keep all the blinds drawn because I think she might be some sort of vampire. In any event, we plan to change a few things when we move in. Nothing drastic mind you but we do plan to exercise our retro-hipster muscles and get the mid-century modern theme going throughout the house.

We are set to close on Monday, December 22nd, 2008. We will receive the keys at that point and plan to go to work right then. Our initial projects include re-surfacing the hardwood floors throughout the house, paint and cleaning and necessary upgrades for safety and efficiency; 200 amp breaker box, insulate the attic that sort of thing. We'll be busy for months trying to make the place spiffy. We're looking forward to this adventure and to a new chapter in our lives.

Please see the images below for a peek into what the house looks like now. I took these images with this blog in mind. I was thinking of an absolute beginning point before we put our stamp on the house. We will try to post all of our projects as we do them. We hope you enjoy watching us transform our old house into the killer crib we imagine it to be in our minds.

Kitchen, obviously.