Our House is a Very, Very, Very Fine House

John and I have lived in our house for a little more than nine months, and I have to say that owning our very own place has been delightful. We had both been apartment dwellers for a while before we got married, so having lots more space and the ability to paint walls and hang things on them without the fear of repercussions from apartment management has been especially nice. Oh, and the garage! How I love our garage. I didn't have to scrape my car windows once all winter. That in and of itself made buying our house worth it. Well, that and the awesome housing stimulus money we're getting with our tax refund. (Kaching!)

We've made lots of changes to our house since we moved in, most of them because of John. He has become quite the remodeling/home improvement king. (This new hobby of his can probably be attributed to the fact that while we were on our honeymoon, we discovered HGTV and, as a result, cooked up lots of ideas in our heads about how we could make our house look super nice once we got home and moved in. Bonus for us when we signed up for cable and found out that HGTV was one of the channels included in our package. But don't tell John that I let it slip that he watches HGTV. He also watches manly shows, like 24 and documentaries about gangs and ESPN.) While John does all of the dirty work, I offer moral support and use my amazing OCD abilities to assure him that things are lined up, centered, straight, etc.

John's latest project (with a little help from my dad, who seriously knows how to do almost anything to do with home improvement) was removing the awful fluorescent light circa 1985 from our kitchen and replacing it with canned/recessed lights. John had been talking about getting rid of it basically since we looked at the house, and he is in love with the results. It still makes me laugh when he turns on the kitchen lights now and stands back, looking at them like a proud father.

This is the third successful replacement of a lighting element in our house, the first being the new light we installed above our dining room table and the second being the track lighting that John and my dad installed in our family room a couple of months ago. I have to say that I am getting much more brave about random holes being drilled in my ceiling and chunks of sheetrock being removed now that I know how good John is at patching and repairing.

And thank heavens for the paint matching pros at Home Depot, without whom we would have mismatched white paint on our ceilings. My OCD would never have been able to overlook such an atrocity.