I received the final numbers today and our "Cash to Close" amount has been locked in and finalized. I'll be writing a big fat check for $10,215.80 in order to get into our new home next Tuesday! We're so excited to start our next adventure together and I think I am even more excited about sharing all of the progress photos with my friends and family. My friend, Becky, and I will be planning some epic thrift store trips in the near future so that I can find some sweet new (to me) pieces of furniture that I can customize for the house.

As you can imagine, I have a lot of ridiculous ideas planned for the house that I have not yet told Chris, he's in for a treat! I think for the most part, he might just give up and let me do what I want... but we'll see how that goes. So far, every time we talk about a paint color, he just says that he wants to paint everything lime green.... every room in the house... LIME GREEN. Needless to say, we're not putting him in charge of the planning, even though I'm sure he's just joking in order to get a rise out of me.

Since I don't have any pictures to show yet, I decided to snag one from the online listing to share with you all. Here is part of the dining room and kitchen:

Shockingly, I don't hate the beige walls, although I think that a light gray might look okay, too. I am just slightly worried that the natural earth tones in the counter tops might clash with a cooler color being everywhere else. Painting the walls white would mean that the cabinets would just be lost in a sea of white, which I'd like to avoid. The Living Room, Kitchen, and Dining Room are all basically just one giant room split into sections, so there aren't too many options for painting the rooms different colors, except for maybe an accent wall on one of the shorter Living Room walls or the back wall of the Dining Room (where there is a door leading into my future craft room). Chris isn't too keen on the beige, but once again, his only suggestion so far has been lime green.

Since we have been playing the waiting game for a while, I've been occupying my spare time with getting lost in PinHoles... on Pinterest, that is. I have a "House!" Board which has a section for each room of the house, plus the outside, plus other random things I wanted to save. I'd like to think that we can update the house on a very tight or non-existent budget, so Pinterest has been really helpful for finding blog posts about how others DIY'd stuff in their own homes. To avoid having to move more things, we haven't purchased any additional furniture yet to replace some of our older crappy stuff (mainly just our sofa set). I did purchase the De La Luna fabric bundle by Tula Pink though because it is the most beautiful set ever and I wasn't about to miss one of her spooky designs! I haven't decided what to make with everything yet, but we will definitely need some throw pillows for every room in the house. If you're not familiar with it, here's a peek:

I personally purchased my bundle from SewShabbyQuilting on Etsy, here's a link:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/628560589

My order arrives tomorrow and I can't wait to lay it out and inspect every inch of the designs to view all the beautiful details hidden within them. I wasn't able to just choose one colorway, so I ended up purchasing the full line - sure, I don't reallllllllllllly have the space to store any more fabric, but I needed it... for science!

Speaking of storage, my GoFundMe Campaign is off to a really great start and I am floored that anyone donated anything at all - I've collected $140 so far! For those of you who have donated and/or shared, thank you SOOOO much! It may take me a while to gather all the funds for the WorkBox, but...

If you would like to contribute to the campaign, click here! I am also working on some rewards for certain donation amounts, starting at only $15. I will be updating the campaign as soon as I am able to finalize a plan that I can truly commit to during the moving and shuffling of everything.

That's all I have to share for now, if you would like to follow me on Pinterest or just check out my Boards, you can do so here: https://www.pinterest.com/chelpanda

~Chel

After some hemming and hawing, I've decided to create a GoFundMe Campaign to see if I can get a little help to purchase a WorkBox 3.0, made by The Original ScrapBox company!

Have you seen one of these before?!?! It's freaking bananas, it holds SOOOOO many supplies for crafting! I am pretty confident that literally everything I own will fit in this and that there would be some room to spare.

The room that I have claimed in the new house isn't as large as my current craft room. I started planning things out in my head, and with everything that I have now, it just doesn't really have a great flow or fit well.

Since we're having to shell out so much money to just get into the new house, there isn't anything left for new furniture, especially for a "non-common-area" piece. I've seen a lot of my friends start campaigns to help with various things, so I figured I would give it a try and see if anyone wanted to help. My friends and family have been nothing but supportive to my art, so maybe they'd continue to help support me by donating some money towards my craft storage dreams!

If you'd like to donate, please click here.

What the GoFundMe Campaign covers:
I am only asking for $2,195. This covers the cost of the cabinet itself, plus the $500ish dollar shipping/crate fee. I specifically want the "White Raised Panel" version of the cabinet, without any of the other add-ons. GoFundMe also take 2.9% of the amount of money I raise + an additional 30 cents per transaction - which I did NOT take into consideration when setting my goal amount.

If you'd like to learn more about the WorkBox 3.0, you can do so here: https://www.theoriginalscrapbox.com/products/workbox-3-0

That's all I really have to say for now, I do plan to update the campaign a little later today with some rewards or gifts for those who are donating - I just need to figure out all the details of that first.

If you're able to donate, I appreciate it SO much and will be forever grateful! If you could also just share the campaign, that helps too.

Thanks!
~Chel

Hi everyone! My name is Chelsea, though I go by Chel for short. I am currently 31 years old and am about to purchase my very first home in my home town, St. Petersburg, Florida. I am SO excited to finally do this, mostly because it means that I can paint whatever color I want annnnnd because we will finally be adopting a dog!

Who is this "we" I speak of? I have a boyfriend! His name is Christian, however, I call him Monkey - you can, too. We've been together for almost 10 years now, so I guess we like eachother enough to take this next step in our relationship.

Anyhoo, we close on the house in 11 days, as we approach July 31st I can't help but get the song "Closing Time" by Semisonic stuck in my head, pretty much non-stop. It's not the worst song ever, so I shouldn't complain too much. I had the idea to start blogging because I feel like there were so many things that I was unprepared for, even just when we were shopping for the right house to purchase. Luckily, I have some really great friends and a great Realtor who was recommended to me - I feel like he really "gets us" and he wasn't afraid to tell it like it is, especially when I was getting all crazy and in my head with everything.

After putting in THREE other offers to houses, we finally snagged the fourth one. We probably looked at about 20 houses total. It seems like it's a hot time to buy right now, so we were outbid on the other 3 houses we put an offer in on.

I was actually pretty hesitant to even look at the house we picked in the first place. While it met the 3 Bedroom + 2 Bathroom criteria, it was only 1,088 square feet, which was a bit smaller than we had wanted. Since we both have some pretty space-consuming hobbies, we wanted to make sure that we'd have enough space for our current items, plus a little to grow. From the pictures, the inside of the house looked nice though and the kitchen had recently been updated with all new cabinets and appliances. Since we had literally just "lost" the 3rd house the night before, we decided that it can't hurt to go look at it anyways, just in case... the inside of the house did look pretty nice after all.

We walked into the house and were instantly shocked at how huge it was! The Living, Kitchen, and Dining Areas are all open floor plan so it's the perfect house for entertaining - which I loooooove to do, mainly for holidays and game nights. Every house we had visited so far, Monkey was pretty critical of the floors, so I expected that to be the case here, instead, he loved them! He found a few flaws, however, it wasn't anything that he couldn't fix himself (he has about 22yrs of flooring experience). We continued to walk through the house with smiles on our faces. The rooms were all a good size and we couldn't really find anything that we didn't like about the house. After walking through the house a few times, checking out the backyard, and whispering back and forth to each other, we decided to put an offer in right away!

On our way home, we couldn't help but be excited about the house, we started talking about all the things we could do to enhance the house and really make it a home for us. We heard back from our Realtor, Jason, the following day. He starts to say that the seller received multiple offers on the house, at this point, my heart sank AGAIN... This again, we're losing yet another house... Jason continued to go on though and said that we were the FIRST offer on the house though, and the seller's Realtor preferred to work with the first offer because they obviously believe in the golden rule of "first come, first served" - YES! We might be getting a home!! Everything was finally going our way, we signed all the paper work that night and started getting our ducks in a row.

Once everything was signed, we setup the inspections, first Home Inspection, then Termite. We also had to make a deposit into the Escrow Account.

• Escrow Deposit: $2,000
• Home Inspection: $325
• Termite Inspection: $95

The home inspection passed with flying colors, the inspector was actually shocked at how well it went, given that the house was a bit older.

The Termite inspection was clean-ish. They found some signs that at some point, there was some termites and there was a small amount of damage to the soffit. He found some wings and dead termites, but apparently this is pretty normal for Florida.

We received all the documentation the following day from each Inspector and then we were able to write up our "List of Demands" for the seller. Most of the stuff was little, though we definitely wanted the house tented - this would have been the largest/most expensive request. She agreed to our terms and then we had to schedule the Appraisal in order to see if they required any additional repairs.

• Home Appraisal: $550

This is where things started to go a little South for us. The appraisal came in at a lower amount than what we had offered. We knew that our offer was a bit higher, however, we did that in order to have the seller agree to pay the closing costs. At this point, we had to lower our offer, which meant that the seller was no longer willing to pay closing costs... however, we would be paying less for the house - so like, win/lose? In addition to the lack of closing costs, she backed out of the repairs we asked for.

List of requested repairs:

• ​Trim Trees that were hanging on the roof.
• Add boot to vent pipe on roof & caulk.
• Reverse hot/cold water on bathroom and kitchen sinks because they were setup wrong.
• Replace small section of screen in soffit where there was a hole.
• Replace section of soffit that had some mild water damage.
• Replace back door frame where there was some mild water damage from not properly painting/sealing the door.
• Termite Fumigation, just to be safe.

Okay, so now I am freaking out, crying, yelling, and about to give up altogether because the "cash to close" amount literally just doubled and she was no longer willing to do ANY of the repairs. This seemed like a dealbreaker for us, but we were able to negotiate a little more and ended up getting her to agree to still do the termite fumigation for us. So, we were once again going to buy this house! After all, if we stayed in our rental for another year, the rent would go up for the 3rd time and we already felt as though we were paying more for rent than what the house is worth.

After borrowing some money from my 401k, we finally had the rest of the money we needed to move forward. So that's where we are now! I keep going back and forth between being a nervous wreck and being super excited, but I've been on the upswing for about a week now, so I hope to keep this mood going, at least until after we close in 11 days.

Thanks for stopping by, I look forward to sharing our adventures with you!
~Chel