Pittsburgh

I know everyone has been waiting for this post, so I apologize to all of you who have been waiting so patiently. :) Here are a few pics of our trip to Pittsburgh.... and of course some pics of our house. We finally found a house on Monday, the day we were to fly home. We had originally found a house that we were pretty excited about but there was a whole lot of fixing up to do on the home, so we would have ended up putting a lot of time and money into this house. Plus once I realized we could do some remodeling I started naming off all the things I would have liked to do... I think that's when Jeff started having second thoughts. He didn't exactly have all the remodeling plans in mind that I did. :) We actually went in to sign the papers for the house and our realtor, after looking at the home inspection, informed us of a few more things that needed fixed... such as a whole new roof. So... we thought about it for a night and decided that maybe that wasn't the best idea, we would have been forking out a lot of the money we had saved up just to fix the house and who knows how long it would have ended up taking us. Anyway, to make a long story short, we had looked at a house a couple days before that that we both really loved, but we were uncertain of the area. We talked to a few people who are going to dental school right now and live in this area. They told us we would be in a great ward (the other house was in a branch) and that there is about 7 other LDS couples going to dental school who live in this area as well. Anyway, they eased our doubts and we bought the house. We both are excited and feel really good about it. Plus we love the house! It was by far the best one we had looked at. We were lucky to get it, the house had only been on the market for a couple of days. And we just got the home inspection back and they found nothing. They said the house was in perfect shape and that it was one of the best homes they had ever seen. What a blessing! The people living in it now have really done a good job at keeping it up and making it look cute. Everything is up to date and I even like the colors they painted the walls with! Did I mention that this house is 96 years old??? :) It has 3 bedrooms and one bathroom. One of the bedrooms is quite small so we will use that for the computer room and Jeff's study room. There is a basement as well that I didn't get pictures of. We will mainly use that for our storage and to do laundry. That was also an eye opener for me, the basements weren't what I was picturing. Some of them I didn't even dare look at. I just had Jeff go look at them. They are creepy, and I just know there are spiders just waiting to attack. If you've ever seen a really old home you'll know what I'm talking about. They are the basements with the cement floors and no finished ceilings. A lot of them have toilets, but most of them haven't been used in 50 years. And they have like 5 doors leading to who knows what. I wasn't about to open them to find out. The basement is where everyone has their washer and dryer hook ups. Luckily the house we got had the best basement I'd seen. I might actually dare go downstairs without Jeff to do our laundry now! I kept asking Jeff, "is there a way we can have the washer and dryer upstairs?? I don't think I'll be able to do the laundry unless you come down to do it with me!" He thinks I'm a wuss, and I'll be the first to admit it!


The view of Pittsburgh...




We are up at a lookout point, overlooking the city. It really is quite pretty.


Pittsburgh is known as the "city of bridges." I've never seen so many bridges.


Lots of tall buildings...


Here is Heinz Field the football stadium where the Steelers play.

Welcome to our home....

This is how close the houses are in Pittsburgh. It's so crazy! And everything is so hilly! It's so different from Utah where everything is basically flat..

This is our front porch. They said they would leave us the swing!

The living room.... I love the wood floors.

The dining room...

I love the old phone on the wall!

They really kept this house immaculate. Everything was so clean and organized!

We also talked them into leaving all the window treatments...

Love the stairs...

Nearly all the homes we looked at only had bathrooms upstairs. We maybe saw one with a bathroom on the main level, and we probably looked at over 50 homes.

Guest bedroom

Master Bedroom... the one thing about old homes is there is never any closet space. We are going to have to make the small room into a half office/half closet.


Looking down the stairs.

Our backyard. All of the yards in Pittsburgh are so little. It's nothing like what I'm used to. A lot of the homes we looked at didn't even have a yard, but I'm not complaining, it's less for us to mow.

This is for my mom. She loves trees, and this one is in our backyard. Everytime I told her about a house we were looking at she'd ask, does it have trees in the yard??" Haha... here you go mom.