If I recall correctly, our first night staying at our “new” (actually very old) home, was on May 28th, 2026. Right after our honeymoon, we actually stayed at my parents for a few weeks because we realized our house wasn’t quite livable yet (I’m hoping to show some pictures of how it was when we bought it in another post!). However, my parents’ house had to get tented, and the company gave us a one day heads up. Well, we decided this was the perfect opportunity to set a goal to move into our house! We couldn’t quite move in that first night (we slept on my sister and brother-in-law’s couch), but after not sleeping well, we worked hard that next day so that we could stay our first night in our home. It was exciting but quite daunting!
Setting Up Our Dining Room/Kitchen
We decided our best option was to repaint the dining room and use that as our temporary kitchen since the real kitchen needed a complete gut. Since the house has a crawl-space, David was able to get underneath and move all of the electrical so that I could have my fridge and range! For now, I would use the old kitchen sink in the kitchen. It was a bit rough!
During our first week or two of living at our house, I used these constantly to cook since I didn’t have an oven hooked up yet: the Instapot, our rice maker, the toaster, and the blender. I was thankfully able to make all sorts of meals with these tools!
The previous owner had left her fridge, oven, and washer and dryer, so we were able to clean those up and use them instead of having to buy our own to start! Once David got the range hooked up, my life got so much easier because I could bake, roast, and have a real stove top! I was getting tired of only having Instapot chicken (even though it’s good, after a while you start craving crispy chicken).
Other Parts of Our House
The only operating shower was upstairs and it didn’t look the best. There was a very interesting wallpaper in the bathroom, and we discovered lots of yucky mold underneath when we took off the wallpaper. I got it all off and just left the ugly walls as-is, since I knew we’d be gutting the whole things one day. I worked very hard to get it clean so that I finally felt comfortable using it.
A Few Memorable Things about Our Early Days
Just a few things I want to remember about our first night at our home:
- We had about 3 roaches in our bedroom which was terrible! I was thankful at this point for our cats being with us, because they actually started to hunt them and I’d find dead roaches in the morning 🙂
- Our new AC system which we had put in did NOT cool our bedroom, so we were very hot all night. We had to buy a wall unit and put it in which did cool the room better. We’re hoping once we insulate the ceiling, it will stay cooler in there…
- I might’ve cried a little bit our first night because it didn’t feel at all home-y… I was so happy to be with my husband and so excited to start out home here, but it just didn’t feel like home yet! It felt very barren (because our bedroom was and still is currently – I kilzed the walls then decided to not finish painting it since we’d be gutting the room in the future. This resulted in a rather drab and dingy looking room which was so different than my lovely, cheerful childhood bedroom! Since then I do feel our home is homey, though our bedroom remain dingy!).
We’ve been living at our home for four months now, and we’ve survived! I didn’t want to forget some of these early things that happened in our first few days as newlyweds living in our sweet old house!
