Five year anniversary

Today is our five year wedding anniversary. We've been very blessed in our first five years of marriage. We bought our home, brought Lily into the world, and now we are working on the next chapter.

What better way to celebrate this landmark date than by packing up all our stuff, moving all our furniture to the garage and ripping out the carpet?

Here is our living room back when we finished it in 2011.

Here it is after our awesome friends Tony and Chad helped us remove all the furniture. 

(By help, I mean, they did all the heavy lifting!)

Here it is now, after our very generous friends Mark and Julie helped us tear out the carpet.

Of course, we would not have been able to get any of this done with Lily underfoot, so HUGE thanks to my cousin Renae and Auntie Bridget for watching the munchkin!

So, why tear apart our house on our five year anniversary?

We've been talking about moving for a while. When we first bought our home, Jason worked in Fridley and I worked in Edina and it was a perfect in-between. A few months later, he got a job in Chanhassen. (For those not familiar with the area, it's about an hour away during the commuting times.) 

For four years, he's been commuting about two hours every workday. It takes a toll not only on our car, but on our family time, as we carpool together. We want to be somewhere more central to both our jobs so we can spend more time at home together in the evenings.

So this past Wednesday, we met with a Realtor who we met a couple of years ago at an open house in our neighborhood. She lives in the area and knows the neighborhood very well. She came over and talked about pricing, and looked around our house. She told us about a program in Minneapolis that will be giving down payment assistance grants to homebuyers. The program will bring prospective buyers on tours of homes in the city and she thought we could really benefit by early exposure to these buyers who are receiving down payment grants. We agreed, but the timing is very tight. The tour event is September 7, and we had not  yet done anything to prepare the house. 

Our Realtor thought that refinishing the wood floors under the cheap carpet  would help in the presentation of the house. I've been wanting to get rid of the carpet almost since we moved in, so this was something I wanted to hear. The carpet has not worn well at all. It's trodden down and yucky. And, let's face it, it's nearly impossible to keep carpet clean with a cat and a kid and a husband who likes dirty, sawdusty, projects.

So on Thursday we decided that in two days time, we would pack up all of our belongings and furniture on our main level so we could tear out the carpet and refinish the floors. 

As you can tell from the photos above, we have our work cut out for us. The floors are in pretty rough shape. They have been sprayed with paint in the bedrooms and the staples from a previous carpeting do not want to come out. 

The goal is to work each night on the floors to get them complete by next weekend so we can get the furniture back into the house for staging. It's a tall order, but my very handy and hardworking husband and I can get it done.

We are so grateful to everyone who came to help us today. We would not be near as far along as we are without them and we probably would have injured ourselves moving all that heavy stuff.

With that said, if anyone has a free evening this week, we'd be very indebted to anyone who would want to help sand or paint poly or watch Lily!

Tomorrow we will take a break to really celebrate our anniversary by going to the Renaissance Festival. It's a tradition we have not missed since we started dating in 2004. When we get home, it will be back to work!