Homegrown Happiness: Plans for the House!

The move is coming up so fast! I'm excited, scared, and all sorts of other things! I have all sorts of plans for our new house. I just can't decide when we should start moving our things in. I'm completely torn between starting to move things in on day 2 so we can start living there, or waiting a few weeks so we can get more work done without living in chaos. That's one reason I'm awake right now. Sometimes at night I just get something stuck in my head and I can't sleep. I'm finally starting to get really sleepy again, but we have to be up in less than an hour, so trying to go back to sleep is pointless. Today is going to be a very rough day for me :-/

Anyway, we're set to close on the 20th. It's coming SO fast! I'm still a little worried something crazy will happen. As I posted before, our inspection went fine. We're still waiting on our appraisal...I feel like it's taking forever! It's been about a week and a half and I'm not very patient. We've done pretty much everything we need to do. We just need to purchase our homeowner's insurance, which we plan on doing early this week. After that, it's just a waiting game :-/

We're still working on our plan but for now we don't plan on moving anything in on the first day. My dad will be coming and we're going to make a few repairs/changes/upgrades on that first day. Right now, all the light switches & covers are that ugly beige color. My dad is going to change them all to white. Josh and I will be working on the cabinets. We've decided that refinishing them will make a huge difference in the kitchen. I can't wait to see how they turn out. I've been doing research for the past week or so. I'll definitely post before & after pics of it.

Here's another look at the kitchen

We'll be staining the cabinets a dark color. We have it narrowed to 2 shades. We'll also be adding some brushed nickel hardware to the cabinets. I think those 2 things alone will do SO much for this space. The counters are going to stay for a while, but we'll eventually replace them with granite (or something...we're considering our options and there's a new recycled material we want to research a little more). The upper cabinets will be raised closer to the ceiling. This will make it harder for me to reach and I'm not super crazy about it, but it's the only way we can put a microwave over the stove. I'm starting to consider just keeping a range hood and getting a microwave cart for the microwave. It would definitely be less work and I like the height of the cabinets the way they are now.

Here is a little bit of inspiration. These cabinets were actually painted black. I prefer stain, but we found an ebony stain that I think would be perfect for a look similar to this. I like the granite color too. We looked at stain colors and granite at Lowe's yesterday, just to get an idea. I'm leaning toward a look similar to this one. Josh is leaning toward a lighter cabinet (his favorite stain was red mahogany) and darker counters. I really like both looks, I just don't know which one I like better!