We bought a house!

• We bought a house in the old, central area of Winnipeg. It's just off a major street where we can easily catch buses to other parts of town. The boys will be about 2 km from the school they will attend. Right now the house is a duplex where one family lives on the main floor and a single woman lives on the upper floor. They will have to move out in August and we will move in on September 1st.
  
• We plan to change it back into a single family dwelling which means that we have to knock out some walls and make some other adjustments. One handy thing for the renovations is that there are 2 kitchens so that while we work on the main kitchen, we can use the second kitchen upstairs. We won't go hungry.
• There are four rooms upstairs plus a bathroom. The boys will each have their own bedroom - something they have been looking forward to for a while. Arthur and I will share the top front room which was bright and sunny the only day we were allowed to view the house. The other room (the old kitchen) will be a den. We plan to keep the wall of cupboards for supplies. We'll have the old computer in that room.
• The main level has a living room, dining room and a kitchen.
  
• The addition on the back includes a guest room and a bathroom. We are hoping to keep the guest room occupied with friends and family (hint hint).
  
• The house is 100 years old but the basement is relatively dry and solid. The ceiling isn't high enough to be usable space for us. Right now, the laundry is down there, with the gas furnace and electrical/plumbing systems. We don't plan on doing much down there.
  
• It's on a corner lot as you can see from the photos. We will have to keep the boulevard mowed but other than that, there isn't much yard work to do. We don't really like gardening so we are happy with this arrangement. We were hoping for a garage but the house doesn't have one. We might build one in a few years. We'll likely build a shed soon because already we have 3 bicycles arranged.
• Our schedule is to live on the main floor while we fix up and paint the upstairs. This shouldn't take too long, but we can't really remember details of how much work is needed. Then, once the floors have been sanded and re-finished, we'll move ourselves upstairs and work on the main level where the bulk of the work and money will go. We plan to re-design the kitchen, take out some walls and add detailing to the ceilings in the dining room and living room. Then we'll paint and get the floors down there re-done.
  
• If you'd like our new address, send us an e-mail. We aren't giving it out before we move in because we are sure the current renters don't like us enough to pass on our mail. We are making them move out, so they likely hate us.

NOTE: We don't have much of value in our house so if you don't know us, don't bother trying to find out where we live so you can steal things from us. We still have the same TV we bought when we moved to Canada from Sudan in 1997. It's not big and it's not fancy. Also, our computer is from when Arthur was working on his Masters in Education which is about the same time we got our TV. We don't have a laptop or a printer and we've gotten just about all the pictures one could expect from our two old $150 cameras.