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Okay, so hold on. A little background:

Way back in the dog days of summer '11, my boyfriend RJ and I had sort of joked about purchasing the dilapidated building diagonally across the street from the hardware store in the middle of the village. But what the heck would you do with it? It became a sort of game we'd play: a farm and garden store! No, an antique store! No, a coffee house! No, better yet, a coffee house-cum-antique shop where everything (including the tables and chairs) are for sale! The list went on. We had sort of settled on some sort of wine/whiskey bar, and we were content to simply daydream about someday having hand-poured concrete bar tops, hand-crafting our own specialty cocktails and serving them in mason jars (obviously, if we bought the place RJ would quit his job, go to bartending school, and then transform himself into the friendly and wise neighborhood bartender)...

...until we heard that someone else was more seriously looking at putting a purchase offer in. Oh no! Our imaginary coffee shop/antique store/wine bar was threatened! And suddenly, we couldn't move fast enough. We (meaning RJ) threw himself into the paperwork side of things, and all of sudden, it was ours. Whew. But then what? The place had never had any plumbing, heating, insulation, or more than a few light bulbs. It actually had an in-door outhouse (bench style, with two openings side-by-side -- those grange meetings must have been a  blast). So the building essentially sat there over the fall and winter, patiently waiting for us to figure out what our plans would be for the place.

So fast forward a couple of months: the plan had changed, and we decided to move into the upstairs. For the time-being. Maybe. If we like it. And our time table being what it was, we moved over the weekend from our mini little duplex into the sprawling, loft-like 1,600 sf upstairs.

Oh, if it were only that easy. We actually had about a month of labor-intensive work involved before it could be even remotely livable. I'm going to devote the next couple of posts to a brief recap of those steps, which should be incredibly fascinating to everyone (who doesn't love sanding floors?!)