The Beginning

When I married my sweetheart we decided that
we were going to fore go a honeymoon and instead buy our dream house. It was the right timing as the house was a family members who had recently passed. I said it was our dream house but it was far from perfect. It was a great base and we knew with a lot of work we could make it special and most importantly a reflection of who we are. I agreed to buy the fixer upper and made my wife promise she would not push renovations, and we would take our time fixing up our fixer upper. Well it has been eighteen months and over 20,000 dollars and we are not going slow but I am starting to love the house. We still have a long way to go but we want to show off our space. We will continually update this with posts of what we have done and what we are doing.

We should have taken pictures of the before but we didn't think eighteen months ago that we would ever be writing a blog. So I will try and paint you a picture with words. There is that old saying that a picture is worth a 1,000 words, but I promise to keep it short. The house is a 1,950 square foot brick house that is sitting on a 10,000 square foot lot. Our house sits on the corner of a street which gives us a large wrap around backyard. It has a large pool and a beautiful concrete paver patio and walkway.The problem was the rest of the yard. When we moved in the house the yard had seventeen trees, a whole side of the house covered in 4 foot thick fig vines, weeds higher than I stand, and most horribly around sixty tons of medium to large river rock. At this point we are down seven trees, no vines, no weeds, and only about fifty tons of river rock. Did I mention we hate the river rock. The back yard is a continual work in progress. Unfortunately we need to get rid of the river rock before we can redo the back yard and no one wants river rock so we take a ton a time to the city dump.

The inside of the house was not much better. The previous owner, and yes she was a beloved family member, had three untrained dogs that had created quite the unbearable odor inside all over the white carpeting. The part of the house that was not white carpeting covered in unbearable odor was covered in mismatching and unlevel pink saltillo tile. Between the stench and the unattractiveness we decided to invest quickly in beautiful Australian Cypress hard wood floors. This made a huge difference in our house and our dog loved us for getting rid of the smells. This should give everyone a little taste of what we started with and you will see more in the many pictures we will post. If you like our stuff or have any ideas please feel free to let us know. We are always looking for creative ideas to try out or adapt to make our own. Oh I should mention our style is far from ordinary, but so far people seem to love it. We really enjoy taking items that would end up in a landfill or on the curb and make them beautiful and interesting. I hope you all enjoy!