Goodbye Summer, It's Been Swell

So summer's officially ending. I'm a little bit sad. We spent the whole thing working on the outside of the house.. the painting, the deck, the pool. I feel like we barely got to sit down and enjoy any of that hard work. Auh well, I can't complain because the outside is looking fan-freaking-tastic and we all made some memories we won't soon forget. Seriously though, next summer all we have to do is paint the garage and landscape.. lots and lots of landscaping.. but the house, it's done! Man, does that feel nice. Now it's on to lots of messy drywall finishing. I for-see a solid 6 months of cleaning white powder off of every visible surface in my home. After that comes the floor refinishing. It should be exciting figuring out how to move every piece of furniture in the house off of the floors for a week. I think I'll go on vacation during that particular renovation. Psh, I wish.

Alright, alright on to the good stuff.. I know all anyone really wants to see is PICTURES! So here they are.

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After

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Aaron always puts his own touch on things <3.

Aaron, me and my Dad headed out to dinner after a long day

of working on the deck. Thanks for your help Dad! 

Coming Full Circle- One Year

One year ago my husband and I set out on what is sure to be the biggest feat of our lives. We have slaved over this house and spent countless hours and long weekends doing nothing but tedious labor. While most people our age work their asses off all week long and relax on the weekend, we crave said weekends so that we may have uninterrupted days to get things done. We beat ourselves up if those two days pass by and we don't feel like we've accomplished enough.

Are we where I thought we'd be as far as progress a year from the day we bought this house? No, and I am totally fine with that. I have learned more in this last year than I have in many years combined and above all of the lessons I've been taught, patience has been the most valuable. I have learned to slow down in this life. I have learned to love and appreciate the here and now, something I have struggled with for a long time.

We spent the last two weekends really in awe of the beauty of this house and the beauty of our lives. Two weekends ago, all of my loved one's gathered at my house on my birthday to help paint. It was more fun than I could have imagined and incredibly touching. We laughed and drank and took pictures and even did a little painting. I felt so loved that day, I will never forget it. Last weekend, we celebrated our two year wedding anniversary and coincidentally, the one year anniversary of the purchasing of this house. Two memories I hold near and dear. Aaron woke me up Monday morning to let me know that he had just put the finishing touches on the front porch and that the house was finally ready to be photographed. We waited till that evening and had a mini photo shoot to celebrate both anniversaries at once.



Bright eyed and bushy tailed cause we had no idea what the eff we were in for!

Two years of crazy marriage :).

Before ^

After ^



I've Got a Vision

This is pretty much what my house looks like today (minus the ridiculously long grass)

It's a beautiful house really. We have thirty plus windows, a handful of interesting butt-outs, a sunroom, awesome deck and screened in porch. All great aesthetically. By no means a rambler. The house's great qualities, are however, all too hard to notice next to the sun faded, blue exterior, rotting trim, and overflowing gutters. It is no doubt, she needs some TLC.

My dad has been talking about coming down for a visit and helping us paint the whole thing come spring. He finally told me a few weeks ago that he'd officially be coming the weekend before memorial day. My birthday weekend! So then my little brain started coming up with ways to spend time with dad, paint my house and also have a fantastic birthday. That's when I came up with this ultra fabulous plan, PAINT PARTY! I sent out my mass text yesterday so it is official. May twenty-first, this pig is getting more than just a little lipstick.

Now on to the fun stuff. What color to paint it? I am so not good with paint choices. The only room that's been painted is our bathroom and it's on our to-do list to be repainted. The grayish purple turned lavender was not what I had in mind. So, I'm kind of  sort of freaking out about picking a color for the entire house.

I love yellow, I love it so, so, so much! It makes me happy. I'm automatically drawn to anything yellow, yellow flats, yellow sundresses, yellow bags, yellow, yellow, yellow. My wedding color? You guessed it, yellow. Oh, what's that you say? You want to see a picture of my gorgeous yellow wedding?? Okay.

Those are my sister in laws, beautiful huh? Anyways.

I AM GOING TO PAINT MY HOUSE YELLOW! I think, with some moral support and after I change my mind 12743985 times.

This is my vision. Buttery yellow siding, very similar to my bridesmaids dresses, not quite white, more cream than white trim, black front door, black shutters (which we'll have to buy, currently the house has none), light gray stain for the porch floor and the front concrete stairs, that same cream for the railings and a black farm style fence with an arbor framing each side of the house. Can you see it? Are you with me?

Here are some photo's I've found to help us all keep said vision:

I like both of these yellows a lot and how cute is the one below with all

the window boxes and overflowing flowers everywhere? Le sigh.

And a fence, similar to this:

with one of these on each side of the house.. all covered in roses. Le sigh again.

Long Time, No Update

Well, it's been about 7 months since my last renovation update. Everyday someone asks me "So are you finished with your house yet?", to which I normally respond by laughing out loud and then bursting into tears. So let me address this question here, once and for all. WE WILL NEVER FINISH THIS DAMN HOUSE! Eh, so maybe I'm exaggerating but seriously, we are nowhere near done. I feel like we've barely started.

We have, however, completed 2 major projects since my last blog post. We gutted the entire basement. This project alone took us from August until October. We did all of the labor ourselves mostly, with the occasional help from friends and family (which we so appreciated). We also ran all new electrical in the entire house. I say we, but my only involvement was the occasional getting up off of the couch to help Aaron pull a wire through a tricky spot. So we have eliminated two deadly threats in this house. The crazy wiring that threatened to combust at any moment and burn the entire house to the ground (there were times I wished it would) and the potentially toxic mold and asbestos in the basement (although I'm sure to have several types of cancer after breathing in that shit for as long as I did).

See the pretty pictures!! (I know, not so exciting.)

Some of the scariness that was our basement. 

 About two-thirds of the way done gutting it all.

The trash bags I mostly carried all by myself. They're filled with moldy drywall.

The finished product. This is exactly what it looks like today.

This disturbing picture shows what was powering our house.

And now look, glorious!

This may take a while...

I'm living on a construction site.. or in one, I should say. Since my last update we managed to spend a month demolishing pretty much everything and moved in about a week after that was completed. We've got unfinshed drywall on the walls, holes in the floors from where walls used to be, one very moldy basement and enough work to keep us busy for YEARS to come. Despite all of this, we finished two projects and trust me, when your living in chaos any finished area feels like an oasis.

Master bedroom closet BEFORE:

Master bedroom closet AFTER:

Guest bathroom BEFORE:

Guest bathroom AFTER:

So even if progress is slow, it's pretty fantastic when it's complete and always worth the wait!

1. Buy a house... CHECK

This has been the absolute craziest few days of my entire life. We were called home from our one day vacation in N.C. because the sellers were refusing to extend our closing date. We closed in less than 24 hours of finding this out. We were out of state... we were 30 minutes late to the closing because we had been driving 7 straight hours on memorial day weekend and still could not get there in time. Does that sum it up enough?? We bought a house!!!!

There have been very few occasions in my life that I actually experienced pure euphoria. My wedding, our engagement. I'm pretty sure I've been euphoric almost this entire weekend. We drove out to OUR house Saturday early and sat on the back porch.. staring over the fields and trying to convince ourselves that the moment was real. We had waited for this for SO long. We had worked, without stopping, to reach this goal for the last 5 years. We stuck to what we knew and we made it. Woah, what a feeling. I'm in love all over again with my husband. I know this renovation is going to be incredibly stressful but I don't care. At the end of the day it's our house to stress over... and that's all we've ever really wanted.

Before Baby Bucket List

So for the last several years I've been living in some sort of weird, in between place. I was 17 and young and foolish and then suddenly I was 18 and responsible. My now husband (then boyfriend) and I moved out on our own. We started making BIG plans of saving our money and buying a house, of getting married and for me, having children. I guess for me, it was hard to be both young AND responsible so I chose the latter. I spent a few years after that, waiting. Waiting to move out of our little apartment and then to move out of our townhouse, waiting for Aaron to propose.. and then for us to get married.. waiting to buy a house, waiting.. and waiting. This is not to say I don't have great memories of these times but in the back of my mind I was pushing for more. But now, here I am. I'm still young and we've almost achieved every goal we set before us. The logical next step is children right?! RIGHT?! It goes move out, get engaged, get married, buy a house, have a baby, right? Wrong. A light bulb went off sometime in the last few months. I'm going to be able to experience life here soon.. the way we couldn't in our struggling earlier years. Why in the world would we have a baby now? Now when we can finally have some "us" time. So that's what I'm going to do. Let me tell you, it's quite liberating to not be waiting anymore. To just start doing. Anyways, all of that leads up to this:

My Before Baby Bucket List~

1. Buy our first home
2. Learn to speak another language
3. Vacation in Portugal
4. Drive to Florida
5. Visit a real fish market in New England
6. Be able to say "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" while in Las Vegas.
7. Go whale watching
8. Spend a weekend in New York or DC or both.
9. Go to dinner on The Odyssey (the boat Aaron and I had our senior prom on)
10. Have a girls night out with my favorite friends (believe it or not, I've never really done this)
11. Rent an RV
12. See the Grand Canyon
13. Go to Disney World
14. Try to conceive a child while in a foreign country (obviously this should be last on the list :)
15. Stay in the Pestana Palace in Lisbon, Portugal
16. Successfully cook a pie from scratch
17. Learn to use a sewing machine *hey I can check this one off!!*
18. Own a car that I love
19. Jump off a cliff into a natural body of water


So before any of you parents out there get offended, I realize that ALL of these things can be done after having children as well.. or even with your children. But that's not what it's about for me. These are the things I want to do now, no matter how small or weird some of them are. I'm excited to get started.