The Beginning

We just bought our first house. It's a pretty little starter home in a cute little neighborhood. We fell in love at first sight. The huge bedroom! The white cabinets! The open living room! And oh lord, the sunroom! We hadn't planned on buying so soon, but we made an offer and were so excited when it was accepted. Then we went back for the inspection. Okay, so the sunroom walls have a bit of wood rot. We can fix that. So the upstairs bathroom is just about the color of bile, paint is cheap!

Then, we moved in. To a house with a broken refrigerator, an oven that beeps approximately every 5 seconds, random power outages, parrot patterned wallpaper, badly stained carpet (thanks, strategically placed heavy furniture!), hideous light fixtures, ugly paint in every room, and dirt. Dirt everywhere. We're shitty housekeepers, I'll be the first to cop to that. But someone forgot to vacuum the stairs for the last 5 years. And no one ever thought to clean the ceiling fans. And someone thought it was a good idea to sweep the dirt under the dishwasher instead of into a dustpan. Yeah.

So home ownership slapped us in the face pretty quickly. The sellers bought us a new fridge (the phrase "illegal non-disclosure of serious electrical problems" gets people to bend over backward pretty quickly), we replaced all the breakers and it seems to have fixed the outages, and we had the oven repaired on the cheap, thanks to a home warranty. We spent a lot of time deep cleaning, and have discovered the real color of the floors.

Now it's time to get down to the business of making this house into a home we're really proud of. And a home we really love. We're going one room at a time, and slowly we'll make this place ours. Here's what we've learned so far:

-when you're replacing a light fixture, it's a good idea to switch off the breaker.
-take the tape off before the paint dries if you don't want to paint again
-no matter how much you want to, don't remove painted over curtain brackets until you're ready to paint the entire room
-those little edger pads don't work with uneven, slanted ceilings. But the straight edges are awesome
-my husband is really scared of snakes and lizards. We have a lot of these in our yard. This is a lot of fun for me.
-yard work is hard. and there's a lot of it

We're jumping in with both feet. We know we can do anything (with the help of our friends, families, and maybe a couple of professionals) and we're so excited for this journey. We're transforming our home as cheaply as we can, without sacrificing style or quality, and we know we'll learn so much along the way!