The best place to start is at the beginning...

We moved back to Virginia from North Carolina in the summer of 2012.  We had a 6 week old so of course, the timing was perfect for moving.  Who doesn't like to watch all their stuff be packed up with a screaming infant in their arms and a 2 year old wrapped about their legs?  But, hey, we live on the edge.

We moved into an apartment since we did not find the "perfect" house before the new owners of our NC house demanded that we leave.  Can you imagine how excited the people above us in the apartment building were to see us coming? A toddler, infant, a dog, and two exhausted parents--we were the perfect tenants! But don't worry, our 2nd child screamed every night from 5-10 pm, so it got even better for our neighbors.

Moving into our apartment

The days and months slowly ticked by as I waited patiently for a house to come on the market that we liked.  I only called my realtor, Anna, every other day and checked realtor.com every 36 minutes.  But one September morning, Anna, called me and told me that I needed to come see a house ASAP.  Could it be the house? Our house? Our answer for getting out of the apartment that reeked of smoke and I could be reunited with the other half of my crap that got put into storage?

We had a few requirements for our house.  We wanted all brick, a basement, a nice kitchen, 5 bedrooms (we knew we wanted 3 children and room for guests), and no 2-story rooms.  We had a 2-story family room in our house in NC and did not like it--hard to heat, cool, and it was noisy upstairs (Billy would be watching a football game downstairs and my Real Housewives of name a city would be disrupted).

I met Anna at "the" potential house.  Brick, check. 5 bedrooms, check.  Basement, check.  But it did not have a nice kitchen and it had a 2-story family room.  I told Anna maybe we should keep looking.   Anna, a wise woman, encouraged me to look at the house again and think about the things that it has that I cannot change--brick and a basement--and the things that I COULD change like the kitchen and the 2-story room.  So I called Billy and told him I found our house, being a trusting soul, he insisted on seeing it before putting in an offer. I guess if you are about to make the biggest financial decision of your life, you like to see it in person.  But he approved and loved the house as much as I did (minus the kitchen and family room).

Our offer was accepted and it all went really smoothly, the inspection was really "clean", we only did minor negations with the owners, easy peasy.  So then I started looking into kitchen remodels.  Ummm...do you know how much renovations cost? Yes, I'm sure you do.  Everyone seemed to know but me.  So my kitchen got tabled (kitchen tabled?!?) to a few years out.  These contractors, they want money.  I know--I was as shocked as you are.  Crazy.

So here starts our adventure in slowly making this house our home and getting ready for a huge renovation.  We are going to gut the whole existing kitchen, expand it into the existing dining room, create a small office at the front of the existing dining room (new kitchen), move the dining room to the existing formal living room, close the family room off and create a media room above it, add a bathroom to the new space above the family room. Wish us luck...we will need it!

Home Sweet Renovation