The Journey Begins

"Family is not an important thing, it's everything." -- Michael J. Fox

Our family has moved into a new house on a different side of the same city, and we did so because of our family.

Not only do my husband's kids (... and my stepkids .. and my children's half-siblings) live on this side of town, but we have heard great things about the schools in this area and were ready to leave behind our first home in a struggling neighborhood.  The only person not on board with our move was my mother, but she has come around and understands that our decision was made for one reason and one reason alone:

Our family.

My husband and I looked at hundreds of homes online and did 20+ walkthroughs before stepping foot into the house we now call Home.  We changed our minds a lot about the importance of basements, kitchens, fences, decks,  landscapes, fireplaces, spacious closets and master suites, and we probably drove our agent crazy.  Most houses we looked at did not have all of our Must-Haves, and a few houses had almost enough of them to earn our offer.  There was just something about every house that didn't satisfy our tastes.  The process was very frustrating... until we finally found the house that felt like US!

Sometimes we would look at houses more out of curiosity than real interest, or we just looked at them because they were vacant and a walkthrough would be easy to schedule. Our house was the last on a long afternoon list of houses, it was at least a mile further north than we really wanted to live, and it was listed at the tip top of our comfortable budget.  We walked into it with reluctantly made-up minds about a different house we had seen that day.  We had mutually compromised that a small yard and being backed up to another person's small yard was just going to have to be 'good enough' for the sake of buying everything else we wanted inside the house.  It was fate that we walked into that last house on the list that we were more curious about than truly interested in because we would have chosen the wrong house out of pure desperation!

On the inside of this very last house on the list, everything was still white from when the house had been built.  Not clean, but white.  The walls were actually pretty dirty, scuffed up and even scribbled on in places.  The carpets were very light and showing signs of poor installation, dirt and possible pet abuse.  The fixtures were all standard; not a single upgraded anything, from the door knobs to bathroom lighting to shower-heads and faucets.  There was little evidence that love had ever filled the house, and it felt to me like a giant skeleton of some unfortunate family's struggle to keep a house they couldn't afford to care for and make a home.

When I say the house is "giant" ... I mean it.  The house just kept going in every direction. Closets were twice as large as their standard-sized doors would let on, with the Master Closet dwarfing most people's bedrooms.  The kitchen was three times the size of my old one with tall cabinets and long counter tops.  Upstairs, each bedroom could easily hold two beds and furniture, with a central playroom/loft to contain the toys.  The backyard was of similar size to our old yard, minus the beloved pond, but it was tree-lined for privacy and didn't back up closely to anyone else's yard.  By the time we got to the basement, we had already seen a house that could accommodate the growth of our family.  In the basement (a.k.a. the house below our house), we found a great room, a bedroom, a partial kitchen, a full bathroom, two bonus rooms, and two storage rooms with enough shelf space to store a few families' Christmas decorations!

It was obscene, the size of this house.  The layout was exactly what we wanted.  All of our Must-Haves were present, without exception.  There was not a thing wrong with the house structurally, as far as we could tell prior to an inspection, and it was only the filth and grime that made us uneasy.  Despite that one detail - the FILTH - we had made our decision.  This house was the best house for us, and we knew we had to act fast.  We made our offer within an hour, and we never doubted that decision for a second afterward.

What struck us most about the house was it's potential.  Yes, it was big.  Yes, it was priced to sell by the bank.  (Yes, I was in love with the kitchen and closets.)  The house had not been abused - just neglected.  The true reason for our making an offer on the house so quickly and confidently was it's need for tender loving care and our matching desire to put that kind of love into making a house our Home.

So we've bought ourselves a Project House!  A house we can love and nurture for years and years to make it our own ... just like the family we're raising inside of it.  A house we can evolve from .... wait for it .... Filthy to Flawless!

Naturally, this blog is for our house and the journey to making it a Home.  Bring on the Pinterest ideas and DIY tutorials!  Get ready to curse our failures with us and celebrate our successes!  If you're a close friend or relative reading this, feel free to grab a paintbrush or just pretend that you're busy every time we post what our next endeavor will be!

Here's to our New Home ... the newest member of our family!