Prelude

Renovating and decorating our home is going to be a long and interesting journey. But just getting our house was a long and hard journey. I feel like it was good for us as a couple, but it sure was a pain in the ass!

It all started about two weeks before we got married. We found the house and while I didn’t love it (I am not a DIYer, I am more of a sit on my butt and pay someone else-er). I was disgusted by the ‘50s to 70’s décor and also over whelmed by the many costly repairs needed. My soon-to-be husband on the other hand was in love. He wasn’t in love with the house so much as the land the house was on. It was on a beautiful 3.65 acres. It was a perfect location for us. We had bickered for months about where in the area we could both live and be happy. The problem starts with the fact we have different backgrounds…. I am – a girl who grew up on a cul-de-sac in a master planned community in Texas. He is – a country boy who lived across from a cornfield in Virginia. The only thing we knew is that while we both work in the city, neither of us wanted to live in it anymore. Sadly for our commute, that meant lots of tunnels, bridges, and traffic no matter where we moved. Once we finally made peace with the horrendous daily drives we both would be forced to face we tried to decide on whether we wanted suburbia or the country. Suburbia was too crowded and expensive and the country was too isolated and too campy. Finally, we found a house that had a mix. It is in the country but on the verge of being called a suburban neighborhood. We had land AND neighbors. Privacy BUT still civilization. We both compromised a little and found the area we had been looking for. This was just the start and ended up being the easy part.

Since no one will find this nearly as interesting or infuriating as I do…I will TRY to keep it short.
We offered full price for the HUD home. The owner had died (a little widow woman who had a reverse mortgage and a green thumb) and it became a foreclosure. It had the lot my husband dreamed about so we placed a full price offer (they pay closing costs) the day after it was on the market. It was accepted and we had a home inspection the day after our wedding. We left for our Hawaiian honeymoon and we thought it would be good to go when we got back. Alas, we are doing a construction loan so we needed an appraisal. Got that done fairly quickly. The real issues started when it came to HUD and our mess of a lawyer….There were deed issues and people who used to live there had to sign stuff every time something got changed (including commas) either way….4 nightmare months later….we finally signed on the house and the next day we started our journey into renovations.

So this is where the story begins I guess…