Day 1: All Grown Up - Redoing Our New Home

Day 1: So today my husband and I officially became “REAL” adults -- we started some major projects to our new house. We thought marriage was the marker for adulthood, but until you feel the excitement of finding an amazing baseboard/chair rail combo, you’ll realize you were not as adult as you thought you were. I actually jumped for joy in Home Depot when we found a pre-fab wainscoting panel that we could install on our walls instead of our original

plan of doing it completely ourselves and cutting hundreds of pieces of molding which would likely

have been an epic fail. I realized mid-jump in aisle 24 of Home Depot that the days of excitement over flip cup night at Syracuse and endless gin and tonics had been replaced by a far more satisfying high——chair railing, granite counter-top options, three

aisles of crown molding options and so much more. Home Depot was advertising a new job position....I won't lie, the thought did pop into my head that maybe I should apply just so I could get that 40% employee discount.

Quick backstory---before we started seriously looking at buying a home we lived in base housing at NAS Lemoore. Initially, I was very wary of living on a military base. The homes are typically quite uninviting and sterile---think hospital white walls, faded brown wall-to-wall carpeting, fluorescent lighting. When we walked into our house for the first time I knew it was going to take some serious work. So I got out my paint brush, got creative and ended up turning what was once a cookie cutter house into a home that we loved. Here are a couple Before & Afters, check out my Portfolio for more.

After a year and a half of my husband watching me do insanely impractical improvements to our house (ex: replacing fluorescent lighting with small chandeliers), he convinced me that it was time to move off base into a house of our own where the work we did would actually be going into something permanent. Beautiful, move-in ready homes are being built in our area, but we didn't want a completely "done" home. We wanted a project (I think my husband may now be slightly regretting that... I keep hearing the word "budget" over and over...), a “fixer-upper” but not so much of a “fixer-upper” that we had to demo every bathroom to rid ourselves of eye-sores like bright purple tile which apparently used to be a big fad...for the life of me I still can't figure that one out.

For months, my husband stalked Zillow trying to find a house that met most of our wickets. Nothing he showed me made me feel like leaving our base house would be worth it, especially since I had just completed re-doing every room. Finally, with the help of our awesome realtor Jamie Tulak of Studio 12 Homes, he found something. I wasn’t sold at first. I was a bit shocked we actually found something. After weighing the pros and cons of moving (and my husband repeatedly reminding me that we would be ten minutes closer to HomeGoods and Chipotle--very smart tactic on his part), I realized it would be crazy to pass up the house. I knew it would be an awesomely fun project for us, plus when my husband deploys I can distract myself by tackling some big projects (and I won't have to hear the word "budget" over and over) Our house has beautiful wood floors, tall ceilings, but yes, definitely needs some updating. So here starts Day 1 of my chronicling the rejuvenation of our first home! Stay tuned for my sharing of our successes and failures, and tutorials on everything from painting kitchen cabinets and ceilings to picking out cabinet hardware, bathroom tile, paint colors and much more!