house hunting

i searched for 8 or 9 months for a house. i made my realtor brad olson take me all over nashville. from the east side to the west side, no houses were quite right. some were cute, other were a mess, some had lousy neighbors, one had a fence that had been crashed into, one had car racing trophies covering (and i mean covering) an entire wall. i fell in like with a few houses. then i found one that i desperately wanted to see. it was south-ish nashville in an area that i knew (just knew) would be the next "it" neighborhood. brad called and the house already had a contract on it. i was heartbroken but then we discovered that the house next door was for sale. brad and i scurried over to look at it.

the decor was .... not my style. at all. but i saw potential in the house. brad and i had not yet put a contract on a house but i felt like this was the right one. i called my parents. i fretted. i stood in the street talking to brad by our cars for a long time. could this be it? after almost a year?

we went back to his office. i fretted some more. he started the paperwork and we finished it up that night. the proceedings proceeded. a few weeks later, i closed.

my parents came down and we spent 4 full days ripping wallpaper down, painting, ripping carpet up, tearing out hundreds and hundreds of staples from the floor. we painted and painted. and painted some more.

the living room had awful brick paneling. i thought a sunny yellow living room would be a good idea. it ended up looking like the yellow brick road but we were so worn out that we kept it. in october, my mom and her cousin came down and ripped down the paneling and hung dry wall. we painted the living room "teepee" and it's a lovely shade of light brown.

they also drywalled up a doorway that had makeshift shelves on one side and paneling on the other. awful! we hung crown moulding in the living room and the dining room.

that was fall 06. buying, preparing, renovating. that's just a sign of even more to come!