Our reno story

So here I am writing a blog in my spare time between 12am and 6am..just kidding.  

Actually after months of thinking about it, I thought I would take the plunge and share our renovation story.  Thanks to a friend who asked, how do you live through this mess and remain so peaceful???

What a great question!  I have since been thinking about that question and what my response would be, because I am pretty sure at the time I mumbled some unintelligible answer lol.

So my friend, I thought I would take you through the process....here's how it started:

The long and short before we came to this home...setting the scene.

We built a house. ..we finally finished it and sold it to move closer to town. ..then through a series of moves we ended up completely gutting and renovating a house to the point we couldn't do any more because of resale value.  

There were a few issues at that place that made me crazy! ! So we put it on the market and spent just over a year hemming and hawing about what to do. ..then I reached my breaking point on the day we came to see our current house... I had just spent hours cleaning up a crazy mess with the help of my 4 kids.   So the state I was in when I came to see the new house was completely exhausted, absolutely frustrated and ready to move immediately into anything that did not  have the issues I was dealing with.

 It was dark rainy November day and all the snow we had was turning into about a foot of slush.  Utterly Defeated I entered the house and was assaulted with this!!

Dining Room and Kitchen...i just can't find the words to describe these rooms

Yeah, it's pretty ugly!! Yet somewhat comforting...reminds me of my childhood I guess lol.  As we continued the house tour we came across more cosmetic issues....

Notice the pink carpet in the bathroom!! GAG!

this doesn't quite show the depth of the shag

But then we came to this....

A DRY BASEMENT!!

Perhaps this won't mean a lot to you, but to me it was huge!! Just seeing a dry basement on such a horrible day was enough to make me want to move immediately!!

So within a month we took possession of this beauty, but had yet to sell our own.  Big risk buying another house without knowing for sure your current house is sold, but here is where we saw God's hand control the whole situation.  You see our house had a conditional offer on it and those people had a conditional offer on their house and then those people had a conditional offer on it  and so the cycle continued about 5 houses back.  Everyone's sale was depending on the one before going through.  There was nothing we could do but wait and watch how only God could orchestrate all these conditions to work out.

Love how during this time there was this song that kept playing to remind me that we won't be able to move unless it was with God. :)

 click here to see the song by Kristian Stanfill

There you have it, the beginning in a nut shell.  There is obviously much more to the story and more to share, so I hope that you will join me for our messy life journey.

Kim

ONE TIP FOR RENOVATING!

Truly though, we spent hours praying and we're reassured that even though this new place would be a huge reno project and would probably extremely overwhelm us, we were not panicked. ... so my first tip would be to choose a house that needs work...but won't send you into panic mode!