We Bought A House!

I’m super excited to share that we bought a house!

We’ve been house hunting on Zillow and Trulia for about 9 or 10 months but seriously started looking with a real estate agent about 6 months ago. We saw house after house and finally found one that felt like it could be our first home. It’s been such a fun, overwhelming, exciting, and fast process and I feel like we’ve learned so much in just this past month of being homeowners.

Dave and I both love Colorado and have decided that we want to be here for a while, so buying felt like the right next step for us. Our 500 sq. ft studio apartment has served us very well but we’re looking forward to having some more space and a yard for Samson. We’ll miss our current apartment complex, the people are so nice and we have great amenities (pool! gym!) that I’m going to miss having right outside my doorstep. It’s bittersweet moving from apartment living to homeownership and I have all sorts of excited and nostalgic feelings about it!

Ok, now on to the new house…

We have a great new neighborhood. In fact, the new house is only minutes away from where our current apartment is, so it’s really nice that we get to stay in the area that we’ve come to know and love. We’re also a five minute walk to a gorgeous lake with some gorgeous mountain views. I feel so blessed to have found a house in an amazing neighborhood and my biggest battle will probably be trying to get Samson out of lake.

The house itself is a fixer upper with great bones (as they say!).  To be honest, the house didn’t “wow” me right away when we first walked in. The previous owners had SUPER different taste from ours (I’m talking black lights in the kitchen and a fire place covered in metal, just to name a few) and it was hard to see beyond the cosmetic work that they did. However, what we did love about the house was the layout, the land, and the location. Somehow Dave and I kept talking about it, we shared our dreams and vision for the house, how we wanted to make it our own, and in the end it felt like a great match.

We’ll now have plenty of room for visitors too, which is SO great because we love hosting and have had 8 people visit us this month. We can’t wait to host more and grill in the backyard under twinkle lights. I can’t wait for Samson to be running in our backyard, for our walls to be freshly painted, to have hard wood floors in the living room, and a new kitchen. There’s A LOT of work to be done but it’s fun getting to do this project with Dave to truly make it our own. I have to say, we’ve been watching an exceptional number of Fixer Upper episodes lately to inspire tackling this one of our own.

I’m also super excited to blog some of our home updates here. We haven’t moved into the new place yet (which has been a blessing) because the house is currently under demo.  So far we’ve removed the popcorn ceilings in the entire house, demolished the kitchen, got rid of the massive amounts of tile in our living room and dinning area, removed the carpet in the basement, sold the above ground swimming pool, and have done a good amount of priming and painting upstairs. What I’m most proud of though, is that we’ve done it all ourselves! Dave has done an amazing job at getting us this far already and I’m so impressed with his dedication to building our new home. (He also can tolerate trips to Home Depot much more than I can).  I also have to give a big shoutout to my dad as well, because he flew out to Colorado to help us with the handy work and he’s been giving us all sorts of home advice along the way. It’s truly a work in progress but it’s comforting seeing progress is being made. I hope to capture as many before and after pictures as I can (it’s a little tricky though, since there are no lights in most of the rooms. The electricians come this week!). So stay tuned for more! I’ve also realized that we need to be patient with ourselves too, because it’s going to take some time until the house is in a good spot. We know it’ll get there eventually and we just can’t wait!

Also, if you have any homeowner tips for renovating or decorating, please send them our way. We’ll take all the advice we can get! 😉