Six years ago Dan & I made one of the scariest, most exciting, amazing decisions of our lives.  While living in a smallish starter home with our boys {at that time Collin was nearly 5 & Evan nearly 2} my sister made us aware of a old farm house that was coming up for auction in a few weeks.  Dan & I had dreamed for years of living in the country & renovating a house into our dream home.  We went to look at the house, but we weren't sure.  The house would take major work.  Paneling covered nearly every wall & door in the downstairs, the upstairs was in bad shape {putting it nicely} with plaster cracking & falling, bad carpet covering painted wood floors... I could go on for months.  Over the next few weeks we went back & forth thinking we loved the setting & the style of the house, but didn't know if we could handle the project with 2 young children.  We went to the auction that day with much excitement & anticipation, as we had decided to bid on the property, but trying not to get our hopes too high, knowing how auctions go. Once bidding began it went so fast & evidently deep down we really wanted this house to be ours!  

Over the next few months we stripped all that paneling off the walls to find more horrible plaster & started making a plan of what to do.  Thank goodness for my wonderful brother, who is an amazing contractor, helped up muddle through all the craziness & put in hours upon hours of work helping us.  We stripped every wall in the house down to the studs, my dad rewired the entire house, we drywalled, put in new wood floors, totally reconfigured the staircase, stripped & refinished existing wood floors, Dan & my brother made all of our trim from bare wood to look like it originally was here all along. All windows & doors were replaced.  My brother made cabinets for our kitchen just like I had been drooling over in a design magazine.  We spent a solid year working days, nights, weekends to get it to the point to move in {although there was still tons to finish}.

In that span of time I went from stay at home mom to working from home freelance designing for Reminisce & finally a full time design position.   We also welcomed a new member to our family in Lydia!  Lydia was born in March, I had gall bladder surgery in August, we moved in with my sister right after that & we jacked up our house to put a new basement under it!  It was such an amazing, stressful time!  I really thought I could kill Dan for wanting to do that at that time with a new baby, but I went with it. Now I'm so glad we have the basement! It's a great place for us all to go & hang out or where the kids can go & run around when the weather isn't good.

Two summers ago we tackled yet another huge project... new roof, new siding, addition to Lydia's room & my favorite... the huge wrap around porch!!! It is our favorite place to be in the warmer months. Truly wonderful...

It's so amazing to me that all the years we've dreamed of what we wanted in a home, that we're slowly, but steadily making it there... to our dream home. We love everything about being here & raising our kids here.  We enjoy finally having a home where we can have friends & family join us & enjoy it here as well. There is still so much to complete, to change, to fix, to paint, to build, to improve, but we're doing it together & we are thankful every day for what we've accomplished so far!