Before Pics of Kitchen

Today our contractor and project manager came to the house, did a walk through, and began to pull together the timeline for our project.  Yay!  Looks like the projected finish date is March 2, so actually sooner than I expected.  Wanted to post some better pictures that show the kitchen now, so y'all will be able to see the changes as they happen.  Sorry for the poor quality of pics...can't find my camera cord so these are some quick pics from my phone.


This is what is supposed to be the dining room, but is now acting as a holding room for our washer/dryer as well as a makeshift kitchen until the reno is over.  The fridge will be moved to the space between the windows tomorrow.

Next is the butler's pantry area.  And as mentioned before, the butler's pantry will be staying!

Here are a few different shots of the little bitty kitchen (Milo wanted to make an appearance and say Hi)

In the left of this picture, that is the pantry.  The plan is to widen it and create a built in for the fridge to get it out of the middle of the room!

And lastly, a picture of the beautiful floor :)

Will continue to update as frequently as I can over the next few weeks, we are so excited to get things going!!

Pics :)

So here it is.....our first house!  These are the photos from the real estate site, I promise I will update with our own pics when things get a little more settled.  It is a bit of a fixer-upper, but just felt so right to us.  We have already started a list of projects that we will work on as we have the time (and money)!

 The view from the street:

The living room:

The dining room:

The butler's pantry (it is staying after renovation):

Tiny little kitchen:

Sunroom:

Guest Room (double doors are between the bedroom and the sunroom):

Guest bathroom (has tub/shower that you can't see in the picture):

Master bedroom:

Master bath (bad pic of shower, will update when I can):

Unfinished attic - plan to finish in sometime in the future:

Backyard (Yes it is large, but not as big as it looks in picture!  But it is fenced in):

And It Begins....

As most of you already know, Patrick and I just bought our first house!  We have decided to stick around Atlanta for a little while longer.  :)  This is my first attempt at blogging, so please be patient over the next few weeks as I try to figure all this out.  Since our family and so many friends live in other areas, I thought it would be great to have this way for everyone to stay up to date on our lives, and the progress on the home.

If you would like to see how Patrick and I got to this point, please see the “About Me” section to the right.  But I will go into some detail into our home buying process for those who are interested!  It all started on September 7, when we met with Nia Knowles for the first time.  She soon became our choice as our agent, and we couldn’t be happier with that decision!  We looked at around 10 homes (maybe more) between September 21 and October 12, when we placed an offer on our house.  Yay!  The whole process of finding a home went much faster than Patrick and I expected, but we couldn’t pass up this house!

Finding the house was the easy part;  the hard part was dealing with the lenders (we are working with Wells Fargo).  First let me explain to you that the house was built in 1935 and has a very outdated kitchen;  from the beginning we planned to renovate it.  So we chose to do a 203k loan, which allows us to combine a renovation loan into our mortgage as one larger loan.  We thought this would be a simple process, but we were wrong!  It could have been much easier, but our lending agent/mortgage associate dropped the ball many times in the process, extending what should have been a 45 day process into something that lasted nearly 80 days.  We ended up closing on December 30, and moving on December 31, which barely got us out of the apartment by our January 1 deadline! 

But it was all worth it, because we spent the last night of 2011 in our new home! <3

Pictures to follow in the next post, and in the next few days I will try to post some more details about the renovation.