A Few Before & Afters

(long post...)

My friend, Jillian, told me, "It takes a year to move in."  When I later told this to Chris as we were moving in the upteenth box...he said, "Well, not us."

Sorry, honey.  We moved in in December and we still haven't found (let me rephrase...haven't had the complete time to look for...yes, I could look now, but I'm not good at any manual labor after 8 p.m.) his old Mac with all our pictures, my address book, a cable modem (we are paying extra each month because we checked out another one), and The Shins tickets.  We will never find those tickets.

I do have time to look at the picture files I have saved on my computer.  It is fun to see our journey...and a good bit of it is documented.  Not really pictures of us, but pictures of what we were dreaming about.  Isn't it fun to see some dreams actually manifest?

Once Chris and I decided it was right to put our house on the market, we began looking at homes with any free time we had.  Here is his dream home we drove by a million times in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta north of the city.  Let me preface that none of these homes I am going to show you were in our price range...by a long shot....we still dreamed, though.  And dreamed BIG.

How ideal...and it sits on three acres near horse farms

We really loved the idea of land and farming (we even bought a book on goat farming!)

Another neighborhood that we drooled over was Heydon Hall

this truly is country in the city.  And inside...

charm and character throughout

Some more listings I saved were:

An old farmhouse restored beautifully...

that vertical planking and furniture in the bathroom is crazy good

and another home:

We found one home at the top end of our price range with this master bath:

It sold before we listed ours.

After, we found nothing else we remotely liked.  We still felt convicted that it was right to move, so the next logical question was, "Do we build?"

We poured over plan books, and we both fell in love with this Southern Living plan here:

simple farmhouse with an awesome porch!

We found a lot and met with a builder.  He was kind and honest and told us we couldn't do it for the price.  Because most, it not all, of the building in Atlanta had stopped, supplies cost double, even triple, he said.

This builder had no reason to lie to us.  We believed him, gave up on the idea of building, and resumed our search for an existing home. 

We did, ultimately, find our diamond in the rough.  Here are a few before pictures (taken by Anisa Darnell...my friend and an awesome decorator whose house I can't wait to show y'all!)

the cooktop before we cut a see-through

Gotta love the original golden KitchenAid!

and several angles of after:

When I find the other computer, I'll post more befores!

Julie