My husband and I bought our first home in October of 2009 and after three weeks of cleaning it up, painting and getting a few things fixed up we moved in. The house is a 1947 tract home that was bought by a man when it was still a dirt lot and the house wasn’t even built yet. He lived in it until 2007 when he passed away (in a hospital) and his brother took it over to try and fix it up and sell it. As you can imagine, the brother and the brother’s wife were no spring chickens and very little had been done to the house in terms of improvements in the past 60 years so the 80-year-old couple finally got around to selling it in 2009, still with very few changes.

This is what the house looked like when we moved in. There are over a dozen rose bushes and various other plantings, most of which were overgrown when we moved in. But that was the least of our worries! We had windows to replace, walls to paint, floors to sand, kitchens and bathrooms to update, plumbing to have redone and electrical to update. When we bought the house, if you turned on a light in one room, walked into another and turned on another light, the lights would dim.

Two years later and lots of work our house now looks a little different:

Being a home owner with a fixer-upper is no easy task but it is very rewarding. To see more before and after pictures of our house please click here and read more!