Let's give this a try...

This is my first post.  Welcome.  I absolutely love reading blogs about decorating, remodeling, and the overall joy of owning a house.  My husband (whom I lovingly refer to as hubs, yeah even in real life) and I were married in April of 2009.  Instead of a honeymoon, we decided to use some of that wedding cash to buy our first house.  The timing couldn't be better (who can really pass up such good housing deals, and an $8,000 tax credit to spend!) and we began our house hunt that summer.  We knew we couldn't stay in the area that were in (I love you Westchase!).  The price for houses was just a little bit over our budget (ahem...probably 3x our budget), so we decided to look north.  So the househunt began.

Let me tell you something about searching for houses in a market in which EVERYTHING is a short sale or forclosure...it is FRUSTRATING.  Yeah the prices couldn't be beat, however the houses left a lot to be desired.  Abandoned homes, smelly homes, homes with walls that were missing.   We probably looked at over 100 homes (okay, 99...I couldn't even walk through the front door of one house, it smelled so bad).  Then we found it....it was a short sale, and it was everything we wanted.  There are no other contenders to even show you here. We had heard that we would have to wait a while to hear from the bank, but we heard back the next day!

We closed a couple of weeks later, and the next day flew to San Diego for a friend's wedding, and started our first big project the very day we got back. 

Our first project?  It was a big one...taking the kitchen from this:

To this:  ???? More on that later :)

A couple more things about this blog:

1.  I really like to take pictures but I do not have a fancy camera or photoshop, so all the pictures you see were just taken with my point and shoot and have not been edited at all...yeah, I'm lazy.

2.  I'm pretty vain so you will probably see lots of pictures of me :)

3. I am a teacher and hubs is a pilot, so needless to say, we try to do things on the cheap.  However, I do have a shopping addiction and a love affair with Pottery Barn.

4.  Fixing up our house is not the only thing I enjoy doing, so expect some posts about cooking, traveling, children (not my own)....what can I say, I'm random (which I was once told is my generation's favorite word). 

5. I'm sure there's a lot more you need to know, but I'll save it for further blog posts.  Enjoy!