Officially in HUGE debt! (But it comes with a sweet view)

I have become accustomed to living in places without having any attachment to them. Since graduating high school, I've lived in tons of different apartments, a few houses & even a teeny, tiny cramped dorm room. I rarely stayed in any place more than a year & even after moving to Austin 5 1/2 years ago, where I've stayed in just a few places for a few years each, I never really felt emotionally intertwined with any of them. But a few months ago, my husband & I started looking for a home to buy; a place we could become totally attached to.

Austin is a tough place for home buyers right now. Inventory is small, demand is big & prices are only going up. We also knew that interest rates were about to start rising & mortgage insurance rules were about to change. So, we needed to find something kinda-sorta quickly, but neither of us wanted to settle. My husband Andrew & I are both extremely stubborn. We both have lots of opinions & we do not always have the same way of seeing things. What I might see as a deal-breaker, he sees as an opportunity & vice-versa. But after weeks of doing tons of online stalking of potential homes, walking through quite a few & having our heart broken a couple of times, we found 'the one.'

A cute, decent-sized, fairly new, 'starter' home of sorts in deep, deep South Austin. It's got a spacious kitchen with a space large enough for a big dinning table & lots of countertops with a big 'ol pantry perfect for storing all of those wedding gifts that we were never able to break out before. The bedrooms are all comfortable size, with enough spaces for Andrew to have a game room, me to have an entire room devoted to crafting & still have a guest room for friends & family. It's perfect for our needs right now. And if we want to expand the fam later, it's flexible enough for that too. And the view; that's what really sold both of us on the house. The backyard is definitely not traditional, with no real grass to speak of, but lots of wide-spanning Oak trees that shade most of the area & a waterfall/pond that will be awesome once we get it going again.  

While there is nothing majorly wrong (thank the home Gods!) with the house, there are lots of little things that need fixing. Some purely cosmetic, some simply annoying and some just not our taste. When we started the house-hunting process, Andrew said that he was really excited to learn how to fix things & make a home unique. In the month or so that we've been in the house, we've already had some 'learning experiences.' We've done a few small projects, gotten supplies to do alot more & started making a very long, extensive list of to-dos.

Below are pictures from the first few days in our new home. Please excuse the 'mess' in alot of these photos.  We hit the ground running & started painting on Day 1.  Before I could start taking pics.

Soon, I'll be sharing what we've done so far & some of the things that are still on the top of our list.  Replacing black & blue 'marbled' handles in the guest bath may be tops.  Be sure to check back often, as I'll be writing about our home projects, tips we find along the way & more.

Welcome to our Home!

Entry Way

Not a very good picture, but this is part of our living room.  It's a good size, but a little awkward in shape!

Our dining room.  It even came with the 'lovely' leaf light fixture.

The Kitchen.  Check out all of those cabinets!

Holy pantry Batman!

Some of the trees in the backyard.  There are so many!

And this is the view just outside our back gate. So beautiful!

Stairs up to the 2nd Floor!

This will be my craft/writing room.  So excited!

Guest bedroom.  Notice the 'interesting' wood border on one of the walls.   Hmm.

Our master bedroom.  There's a sitting room to the left, leading into our big walk-in closet.

Master bathroom.  The bathtub is a-mazing.