Our First House

Welcome to our blog! We have just purchased our first home and are embarking on a major project to renovate and update nearly every part of it. We decided it would be fun to start a blog to track our progress, share the experience with friends and family, and have a way to look back on how far we've come. I have a feeling that at some point, when I feel like this process is never going to be over, I will need a reminder that we are actually making progress!

So here it is: our first house.

It was built in 1969 and has been owned by the same family since it was built. They have taken meticulous care of it, but have not done very much updating in the last 40+ years. The couple who owned it recently passed away and we purchased the home from their two sons, who are in their 70s!

It is in Vestavia Hills, which is the community where I grew up. It has a great school system, so this is a house we can stay in for years to come if we so choose :) It is in a wonderful, quiet neighborhood, on a street that ends in a cul-de-sac. It is about a half-mile from a pretty little lake with a walking path that has ducks, swans, etc. Here is our street:

We've been house searching since late Spring/early Summer. A lot of our search was done long distance while we were in Charlottesville, with help of my parents. We closed on the house on August 26th, and some of our family helped us move our stuff out of storage and into the basement of our new house. We are living in my parents' basement and storing everything in the basement of our new house until we finish the renovations and can move in.

The house has three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, and a half bath in the full (mostly) unfinished basement downstairs. It has a two car garage and small deck off the back. It is actually on two lots, so we have nearly 3/4ths of an acre of land. Most of the back is pretty heavily wooded, and has stairs and a series of small decks down the hill and into the woods in the back. Although it goes down hill not too far behind the house, it then flattens out and has quite a bit of flat land that ends in a creek in the back. Our plan is to eventually clear out the flat part so that we can have an open yard by the creek. I'll include pictures and a full "before" house tour in the next post!