Our House

I have a hard time falling asleep almost every single night, because I can't seem to turn my brain off. Last night my brain was obsessing about our house and how much work we've put into it to make it ours. Of course I've put these pictures in backwards, but you can deal with it, because it's my blog, and I screwed up. :) The latest project we finished was our garden.
This is only a partial view of this section of our yard. When we bought the house, this was all grass, but it didn't have a sprinkler system in it, and I figured it would serve it's purpose better as our garden. We dug up all the grass the first year we lived here and planted our garden in that horrible dirt. We've since put in all this bark and the raised beds. James also added an ingenious sprinkler system to that side of our yard.

Before the garden was the extra room in our house! When we bought the house, it was only a three bedroom house. It become increasingly clear to us that we are going to be in this house a long time, so James became more and more obsessed with the idea that he could build an extra bedroom, from nothing, above our living room. I'm so glad he did because we love our play room with the huge walk in closet!

About a year before we built the room, we remodeled our entertainment center unit thingy. This is the "after" shot.

This is the before.

A nice improvement, don't you think?

Putting the tile in our house was one of our very first projects. Oddly enough, this is the one that James was the most scared of. There was carpet under our dinner table, and that just did not jive with me. We ripped out all the linoleum in the house, and part of the carpet, and put in this tile.

Aside from these obvious projects, we also replaced the carpet in the whole house, put a ladder up into our attic and put down boards to walk on and store all of our "junk", we put hardware on all of our cabinets, and we painted, of course.

Of course, painting this whole wall was later a waste since this is where the new room went. But it was our first painting project in the house, and we were proud of it.

You can tell that we've put a lot of energy into making our house, OUR house. We've really enjoyed all of it. I often joke about hating our house because it's a measly 1500 square feet, we owe about $40,000 more on it than we bought it for (due to the tanking economy, not our own stupidity(though that is arguable)) and we hate the HOA that is tied in with living here. But, I got a wake up call a couple of days ago.

James and I are forging forward into an investment venture. It involved meeting with a financial guru, of sorts, to give us some advice on how to get started. He laid out two different plans for us and the first one involved us renting out our house. I've always thought that I would like to move into a bigger house, with no HOA, but when he suggested that we move, I immediately knew this was not an option. I love our house and cannot foresee any immediate plans to move out of it. I think we'll make it work for us as long as we possibly can.