Last year in the midst of planning our wedding (what were we thinking?!), we decided to start looking for our first home together. Several people warned us about the long, heart breaking process of searching for that first place, and they could not have been more right. For about a year we consistently searched, viewed homes and had our offers rejected. Then in the midst of our search Harvey devastated our city, so while we were looking for a home, millions of people lost theirs. As our city rebuilt we tried several routes, including buying an abandoned home that was set to be demolished and having it moved to another property. This also fell through, but through this process we were able to connect with our loan officer and learn more about the 203K program, which is the direction we decided to go. Finally we found the house on King Street. It had all the character we wanted and some that we didn’t (think knob and tube wiring, wood paneling, shag carpet, termite damage, wall furnaces and window units), but we put in an offer the same day along with a letter to the owner. We were overjoyed when we heard a few days later that the owner had accepted our offer! That day began our long and current journey of fixing up our first home together on King Street.
We’re going to take you room by room as we work on our house, showing the before and after along with what we’ve done to keep things on the affordable side.
But first, a little history about our home…
What we loved most about our home is that it had been owned by the same family since being built in 1945. The King family, also the name of the street we live on, had been the caregivers of this house for over 70 years. In our letter to the owners we expressed our desire to continue to love and cherish their home and to build our legacy here as they had built theirs. We came to learn that the previous owner was quite the musician, working with artists such as Kenny Rogers and the guitarist from Led Zeppelin.
She took great care of her home and we joke a lot during renovations at how well everything is built – making it much more difficult for us to demo! With that said, we have and are keeping a lot of the original character and design of the home. We’ve only completed a few major changes such as demoing a wall to open up the space between the kitchen and dining room and adding some windows for extra light. Other than that, the small quirky corners like the built into-the-wall ironing board and stained glass windows on our front door are staying. We’re going to take you room by room as we work on our house, showing the before and after along with what we’ve done to keep things on the affordable side. We hope you enjoy reading along as we make this first space together a home that is uniquely ours. Thanks for following us on the journey.
Comments are closed.