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Documenting Life as We Knew It | Renovation Journal
Documenting Life as We Knew It I tried to figure out the best order in which to present our renovation and have decided that as long as it makes sense, I’m going to take you through the project just as we lived it. That means there will be some jumping around and coming back to projects, and waiting right along as we did to get to a “finished” project! We diligently documented our progress with a gazillion pictures and my renovation journal. Every once and awhile, I will give you a little “Break” from the actual projects and post an image or entire post, like this one. Just images I…
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Hardwood Flooring; Getting Acclimated!
How Hard Could It Be? Thanks for visiting again! We’re going to talk hardwood flooring today. But first, it dawned on me after I wrote the last post that I hadn’t really talked about the overall renovation game plan. I eluded to it but just to clarify, this renovation is nearly all DIY! Yep, we’ve done most all of the work ourselves and even though it has been a challenge, seeing each project come together has been very exciting. We weren’t too terribly sure of where we would get all of the spare time to fit-in the many projects we had planned and run two businesses at the same time,…
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Flooring Dilemma: Take It or Leave It?
Flooring Decisions During the three plus months of waiting to close on the house, we developed so many iterations of our renovation plan. And the flooring was probably the aspect that changed the most. Here’s what the entire thought process looked like, as best as we can recall: And I should divulge now that given an unlimited budget, our first choice would have been to do all new hardwoods throughout the entire house but we were really trying to conserve funds and live with certain things until a later date. The first plan was to replace all of the carpeting because it smelled so bad and we literally starting pulling…
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Let the Renovation Begin!
Okay, let’s jump into the first project: the basement. Now we have an unfinished basement which wouldn’t normally warrant a top-o-the-list priority, but let’s just say it was less about the basement and a lot more about ridding the house of mice! You see, the house sat empty for about 7 or more months and those little critters pretty much took over! We quickly learned that there were some wide-open thoroughfares in the basement which led to the slight infestation. And I’m talking, you could see daylight thoroughfares! Mice were like “Woohoo, party at The Christmas House!!!” We first brought in an expert to give us recommendations on how to…
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In the Beginning…We Needed a House (Part 2)
Hey there, thanks for joining again! So in my last post, we were getting ready to begin the journey to finding our Young Victorian in the Colorado mountains. But first I had to share some of our backstory and it was a bit of a downer. But it was also an incredible opportunity for growth and lessons learned and for that we are grateful. And now it’s time to focus on how we stumbled upon what we’ve dubbed Annabelle’s Place! Getting Ready to Buy! We left off with us moving to an apartment for what we thought would be just a few short months. We diligently did everything we could…
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In the Beginning… We Needed A House (Part 1)
Ah, thanks so much for joining us! So I thought it best to start in the beginning, way back in mid-2015 when we set-out to find the home of our dreams! While we had been living in Colorado since December of 2010, we had only been renting and while we were very fortunate to live in two amazing rental homes over the course of 4 1/2 years, we were desperately itching to buy our own home again. Rent First, Buy Later But that’s not quite the beginning, I really should back-up and talk about why we had to rent homes in Colorado initially. That discussion is a difficult one, even…
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Introducing a Young Victorian
Starting off this brand new blog with a project that is literally consuming all of our time these days, months, and now years! We’ve documented the renovation of a Victorian home we purchased in the mountains of Colorado in late December, 2015. This home is only 20 years young but it was originally built to look like a much older home. While she has some beautiful characteristics of a much older home, she unfortunately had some not so great characteristics of a much older home too. There was sadly a lack of maintenance to this poor little lady but fortunately, we were able to look past her “issues” (and very…
