Saturday, May 19, 2007

Happy House-Anniversary to Us!




We closed on this cozy, old house one year ago today! It's been hard work. In short, Chad and I filled in 54 years worth of wall cracks, sanded and painted every wall, painted or covered every ceiling, painted all the interior trim work in every room, gutted and remodeled the bathroom, scrubbed and scoured every dirty nook and cranny, built and filled a storage shed, hired a guy to fix the underpinning, hired other guys to build the deck and hired other guys to install a driveway. 99% of the hard work happened in the first six months. I won't lie. It was rough. Nothing that I'm willing to repeat, EVER! The daily stress combined with the kitchen housing paint supplies for over four months, meant that I ate fast food for just about every meal. Despite all the sweaty hard work, I gained 15 pounds on my short 5'2" frame. UGH. I've lost 14 of those pounds now, a measurement of life getting back to normal.

I'm glad (words can't begin to describe how glad) that we didn't move to New York City when the offer came last February. I couldn't bear to leave this home that Chad and I worked so hard to make our own.

I have to give some thanks and pay some respect to the people who made it happen.

Chad, thank you so much for being the motivator when I was a cursing, crying heap nearly immobilized by the amount of work we had to do on this house. Your "one foot in front of the other" drive got us through a major amount of work in record time, and amazingly we still like each other.

Adam Stephens, Senior Mortgage Loan Officer for Capstar Lending, thank you for making the whole mortgage process such a cake-walk! You rock! Readers in the Austin area, call Adam at 512-459-2407 when you're in need of a mortgage.

Sarita and Karen Kuykendall of Wilson Goldrick Realty, thanks for your invaluable assistance in the house search and for not sending us on our way when you heard our ridiculously low price limit for the area of town in which we wanted that rare gem of a fixer-upper.

Thanks to all of our friends who suffered through seemingly endless house conversations... yawn. Thanks to all the friends who complimented the end product. Thanks to all the friends who have spent time with us here and helped us build some great memories.

My one regret is that my dad didn't get to see the house after the hard work was complete. He and my mom saw the house before we even closed on it, before we had done anything to it. I got the distinct feeling that they were going to send the nice little men in white jackets to haul me & Chad off to the funny farm. Dad lived long enough to see photos of about half of the interior work. Dad and I shared some laughs over projects gone awry. I think that he started to understand our vision for the house and why we bought the place we did.