So before I show you our first home, I think it's necessary that I share a little story of how we got here. And this white bucket, believe it or not, plays a HUGE part in our story. While the journey to our first home really starts at the beginning our relationship 10-1/2 years ago, I will spare you every single detail and back it up to the summer of 2014.

August 2014, to be exact. August 11th, 2014 to be really exact. Cole and I had the incredibly humbling conversation with my parents asking if we could move in with them to save money to buy a house. As you can imagine, at 29 years old, the absolute LAST thing I wanted to do was move back home. And it had nothing to do with my parents, they are incredible. It was just the whole "I-feel-like-I'm-failing-at-life" thing because "I'm-29-and-my-husband-is-31-and-this-is-our-reality-right-now". Moving in with your parents is really great for the savings account but kinda terrible on the ego. But, like my Dad always says, "Sometimes life's a shit sandwich and you have to take a bite." Or, another one of my personal favorites, "When one door closes, another door opens. Sometimes it's just the hallway that's a bitch." Either seem incredibly fitting given the situation. At the time, my husband was pursing a career in Firefighting. Between his GI Bill that he was getting for his Fire Tech degree, and my salary, we never seemed to have anything substantial left over at the end of the month to make a dent in our savings because, California. So, thankfully, my parents agreed to let us move in. Honestly, as much as I might have sounded like a Negative Nancy in the previous sentences, there is no way we could ever have purchased our first home if it weren't for my parents letting us come back home. We are forever and ever grateful to and for them. My parents live on a 14 acre ranch and when my sister and I were kids, they converted an old feed shed/loading dock into our dance room. It's basically a 500 square foot rectangle with commercial grade carpet, mirrors along one wall, two windows on each end of the room and a sliding glass door for egress. Growing up, it was the greatest place for sleepovers because it's a few hundred yards from my parents house, so we could stay up and be crazy teenage girls till the wee hours of the morning. Turns out it's also a great place to move back into when you're 29. Oh life, you sly dog you. Have I mentioned that it doesn't have any running water? Yeah, that is where the bucket comes in. You know, when it's 2:47 am and you wake up with the urge to pee, the last thing you want to do is walk a few hundred yards to use the bathroom. And I don't know about y'all, but the only squatting I seem capable of doing is at the gym. To be completely real, no matter how hard I tried, it would splatter up on my ankles. And let me tell you, there is no joy to be found in getting back in bed with pee/dirt splashed extremities. Nope, not fun at all. So, the white bucket became my saving grace. I can't even begin to tell you the range of emotions I would feel while sitting out there in the pitch black in the middle of the night (yes, I left the bucket outside. For some reason I just couldn't bring it inside). They ran the gamut from pity to anger to hopeless to amused to depressed to motivated. Like my Dad always said, "Great achievement comes from great sacrifice." Anyways, we did that for two years and closed on our new house September 2nd, 2016. It was a truly surreal day moving our things into our first home. And going to the bathroom in a toilet that is connected to our bedroom, I'm not going to lie, I might have shed a tear or two. For reals. I legitimately cried. Few things will ever be able to top that moment that we worked so hard for.

Now, on to the home tour!

We said we wanted Granny's house, and that is exactly what we got! 1,422 square feet of untouched, original 1962 glory. It's a perfect blank canvas and I can't wait to gut this place to it's core and build it back up again! I FINALLY GET TO BE MY OWN CLIENT AND DO WHATEVER I WANT! Excited is an understatement. I'll get into a more detailed plan for each space in some upcoming posts, but for now, I want you guys to see what it looked like before we moved our things in.

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OUR FIRST HOME