Our New Little Home

The time has finally come...almost 5 years in the making and saving!  We couldn't have gotten this little home without the support of our parents and our wonderful Real Estate Agent and Broker Alicia and David Duarte!  If you are ever in the market to buy, they are the dream team you want!  

We started this journey while I was on maternity leave and both girls were having several medical appointments every week!  Needless to say, we had a lot going on in those weeks/months!  How did we find this house? We started looking in the South Bay Area so we could stay close to family and friends, yet be within a "reasonable" distance from work.  We quickly narrowed down the neighborhood we wanted which gave us our top two "wants" on our wish list, location and schools.  

We looked at this house during one of first Open House weekends and immediately fell in love with it, but knew it was out of our price range since houses around here go for over $115k asking price.  We didn't want to be in that position so we let it go and moved on to look at other houses.  In the mean time, we placed an offer on another house, yet got out bid by over $100k.  The housing market around here is outrageous! 

Fast forward to St. Patricks Day, I get a call that morning from Alicia.  She said "our" house was still on the market and if we want it we need to go see it that night and put in a offer before the next morning because there was another offer!  We scurried around trying to find a babysitter and prepared ourselves to place another offer again!  We walked into the house and fell in love again, the character, the location, the schools, the neighborhood!  After what seemed like forever, we got the house, moved in (one week before I went back to work from maternity leave) and we began the weekly trips to Home Depot.  

The house was adorable and had so much character, however needed a lot of TLC.  You will see below some of the before and after pictures.  The landscaping needed some grass and demo and the interior of the house was dark.  After transforming the yard and painting just about everything on the inside (trim, crown molding, baseboards, walls, ceiling, closets) the house is now looking more like us!  We had to give up a bedroom to get everything else we wanted, however the girls are sharing a room and it's going fabulous!  Hadley questions us when Sloane is not in her crib in the morning!  The open floor plan from the kitchen to the living room is amazing!  We love our little home and I hope our girls can love growing up in it!

Before outside of home with no landscaping:

After with landscaping (lets see if I can keep these plants alive):

Before of the backyard:

After with enough space for a naked little Hadley to run around in the water: 

Living room before:  

Living room after: 

We now have plantation shutters in all the windows and of course more baby stuff on the floor

Girls Room Before: 

No joke, this is how dark it was.  Add a little pink and a lot of princess dresses...

After:

Curtains and walls are still a work in progress, but it's a start.

The whole house is a work in progress.  We always having something to do/fix now and trying to get our old furniture to work in here is driving me nuts!  Once we have everything on the wall, beds made pretty, curtains hung everywhere and pictures in our empty frames, I post a final product blog.  My mom and dad are coming out in two weeks and we plan on putting them to work and motivating us to get lots of little projects done!  Until then, you may find us at Home Depot, at our new park with the girls or swinging on our favorite swing under our new big tree!