We have a house, now what?

It's such an incredible feeling buying a house. People can try and explain how stressful yet rewarding
the process is and give you all the advice in the world but nothing compares to living through it.

We were that crazy couple who had a settlement date of the 19th December. Which meant in the weeks leading up to Christmas when everyone's panicking about what to buy people and wrapping up work before the break we were trying to pack up our lives into boxes. I was still packing boxes as we got the keys, I was still packing boxes the day after we got the keys and I was still packing boxes when Josh's awesome mates turned up with utes, and 4WDs and trailers to haul out all our stuff. We ended up moving in officially on the 21st December, having a whole bunch of family and friends come through the place on the 22nd whilst we were living amongst the boxes. Then we cleaned up our apartment from top to toe on the 23rd, handed the keys in to the real estate agent on the 24th, went scrambling through the boxes to find all the Christmas presents and wrap them and then suddenly it was Christmas. By the time we stopped to really look at what we'd been through we had already lived in our house for a full week.

And that was the point that we looked around at this house full of potential and asked ourselves - now what?

Obviously there was a whole lot of unpacking and deciding where to put all our stuff. But beyond that we walked around the rooms of the house and all through the backyard overwhelmed at the possibilities of how this house could turn into a home.

In the early days we set about fixing up some obvious stuff like changing the locks on the doors since it was tenanted before us. We hit the front garden and backyard really hard because believe it or not this backyard came complete with 10 years worth of weeds. Weeds that had turned into TREES. We also ripped down some floral green wallpaper in our hallway - don't worry I have photos so you won't miss a thing with that!

Which brings us to today. We now have a house that's ready to have work done to it. We're now comfortable enough and settled enough in our work/life routines to be able to dedicate whole weekends to working on the house. So why are we still feeling stuck?

The only thing I can attribute it to is the overwhelming range of choice. Yes choice. Faced with millions of sites full of gorgeous bathrooms and bedrooms and decks and fancy kitchens it's very easy to want to do all of it to your house. But you can't. You need to spend a whole lot of time being selective about what will fit with your style of house, your budget, your aesthetic and ultimately how you're going to live in your house.

So here we are at the start of the long weekend for Easter staring down the barrel of 4 days off, our heads swimming with ideas and asking ourselves now what?

I've got a chalkboard full of things I'd like to achieve and a vague idea of a colour scheme and while I don't have all the answers yet I'm really excited to see how our choices over the next little while settle into place. I can't wait to share it with you!

A Tour of our Abode

Here it is, our little abode! Some of these photos are from the days after moving in, others are taken on the day of our engagement party (did I mention we got engaged recently?) but you'll get the picture. So above is the outside and the front lounge room complete with open fire place.

This is the dining and kitchen (a little blurry sorry!) complete with chalkboard wall!

This here is my sewing room which is where I'll be creating furnishings/cushions/curtains for our home.

This is the backyard. The previous owners left that swing seat which I love so I'm sure you'll see a post on here where I make a nice cushion for it.

Here's the yard from halfway down and then right down the back. It backs onto a reserve so all you see is bush which is so nice. Ocassionally I sit out on that bench just to hear the bellbirds, kookaburras and the occasional owl.

And finally this is how we dressed up our yard for our engagement party. You may be able to make out the massive amounts of fairy lights strung through the trees as well as all 130 tea light candles that lit up the pathways as it got dark.

I'm documenting this all here because these are essentially our "before" photos. We have SO many ideas on how to do this place up and make it ours so it will be fun to look back on these pictures as our home emerges.

Thanks for stopping by and visiting our house!

Hey look we have a house!

Hello and welcome to our little corner of the internet! We're Jodie & Josh and we just bought our first house!

So what's so special about our house I hear you say? It's a little 3 bedroom place in the Blue Mountains just outside of Sydney. It's a 1000 square metre bush block which backs onto a reserve so you can look out and not know where our land ends and the reserve starts. From looking at the style of house, it's fixtures and character, it may be around the 1940s era and we're madly in love with it.

So this brings me to this blog. While this place is everything we'd ever dreamed of owning (in our budget) it needs a LOT of love. It came with original green floral wallpaper, lilac living areas, a kitchen that has a lot of floor space but somehow no bench space to speak of, a poky bathroom and separate toilet and a whole backyard rampant with weeds. We're telling people it's got potential.

We're dreamers. We got ideas bigger than this house can contain and it's our mission to turn it into a home. Every step along the way we're going to document our progress. The wins, the fails and everything in between. We hope that you can follow us on this journey and learn alongside us as we grow into this little house we call ours.

Thanks for stopping by!

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