New House Update & A New Blog Series!
Whew! The last three weeks have been quite a whirlwind. If you've been following my blog for a while, you know that we purchased our first home at the end of April! It's a very exciting and busy time for Anthony and I. A couple of weeks before closing, I had an inkling that I should take a planned break from blogging so I could focus on tying up all the loose ends with our home purchase and moving, but I didn't WANT to take a break! I thought I could just push through and be able to continue posting 2-3 times per week like I've been trying to do for the last several months.
What I learned was that if it's time for a break, a break will happen whether you "decide" to take one or not.
I wish I would have given you all some forewarning that I would be taking a three week hiatus, but because of my own stubbornness, it was more of a snowball effect than an intentional decision...
But things are starting to slow down a bit, and we now have internet set up at the new house so I am back with some updates! Make sure to read to the bottom of this post for an announcement about a brand new blog series.
Since I last posted...
My friend, Jamie moved to York! Jamie is one of my best friends from college and we are so excited to have her and her sweet pup, Annie staying with us for the next month or two! Jamie started her new job here on the same day we were scheduled to close on our house, but that didn't end up happening...
We had to reschedule and close two days later because the listing agent and sellers didn't have the deed ready, which we discovered after we had already been sitting at our lawyers office signing papers for a half an hour. It was frustrating for sure (especially because they were the ones who set the closing date!), but I didn't get upset about it. For those of you who didn't know, we purchased a house that was in foreclosure.
The plus side is that we got an amazing house for an amazing deal (the listing agent was unaware that there was a three car garage on the property and that the heating system was updated from oil to gas in 2012) but the downside was that every step in the process of purchasing this home took 2-3x as long as it should have because the bank who owned the property, the law office working for them and the listing agent were so unorganized. We decided the day we wrote our offer to just adopt a "go-with-the-flow" attitude because we were sure there would be many issues we would have to resolve before we got to closing day. And we were right! I'm planning on sharing more about our home buying journey in a future blog post, but suffice it to say that if we had to draw a line chart of our progress over the last several months it would look something like this:
Now that we are at least partially moved into our new house, I can say that it was 100% worth the wait and trouble. For the last two mornings that I've woken up on a mattress on the floor of what will become our guest room, I've just been so gloriously happy and proud that this ginormous, dirty old house is ours. I take Annie outside with me to get the mail every morning to the sound of birds chirping, thinking to myself how incredibly fortunate I am that we could make our dream of homeownership come true. I feel like a Disney princess, I really do.
If you follow me on Instagram, you've gotten a sneak peek into what I've been up to these last few days. While I would love to roll full steam ahead into decorating, we have the very important steps of cleaning and painting to take care of first.
It will be a while before I have any "after" photos to show you guys, but in the meantime, I've decided to start a brand new blog series but I'm looking for a certain type of reader/volunteer to help me start it off...
Are you feeling stuck when it comes to decorating your home?
Is there one room in particular that you just can't decide what to do with?
Would a little professional advice be all that you need to break out of the frustration and kickstart your decorating project?
If you answered yes to these questions, then I need your help.
For the next six weeks only, I will be running a blog series called "Reader Design Dilemmas" where I will focus sharing creative solutions to the struggles you're having with your home decor. If you are one of the lucky readers to have your room selected, you'll be getting professional interior design advice FOR FREE! And the rest of us will get to learn from your project and work through common issues that we all run into when we try to decorate our homes.
Here's how it works!
- You submit 1 photo of a room that you need help with, along with a link to your Pinterest profile, a short description of your style and the problem you are having with decorating this room.
- I'll review submissions and select ONLY 6 Design Dilemmas to tackle, creating a drawing or collage (with sources!) to illustrate my design solutions.
- I'll break down the Design Dilemma and share my solutions with a weekly feature on my blog!