Looking Back: Before/After Fun

I can’t believe that we had our two year house anniversary yesterday.

There was a lot of drama leading up to the purchase of this house. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version, but you’re welcome to go back and read through the archives for the full nitty-gritty. I worked at a job for 6 years when I heard that I may be losing it. At that same time, I also happened to be pregnant with Jack. Oh, and we had our townhouse on the market for over a year and had FINALLY gotten an offer. So there we were, townhouse sold, pregnant, jobless and moving into a rental house owned by my parents.

A little bit of stress… right?

We were incredibly lucky though – I ended up keeping busy with freelance work and landed a job that started just 4 weeks after my last day at my previous position. After a couple weeks at my new job, we restarted our search for the perfect home… and found one on Christmas Day. We put our contract in on New Year’s Day, went to settlement on January 27, 2012.

I started painting my first room that Saturday. While I was almost 8 months pregnant.

A few days later my pregnancy became a bit more complicated when I received a double diagnoses of gestational diabetes and cholestasis.

Just 15 days after we signed the contract for our house I went into early labor at 31 ½ weeks of pregnancy. When they told me that they were going to try and stop my labor and keep me in the hospital on bed rest, I told them that we had just moved and I need to go home and unpack.

I remember I was very upset that the crib was in pieces.
And I had more rooms to paint.

After hours upon hours of the doctors trying to stop my labor, Jack was born on February 15, 2012. Just 19 days after settlement. And the house was a mess.

Leaving the hospital a couple days later, while Jack had to stay in the NICU was one of the hardest things I’ve ever dealt with in my life. So, each day I would throw myself into house projects in morning, scrub the paint off my hands at the NICU scrubbing station each afternoon and spend as long as possible just staring at Jack through the walls of the incubator. Travis would work a full day and then join me in the hospital. Sometimes we were allowed to hold Jack and sometimes I was only able to poke a finger in to touch his soft skin.

Oh and I licked him.
Because he was mine and I could.

Then, when we were so tired that we couldn’t stay for another minute, we’d make the hour long trip home and I’d wake up the next day and do it again.

Turning our house into a home was the only thing keeping me sane.

Over the past two years, I’ve done more house projects then I can count. I can truly say (even though I’ll never be DONE) that our house feels like a home.

So each Thursday for the next month or so, I’ll be sharing the before and after of each room. Each before picture will come directly from the listing photos of how we first saw our house. Each after photo is the actual NOW that we are living in.

I hope you enjoy them!

Oh, and if you have been reading this blog so long that you were reading along when I was going through all the drama, leave me a comment. I’d love to know if there are any long, LONG time readers!