The First Money Pit, Part 1

I've never really dedicated any time to this blog, but since I love the name I've given it, what the heck, let's give it another go!!
Well, years ago when I started this blog, Hubby & I were the owners of a lovely Queen Anne Victorian, which we'd bought when we literally were poverty stricken; newly married (2nd time for both of us) we needed a bigger house for the blended clan of rug rats & the Hubs hated living in my townhouse. He'd owned a spectacular, large historic Victorian with his ex, which she kept & I know he mourned the loss of it, so living in a newish townhouse just wasn't going to cut it. Less then 6 months after we married, he saw the Victorian we later purchased, I really wasn't for it, was in a small town I really didn't like, I hated moving my kids from the home they'd grown up in & quite frankly, was worried about being able to afford it & the work it would need. Out of the two of us, I tend to be the one who always likes to be practical & think long term & I could see that the home was going to bugger us with the amount of work it needed, not that it was falling down, but there was going to be expensive. Hubby, the more adventurous one who'd already owned old homes, reassured me that it was all doable, we made the infamous "Four year plan". ( I'll detail it further down for your amusement)
I loved old homes, Antiques..I was excited with the idea of owning my own Victorian home, I'm quite talented in design, I was going to transform it into a showcase in no time flat!! The home had many features which I loved, we were able to eventually negotiate a price we could afford. The kids would be ok with the move. I became very excited!!
Silly girl, I was so naive!!😂

I'll write about it at length in my next post, but the gist of it was that I became quite ill; I had been ill the year previously, had expected to fully recover, but instead became much sicker with complications, this was progressing while we were selling my home & proceeding with the purchase of our new home, quite frankly I thought it was a bad idea to go through with it all while I was ill, but  Hubby reassured me it would all be fine. Little did either of us know between my illness & what turned into a major clusterf%^*# dealing with the sellers, the buyers of my home, major aggravation with the realtor not doing due diligence & then finding issues with the new home we weren't aware of, because the sellers were major scam artists...just a few things🙄😫.

But we did it, bought our first house together!! Despite everything, we were so excited, had so many plans!!

Lets Give This Another Go

There is no romance in renovating a house.

Forget all the shit you read in all those renovation magazines, the photos of the happy people, the very short stories of the struggles they went through to get their dream homes.

It's expensive, messy, and can get downright bloody.

The Hubs & I will fight tooth & nail for days about stupid shit like what kind of toilet tank guts to buy.  Or whether his buddy, who's working for us gets to have a say in what stuff I want to go in MY house.

And of course,we fight about money. But that's universal, we fight about money all the time anyway.

We've been renovating this house for almost 9 years.  

I really think that we could have bought a new house for less money.

But, oh, we are supposed to be doing it because of our love for old houses.

That wore off about 8.5 years ago.

I do love old houses. Now I just love old houses that are done.  I want to live in an old house where the damn work has been done by previous owners.

The only thing I want to worry about is whether I should buy that pretty shabby chic comforter for the guest room.

But, we are both fucking crazy.  We'll keep doing this until the house is done. Then it will be time for Hubby to retire, and it's time to downsize.

Welcome to my blog.  I can't promise my procrastinating ass will post a lot of photos, but I'll make sure to vent about all the wonderfulness of old house renovation.  Maybe you can relate.