Well... We're Homeowners!

It's been a few weeks, and if you don't follow me on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, here's the big news:

We closed on our house! As of June 26th (one day after the originally anticipated date), we signed many many pieces of paper and received two shiny sets of house keys to our very own home. The last few weeks have been spent settling in and getting to the point where the house is livable. We still have lots to do, but we've gotten a lot done and it's really starting to feel like home.

Jesse, me and our realtor, Jody at our house closing.

Proud homeowners!

We also decided on a whim to adopt a dog. His name is Clyde. He's a Border Collie / Hound / Pointer mix. He's a total goofball and has already become Jesse's best friend. He's a wonderful addition to our little family. He's won over one of our two cats, but I have hopes the second one will come along in time. She's just an old grump.

Anyhow, back to the house - I must admit, buying a home was WAY less stressful than people have told me. I think we got really lucky for a few reasons: those of you who know me in real life know that I have a bit of OCD when it comes to researching, planning and preparing (it's my job, I can't help it). That being said, it all paid off because we were prepared for the few minimal road bumps that came our way. We were also lucky because along the path of researching, we found an AMAZING realtor. He's absolutely phenomenal and I would recommend him in a heartbeat to anyone looking to buy in-town in Atlanta, specifically East Atlanta. He had the most amazing "crew" of people to utilize for all of the steps in home buying (loans, inspections, etc.). If anyone needs a realtor, I strongly suggest checking him out. Shoot me an email if you want his details.

I need to take some more better photos of the house and the progress, but here's some eye candy for you for the time being...

Adding the stylized house numbers.

Living room, mostly set up.

Relaxing in the back yard after a long day of settling in.

As always, thanks for reading!
Courtney

Hey Look, It's June! A recap of the last few months.

Well, looks like my sabbatical from blogging went into full effect... for a little longer than anticipated. Whoopsie!

As usual, when I take a long break, lot so of things happen in my real life, so I needed some time to get those things in order before I started writing again.

Let's see, where shall I start? I'm thinking a quick summary of things that have happened would be a good starting point.

I got hired full time at the ad agency I'd been freelancing for since September. This was HUGE for me. While I've loved every company I've worked for during my career for different reasons, this company is everything I've dreamed of. An amazing workspace, inspiring co-workers and projects that make me strive to always learn more and more, it truly is perfect for me. I have never been so happy and felt so accomplished at the same time. It's the most supportive experience I've ever had. Getting hired full time also took a lot of strain off of me mentally since I was always having to be prepared that things could change at a moments notice. Not that life ever guarantees things to be stable, but being freelance when I've never been comfortable as a freelancer was very taxing on me. That being said, it leads me to the second point of my summary...

Once I was hired on full time and had a stable salary, Jesse and I decided to take the plunge and start looking into buying a house. As of two weeks ago, we are under contract on an adorable mid-century atomic ranch in East Atlanta. Obviously, we're aware that anything can still happen since we're still under contract, but things are moving along swimmingly and our fingers are crossed that everything works out. Our closing date is slated for June 25th. We're absolutely elated that this opportunity came about at such a perfect time.

Those are the two biggest things that have happened recently aside from a trip we took to Palm Springs, California at the end of March to see my sister-in-law get married. That was an absolutely fantastic trip, which was filled with SO MUCH AMAZING ARCHITECTURE. Jesse and I fell in love the moment we drove into the city limits. I'll be doing a blog post sometime soon recapping that whole adventure. Such an amazing town with so many lovely people.

That pretty much summarizes everything for the moment. I'm excited to be back blogging, especially now since we're buying a house, there will be lots of home blogging to come.

Happy June, everyone! I think it's going to be a great summer, filled with new experiences, baseball games and lots of friends and family!

Holidays in Full Effect

Is it just me, or is the holiday season flying by?

Between the rush of crazy busy days and planning for my parents to be with us during Christmas, the last month and a half blew by and I feel like I totally missed Christmas. I suppose the fact that I had a nasty cold from the Wednesday before Christmas until now that is still hanging out, didn't help since I was in a Thera-flu induced stupor most of the time.

Unfortunately, we took ONE photo. That's right - a single photo. Kind of a bummer.

Regardless, I was under the impression that all went well - my parents seemed to have a great time and we had TONS of food around - Sweet hubs and I cooking our first full Christmas dinner was a success.

Now, it's time for me to go back to resting in hopes that my cold will magically disappear and I will get a ton of stuff accomplished in the next three days before we leave for our New Year's trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia.

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and will continue on to have a wonderful New Year's celebration.

Merry Christmas, from The Browns (photo courtesy of sweet hubs on Instagram).

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 4 - The Bathroom

We're now onto the bathroom in part 4 of the house tour.

I really like the bathroom - it's the first time in a while I've had a more modernized bathroom with regard to fixtures and tile, so I wanted to take advantage of that fact and use a more modern color scheme. The color the walls were painted were a bland dark tan, which just blended in with the tile and made the room look very dim and dirty.

Before:

To remedy the bland color on the walls and to give the room a more modern feel, we went with a dark, charcoal grey - Behr's Nature Retreat (430F-5). It made all of the features of the bathroom stand out and overall just cleaned up the entire appearance of the room. We are considering a new shower curtain, but since I still love our Lenox Chirp one from our previous apartment, which can be seen here in its former setting, I figured I'd stick with it till I found something I love more.

After:

Photograph of a traditional japanese tattoo by Jayme Thornton.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 3 - The Kitchen

The kitchen, while not the most impressive room in the house by far, has improved a lot with an intense cleaning, swapping out the outlet and light switch plates and just a few coats of paint. The dingy tan color definitely had to go. There isn't a whole lot to say about it, except that it does need renovations, so we're pretty limited on what we can do to improve it.

Before:

I picked a very bold green for the walls - Pesto by Behr (color number 440D-5), which happens to be one shade darker than the dining room (seen here). I really like to use shades of a few colors rather than a multitude of different colors. It makes the rooms work together rather than just be a kaleidoscope of color, which I find tends to make people feel uneasy.

The bold green made the contrast between the white trim and the walls a lot more dramatic so you didn't focus on the things we can't do much about (namely the floors and that the cabinets need repairs / replacing). We have a few more improvements that we're going to do, such as replacing the light fixture and possibly changing out the cabinet hardware, but it's pretty much where it's going to stay.

I can't complain too much - it's the largest kitchen I've ever had in my years of renting, so I can live with the less than perfect aesthetics. It does have some features I really like though, such as the original small rounded corner shelves that flank the sides of the upper cabinetry over the sink, which allow me to display my awesome set of original 1964 New York World's Fair drinking glasses.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 2 - The Dining Room

Happy October, everyone! I've been so happy to be able to comfortably have the windows open in the house lately - it has such a wonderful cross breeze! Lots of stuff coming up to do for October - sweet hubs 31st birthday, a trip to South Carolina for the state fair, a trip to the mountains, some pumpkin picking, hopefully lots of baking! I love fall - it's absolutely my favorite time of year.

Anyhow, now that I've professed my love of fall, let's move onto part 2 of the house tour - the dining room! You've already seen a sneak peek of it here in our how-to post on recovering our dining room chairs, but here it is, in full effect.

A few before shots:

And now the after:

Painting by Ashley Love

TCB Cross Stitch by the amazing Kristy Kizzee (aka Bombastitch)

Coney Island poster by Michael Michael Motorcycle

I actually quite liked the color of the dining room before, but unfortunately, it didn't go with the color palette I had in mind, so it had to go. We replaced it with a nicely pigmented, but light shade of green called Desert Cactus by Behr (color number 440D-4), which is a few shades lighter than our kitchen that you'll see in part 3 of the house tour, next week.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 1 - The Living Room

Sweet hubs and I have finally gotten to the point with the living room that we feel comfortable sharing photos of it. There's still work to be done, but we're pretty happy with the progress we've made.

Here's a before shot of what we were working with:

To those who love red, I apologize in advance, but I truly hated the color of the living room before. It was not quite brick red, and not quite burnt orange, but this grotesque hybrid of the two. It repulsed me and therefore had to go immediately after moving in.

We chose to go the total opposite of what was there previously and cool that baby down with a nice dark teal, specifically Mirage Lake by Behr (color number 500D-6). It did everything we hoped it would - made the white trim pop and made the floors stand out so much more.

See my favorite lamp by Grenkol? It was a perfect fit for the bookshelf.

Aside from painting, the house overall was in pretty great shape - we did also end up swapping out all of the outlet and light switch covers in the house. The ones originally in there ran the gamut of almond, white, and my favorite - painted over to match the wall and cement the plate in place. I can't really complain though, like I said, it was in good shape.

Now, as for things we still need to do - we definitely need a curtain solution. I hate mini-blinds, especially cheap plastic ones. Our cats apparently hate them too - our sweet little Abigail has a mission to break every one of them. We're doing pretty well so far. (Insert sarcasm here.) We're thinking of either going for roman shades with a textured fabric or a natural wood roll down - we shall see.

Another little project I'd like to tackle is putting in new window hardware. The hardware that is currently in all of the windows in the house as well as the knobs and pulls on the drawers in the kitchen are all very old and very worn down. Aside from that though, we're in good shape for having been here two months now.

One of the challenges we ran across with this room is the awkward layout. We hadn't initially noticed it when we viewed the house (not that it would have deterred us from renting it - the neighborhood and the price were too fabulous to pass up on), but it did cause us to think more than we wanted to with regard to our furniture layout. I must say, I'm really glad we decided to keep our "apartment sized" furniture. Had we purchased a larger couch, we would have had to eliminate some furniture and we just aren't quite ready to do that - we love our mid-century hand me downs!

We're quite pleased with it. I'm sure as time goes on, we'll play around with it and maybe find something that works better, but for now, it definitely feels like home.

Design in My Home Project: Budget Friendly Landscaping

When sweet hubs and I found our darling little bungalo, we fell in love immediately. It was the perfect size for us (it's a small house and coming from NYC, we didn't need a cavernous space to fill with excess "stuff".) It's not a newly renovated place, but its got a lot of charm. That also meant it needed a little elbow grease, specifically on the outside, which Jesse was itching to get his hands on. It had been so long since we'd had our own outdoor space, that doing little bits of landscaping was one of the major appeals of the house. Keep in mind, this is also landscaping from a couple of novices... the most either of us has ever really done with regard to landscaping was raking or cutting the grass. 

Over the last month, we've become best friends with our local Lowe's store. We've done little bits here and there, and finally, the front is now starting to take some shape. We didn't have a huge budget, and to be honest, didn't really want to spend a lot of money on a rental property, so I wanted to share the little things we did, that made a big impact.

First off, this was what we started with:

Full frontal of the house. Note the overgrown landscape beds and unruly, unpruned trees and plants.

Close up of the overgrown and dead leaf filled landscape beds.

Close up of the walkway landscape bed and vine impressions left on the brick.

It wasn't terrible, by any means, but it could have looked better. A lot better. So here's what we've done...

- Raked out and mulched the landscape beds. (Cost: $2.50 x 10 bags of 2.2 cu ft brown mulch = $25.00

- Sprayed down all of the sidewalks and stairs with water (Cost: Free)

- Cut the grass (Cost: Free)

- Pruned the trees and pulled weeds from the landscape beds (Cost: Free)

- Planted five ornamental grass plants (Miscanthus sinensis 'Variegatus') in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $3.00 x 5 plants = $15.00)

- Placed three solar powered lights in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $2.50 x 3 lights - $7.50)

- Planted a geranium plant and a salvia plant in two planters that we found (Cost: $9.00 for the geranium, $1.50 for the salvia = $10.50)

- Planted a small container herb garden with mint, dill, rosemary and chives (Cost: $3.50 x 3 plants, $1.25 for packet of dill seeds, $4.77 for a small bag of potting soil, $6.96 for a black heavy duty plastic urn = $23.48)

- Threw down some grass seed in bare areas on the lawn (Cost: $10.14 x 2 bags of shady grass seed = $20.28)

GRAND TOTAL: $101.76

We still have a few things we want to do to the front - the main thing being that we need to put two pieces of landscape timber to finish the front bed (you can see this on the walkway shots). Once we buy the timber, we'll be right around $105. Not too shabby!

Another project for a little later on is that we want to scrub off the vine remains on the house, but we need to figure out a strategy for that (to power wash or to scrub brush).

Here's the final product (until we decide to do more):

I love the dark brown mulch - t adds some much needed contrast to the front of the house.

Close up of one of the landscape beds.

Close up of the brown mulch.

You can see where we need to lay the landscape timber on the left side. Also, I just love the ornamental grass!

Close up of the geranium and the salvia plants.

Ornamental Grass

My sweet little herb garden. (I'm very excited about this.)