Our New house

I love to re-invent things. Whether it be an ugly chair, or a desk that has seen better days. Which is why, when we were looking for a new house, I didn’t shy away from the ones that weren’t “pretty”. My husband wanted a house with more than a quarter of an acre, and in this area of South Florida, it’s not a common thing. We wanted to stay in the area because we didn’t want to move the kids out of their schools, and it’s close proximity to my husband’s workplace. For more than a year, we looked at every single house in our price range that was sitting on at least an acre. After a year of looking and having a few deals fall through, we found a pretty piece of land, not too far from “civilization” and on FIVE acres of land! Although it was in decent shape, we found there were a lot of problems that we didn’t know about. For instance, that the water system didn’t work (in this area, we have a well and a septic tank – oh, how I miss city water!). Or that the previous owner, who was a plumber, just “rigged” everything electrical instead of fixing it. The shower is falling apart, the pool has a leak and when it rains, the front porch gets flooded completely because there are no gutters on the house. I could go on, and I will, but you get the point.

I took these pictures on the day we moved in. They aren’t well lit, as it was pretty dark when I took them, but you’ll get the idea.

Our new house on day one. It was boring and blah. Not at all the tropical oasis people think of when you think “Florida”.

Front Door Entrance Area

View from the front entrance into the living room

 

We have a fireplace – in South Florida…

 

Master Bathroom

Master Bath – Shower – or should I say water dungeon?

You can see into the master bedroom in that picture. The entire house was cream colored, even the ceilings, except for the kids’ rooms. It was the blandest of the bland.

Teal and Red in what is now my daughter’s bedroom. I can’t even imagine how that came about.

 

My son’s room was cornflower blue

I was pretty excited about the size of the laundry room, but that was about the only thing.

Laundry room, looking into the hallway.

Laundry room looking at the garage door

Where did they fold clothes? We almost immediately took that big cabinet out and built a table/cabinet.

This bathroom was completely builder’s grade everything, just like the rest of the house.

One of the first projects I did was to paint the bathroom and the cabinets. It’s much better with just the addition of paint and new textiles.

Standing in the hallway, looking into the laundry room and my daughter’s room

 

Pool Area

The whole back patio and the area surrounding the pool is kind of dirty and moldy and gross. We plan on changing that soon.

At this point, we are moved in, but still trying to finish the painting and decorating. Color choices have been harder to make since we decided to make this house lighter and brighter than our old one, and our existing furniture is mostly dark. Ugh! Just weeding out stuff that we brought from the old house that doesn’t fit in this house, like pictures and knick-knacks, is taking a lot of time. I’m trying to re-imagine everything before making the decision to pass it on to Faith Farm, Goodwill or the trash. We’ve come a long way, but oh boy, we are far from done!