A House on the Water

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve seen a few posts about the “new house”. If you don’t follow me there (you really should!),  then this might come as a surprise to you… we are moving! To a house on the water. It’s serioulsy a dream come true.

Yes. Moving again. I know. Crazy, right?!

Let’s back up a minute… A few months ago, my husband started a new job, which is about an hour away from where we are now. At first, we figured that we would stay here and he would just commute, but as time went on, it became more and more of a pain in the arse. I started looking at houses, more as a “what if” than a real possibility. But I found that if we went that far north, we could actually afford a house on the water, which has been a dream of ours since we moved to Florida. We weren’t really planning on pulling the trigger on moving until this summer, but we found this house and fell hard for it. Things moved at a lightning pace from that point, and thanks to some intense negotiations and some incredible help from my father, we are now proud owners of this amazing house!!

So, without further ado, here are some of the pictures from the listing. Or as I like to call them, the “before” pictures…

The front of the house. The peachy color makes it feel very Florida-ish. Cool fountain, huh?  Unbeknownst to us, it was electrocuting birds. Don’t worry, we got it fixed already.

The fountain view from the front door… that view… oh my. 

Entry way

View from the front door into the house – drives me nuts that the stairs don’t match!

The living room

The blue guest bathroom – blue toilet, blue tile and tub and even the window framed out in blue tile… 

The dining room – the only place, other than the entry way, that the tile was laid on the diagonal. 

The kitchen

Family room – that dog and duck tile around the fireplace is awesome, huh? 

The kids’ rooms… what a gorgeous view to wake up to!

The master bedroom 

Our closet – holy smokes, it’s huge!

Master bathroom – funny story about that tile… they either ran out of the onyx tile or they fixed a leak, but one whole wall in the shower is FAUX PAINTED to look like the tile. We didn’t catch that until after we bought it! 

The patio looking out to the pool… 

The pool gods… Poseidon fountains. One of my favorite parts of this house.

And finally, my husband’s favorite part of the house… the dock and the view… We seem to be missing a few boards, huh? LOL! 

There are a few more rooms that weren’t included in the listing, like our son’s room and the guest bedrooms, and I don’t have a good before shot of them on this computer. I’ll be sure to find some when I post the updates.

It’s a great house, and we are so stinking excited to have a house on the water to call home. But as usual, with every new house, there are so many projects to do. It makes me a little dizzy just thinking about them, but here are a few of the big ones.

• Retile/update all the bathrooms – some of this has already been done. I can’t wait to share the afters with you!
• Install a new kitchen – we went to move the cabinets to get the floors done and they basically fell apart. We have already started to plan the new space, and I’m so excited to see it come together! The backsplash is going to be amazing!
• Remove tile in the whole house. My friends think I’m crazy, but that beige generic tile was making me nuts. We found terrazzo was underneath that tile in much of the house, and we are currently getting them restored. It is stunning! There are a few rooms that didn’t have the terrazzo in them, including by the front door, so we need to figure out what we will put in those spaces. Any ideas would be welcomed!
• Re-tile, replace coping and refinish the diamond brite in the pool. It’s a leaky, ugly mess.
• Re-build the dock, and clean up our “beach”.
• Paint all the things! Every surface needs a new coat of paint, not to mention a new color.
• Landscaping – the entire back yard was completely overgrown with Florida holly, Brazilian pepper, dead oaks and other random junk from years of neglect. We’ve already gotten most of it cleared and found three huge mango trees behind all that mess! We’ve already got mangoes growing – can’t wait for them to be ripe!

As soon as I get some good progress going, I’ll share some updates. Do you want to see some progress posts, or want to wait for each room’s big reveal? Let me know what you think!

Thanks so much for coming by!

Eliesa