No Where to Go but Up: Our Forever Home; the Before Pictures.

Hello again lovelies!

When I last left you, we had just found our forever home. After looking at a few duds and one we loved but was already sold...we were taken to the place we are currently in.

After a walk through and an inspection, we purchased a nice mobile home in the same town we already lived in. Dawn and I talked extensively about moving out of state, ( I wanted to go to North Carolina and Dawn wanted to go to Arizona or New Mexico, but I just can't leave my Mom and teens behind. Every family member Alex knows is here, and as Mom is the only grandparent she associates with, it would have devastated her to leave her grandmother and siblings behind. So we stayed. ) but we decided to stay here instead.

There were some things that needed to be fixed right away, like a crack in the spare bathroom toilet tank that caused water damage to the floor behind the toilet, and replacing the fridge, ( which worked fine except the ice maker was shot. We gave it to a friend who did not require an ice maker. ) most everything else has been working on minor stuff like getting decor and furniture and soon we will begin painting the inside. We had a screened in front porch built, which is where I spend most of my free time when I am not FREEZING TO DEATH. In FLORIDA. In MARCH....but I digress.

Here are some shots of the house and yard when we first got it, when it was mostly empty. Please forgive the quality of some of the pictures, as they were taken my by awesome ( but brand new to me at the time, meaning I had no clue how to really operate it, lol. ) new smartphone. ( Also, I used to roll my eyes at people who said they could not ( or did not want to ) live without their smartphones, but I totally get it now. Internet, texting, phone, camera...all in one tiny computer/phone. Love it, and if not for it I would hardly ever be online at all, lol. )

Ready?

Let's start with the outside...

It is a pretty and spacious yard, and we have been hard at work raking the many years of deep leaf cover up and burning it, planting grass seed and planning a ground breaking for the garden. It looks a lot different now.

Let's move in to the living room from the front door...

This room is shaped really oddly, but it is sooo much bigger than what we had. Also, a fireplace! ( Which I have not used until today since we moved in. )

Hang a left out of the living room and you come to the kitchen, dining, and laundry area.

The double doors are where the washer and dryer go, and I no longer have the stove and fridge in these pictures, but you have to wait for the "After Pictures Post" to see them!

Funny story. I have long bemoaned the fact I did not have a dishwasher, and wanted one more than anything. I thought my Mom was nuts for using hers as storage for stuff. I was over the MOON when I saw this place had a dishwasher, and I gleefully loaded it for the first time. It took forever and I could have done a faster and better job washing by hand. I loaded it the second time, and decided we did not even dirty up enough to warrant running it, and as it is an older model it was probably an energy hog. So now, we still hand wash and my dishwasher holds my metal bakeware and I keep some cooking odds and ends and the pot holders on the top rack.

Mom, if you read this...no saying " I told you so!"

After the kitchen we will head to the master bathroom and bath.

For some reason the pics make the master bedroom and bath look tiny, but they are actually huge. My bedroom now has a king sized bed, ( oh yes, I told you I was going to have a king sized bed one day and I meant it, lol. ) two chest of drawers, two bedside tables, and still have plenty of room to walk around. These pics are before we gave everything a good scrubbing ( we bought from a small private company that sells a lot of repos, which is what our place was ) and before we moved anything but a few boxes in. It looks so different now, and we are not even close to done yet!

My bathroom has a garden tub, as you can see, and a ton of mirrors, which was a little scary in the middle of the night when we would get up to use the restroom.

Now it is time to see Alex's new digs.

Again, it is bigger than it looks. The walls are a light blue, ( which we are changing ) and even though the room is bigger than they look, once we got a bunk bed and put her desk, toy boxes, and clothes cabinet in there, I admit there is not much room left. Her bunk bed is enormous.

Up next is the spare room, which I also use for my " Get away from everyone and chill or work on stuff " room.

At the time, it was the room where we took all the boxes as we brought stuff over, before we got smart and rented a dang U-haul.

We also enlisted the help of my son and future son in law to load and unload for us, and they made very quick work out of it.

Last but not least, we have the spare bathroom. This one has pics of the old bathroom as it was, then a pic of my nephew ripping the floor out to replace the rotted floor and cracked toilet, and this is the one "after pic" that I am posting. We are not done in there, we still have to paint, but with the exception of a bathroom rack over the toilet, this is pretty much what it looks like now.

Also, having TWO bathrooms is the BEST!!

There you have it! Our new forever home before we moved all our crap in and bought NEW crap! Heh.

The place is a work in progress, but we are having a really good time making the house a home. I admit that it still does not seem real to me at times. I still feel like I am visiting someone else's much nicer house. That is probably because we spend more time on working on the house rather than living inside the house. We are working on that too.

We have a home. No rent. No Mortgage. Ours, free and clear. I do not think I could ever find the words to describe just how amazing and happy I feel about that.

The "After Pictures" will roll out in multiple posts most likely. We are painting the whole house different colors and will be rearranging things as we go...so I will post those as I get sections finished. I will give you a sneak peek at our living room though. This is what it looks like now, as we have not decided on a paint color scheme yet.

Now I finally get to start writing about the things we have been doing since we moved! Stay tuned for those posts!

Thanks for sharing my new home with me, folks.