Love It or Lose It

                If you read my first post, you’ll remember Randy and I have been married about 6 years.

                When we first got married, Randy already owned a small house. I mean 800 square feet small. The laundry was in the kitchen was in the living which had no dining. No garage. Just, small. And in an awful location, sitting on one of the busiest streets in our area.

                Nonetheless with a LOT of help from my awesome in-laws, we made that house beautiful. Tore out walls, laid laminate flooring, new kitchen cabinets, complete bathroom overhaul, new carpet and fixtures in the bedrooms, painted the entire interior and exterior, including the columns and porch, new furniture, new heat and air. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it. We had taken a space that wasn’t even functional, let alone beautiful, and we made it desirable.   

                

 House before we moved in

After we moved out. Like 2-3 years after. In a slightly sadder state of repair, but you can see the difference ;-)

And it was CHEAP! Boy, was it cheap! Extremely low house payments. Could not beat the payments lol. That might be what I miss most.

Anywho, we lived there about 4 months. One night we went over to my parents’ house and within 20 received a call from the fire department telling us our house was on fire. ‘I’m sorry… what?!’ So we got over there and by the time we got there the fire was out, but it didn’t matter, it was totaled. Black from floor to ceiling, except in the bedrooms- the doors were shut so were able to salvage what was in there. But the house wasn’t livable anymore, so we sold the property and got a new place.

That was 5 years ago. The house we moved to is the house we have now. It’s about twice the size of the old house. Like the first house, it was pretty ugly when we first moved in. You would have thought we were carpet salesmen for all the carpet throughout this house. Carpet in the kitchen! Scalloping on the kitchen cabinets, those lowered ceiling box-looking fluorescent lighting looming overhead, all extremely old and highly outdated fixtures, wood paneling, bulky oddly placed built ins, the laminate countertops weren’t even trying to look good… it wasn’t much to look at. At all. Nonetheless, it had good bones, and we were in love with it. I managed to find some pictures from my *COUGH*myspace*COUGH*…. Enjoy. LOL!

This is our guest room, but it pretty much is what every room in the house looks like.

The den.

 We’ve done a few renovations that really make this place look a lot better. We painted the kitchen cabinets, updated them and covered up the scalloping, tore down the lighting, painted most rooms in the house, put down tile in the kitchen and entryway and laminate flooring in the living and dining, tore down wood paneling, etc. Brought it up to date with the times lol.

We never intended for this to be our forever home. We still don’t. But like many homeowners, it didn’t take us too long before we stopped being excited for what we had and caught ourselves in a perpetual state of ‘waiting for the next house.’ Which wouldn’t have been so bad, but the more we looked forward to a new house (which we were nowhere near being able to get, mind you) the more frustrated we became with our current home. In our minds, our home could never give us what we needed in a house, so we just kinda stopped updating. Stopped looking for ways to make it work. Stopped investing in our home. After all, if we were gonna sell this place and move we didn’t want our renovations to exceed its value (<<<convenient ‘logic’). We were pretty much ready to...

 

Lorax, anyone? :)

Well, about 4 months ago Randy and I started Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. I’ll be writing a post about this later, but here’s the paraphrase…  for YEARS we were bringing home a good sized income and seeing almost none of it. Or having some of it and spending it all within the first few days of getting paid and living on ramen for the next 2 weeks lol. It took us a long time to get there, but we had finally had enough of living paycheck to paycheck.

If you don’t know how Total Money Makeover works, I would encourage you to check it out. Briefly, it’s like this: You layout all your debt, with the smallest debt/loan/whatev to be paid off first, then the next highest amount, all the way through your highest debt (your car, house, etc.). This is the debt snowball. Then you take your income, divide it up to cover your payments for the month, and whatever money you have left over, you budget it towards everything from groceries to play money, if you so choose. So once you’ve paid off that smallest debt, you take what you would have paid if you still had it and start paying that as extra on your next highest debt, and keep doing that until eventually everything is paid off.

So we did our budget snowball and have been budgeting faithfully, and we should be debt free in a little over 2 years (minus our house). 2 years! I couldn’t believe how quickly that could happen, especially considering how much debt we have. Just knowing how close we were gave me kind of a feeling of freedom, and I never wanted to go back to financial slavery again. So I found myself asking crazy questions like…

‘How long would we have to stay here before we could save [insert $ amount here] for a downpayment on the next house?’

‘If we saved [$$$] for a downpayment, and sold this house for [$$$], what kind of house could we get without really increasing our current house payment?’

‘Wait, WHAT?!!’

And just like that, we began to see the value in our home again. Our current plan is to stay here for at least 5 more years, so instead of talking about all the flaws of our home, we started asking ourselves what we could do to fix them. Not just asking- but looking for solutions. And little by little we’re finding and implementing them. So many of them aren’t even expensive things, but they’ve added so much to our home. We’ve really fallen back in love with this place. I'll be posting some pictures soon of our current and recent projects.

We’ve lived here 5 years. And we’ve wasted too many trying to live in the future, not cherishing what we have now. And we lost out, during those times, on a home that was able to offer us so much more than we were ever willing to see.

There’s a show on HGTV called ‘Love It of List It’ where David tries to sell a family on a new (to them) home to better suit their needs while Hillary comes and remodels their current home in hopes to make them stay. I think if we all approached our homes like that… like we were really trying to solve our problems and create a place that we’ll love (again), we could come pretty close. We might even surprise ourselves.

                So I’m ending this post with a challenge- what about your home do you struggle with? What’s ugly? What doesn’t work? Now, what can you do to change that? Determine that the thing can be done, then find the way. Let’s stop losing time spent in a place we could love by giving that time to dreams and wishes of more.

                What will you do with the time left in your home?

                Will you love it, or lose it?