Our First Home Renovation!

In case you missed our big news (which you probably haven't if you follow me on Instagram), we bought our first home about a month ago! Annnd it's been the setting for nearly all of our nights and weekends since then. When we were on the house hunt, we knew we wanted to find a home that had good bones (such an HGTV phrase!) but needed a little love, and we're thrilled with the one we found.

We bought a ranch style home built in 1970, located in Springfield's Brentwood neighborhood. We're quite a bit further from our downtown offices, which we've become pretty accustomed to being close to, but I am unspeakably excited about living near TREES! Tall ones, too! We're really looking forward to having neighbors on our street and a few blocks away, including some great ones we're already lucky to call friends.

When we bought the house, there was wood paneling in the main living area, which we ripped out on day one and replaced with new drywall. On top of that, there was a wallpaper border in almost every single room, and some rooms even had floor-to-ceiling wallpaper! We spent a good chunk of time peeling wallpaper, and it's almost completely gone at this point. We've had to do some patching up on the walls since tearing out the wallpaper — mudding, sanding, etc., and that's what Austin's doing here.

Before we move in just a couple weeks, we're hoping to have all the walls painted (white!) and we'll be replacing carpet in the bedrooms with wood floors to match the main living areas. We likely won't get all of the floors in in time, but the look and feel of our house has already changed so much in what feels like a really short amount of time.

I'll of course share before & after photos once we've made some more progress, but I wanted to give a little look at the in-between because that's the stage we're in right now, and it's the one that sometimes goes undocumented! Figured I should highlight the blood, sweat, tears & less sexy portion. 😉

Thankfully, our hard work hasn't felt as hard thanks to all the great help we've had, especially from my father in law, Tim. A HUGE thank you to our family and friends who have been so helpful as we've been renovating and preparing to move! Whether you've texted us, brought us coffee, sat and listened to us talk about our house reno, let us borrow tools, peeled wallpaper, painted, etc. etc. etc. we're beyond grateful.

Next comes the really fun part — picking out fixtures, furniture and decor to make it feel even more "us", and I'm excited to see where this stage takes us. I've been chronicling most of this on my Instagram stories, so if you're curious to see more of our progress, you can find that on my highlights!

Oh, and if you want links to any of my outfits in this post JUST let me know 😝💕