My First Renovation Friday, Jul 24 2009

So the default blog theme is uuuuuugly, but I know absolutely nothing about web design (I’m a photographer, not a graphic designer…while I can edit the heck out of some pictures in Lightroom and I’m not too shabby at Photoshop, I’m not your girl when it comes to the ‘net).  I hope to get this thing looking nice and pretty before long, but in the meantime I was just browsing through some of the WordPress themes and settled on the Fleur-de-Lis, since this is Louisiana and all.  I think the text looks really cluttered but I don’t know what to do about it.  

This is only the first of many renovations (both online and on the homefront, I’m sure), so stay tuned!

Leave a Response »

 

Today’s Places Friday, Jul 24 2009

Keith gets off work early on Fridays so we set up appointments to look at two properties this afternoon.  They’re both about 45 minutes from where we live now, and I’m really excited about them because they’re both over 100 years old!

Here’s the first one:

It was built in 1905 and has 3 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms.  It’s about 2500 square feet and sits on four city lots, and it was part of a recent holiday tour of homes in that area.  It has all the original wood floors and has a balcony off the upstairs master bedroom.  There’s a matching workshop in the backyard.  I think it’s absolutely precious!  We’re not too sure about the neighborhood and school districts, or about how much work it needs (if it’s just cosmetic or structural stuff), so those are things to ask today.  The price is good, though, and in fact it just dropped $10,000, so hopefully the house is as good as it looks.

And here’s the second place:

This house was built in 1909 and is located in the town’s historic district and is on the National Register.  It has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and is about 2000 square feet.  The home was completely gutted, rewired, replumbed, and remodeled a few years ago.  It only sits on one lot, but it does have a carport.  We know the neighborhood is good, although I don’t know what school district it’s in.  The third bedroom is described as loft-style, so I’m interested in seeing the layout.  The price of this home is comparable with the first and both are well within our budget.

We’ll see how it goes!  I’ll be back tonight to post pics and impressions.

One Response »

 

Finding a Place Friday, Jul 24 2009

As I’ve said, we’re looking for a house, and the house-hunting (and then house-decorating) process is the whole focus of this blog.  So I guess I should start off by telling you a little bit about our situation…

Keith and I met in June of 2005.  He was living with his parents in his hometown, and I was living in a small duplex in a town about an hour away.  In September, he moved in with me (shhh, don’t tell my grandma!) which was awesome, because we got to see each other a lot more frequently and he paid half the rent.  We got engaged in February 2006 and got married on August 5th of that year (yeah, we move fast).  Things were great for a couple months, until the end of October when I got a letter from our landlords telling us that they were raising the rent by $200, starting the next month.  Since we were already paying way too much for a sorta crappy little duplex, I was very upset about that and went to discuss it with my landlord.  He was kind of a jerk, and we had words (that’s the ladylike way of saying that there was yelling and swearing involved), and in the heat of the moment I told him Keith and I were moving out.  Which was fine, except that we didn’t really have anywhere to go.  We quickly looked for apartments and didn’t find anything suitable, so we decided to buy a house.  We loaded up all of our stuff and moved in with my mom for a few weeks (gotta love being a newlywed and living with your mommy), and I started furiously house hunting.  Amazingly, I found a cute little 2 bedroom Craftsman in my hometown, about 10 minutes from my mom’s house and about 20 minutes from the town where Keith grew up.  The price was right (great, actually), and we jumped on it.  Less than a month after we started looking, we were signing the papers on our very own first home.  I call it our Christmas present to ourselves, since we closed on December 22nd.

Things have been great since then.  We love our little house – it’s cute (note to self: post pictures), we didn’t need a lot of furniture to fill it up, and it’s easy to keep clean.  We’re living in my hometown, which is nice because we have a lot of friends here and our families are close.  But with a growing toddler, a Great Dane, and an ever-increasing pile of stuff, we’re kind of bursting at the seams here, and it’s time to move on.  So here’s what we’re looking for:

• At least 3 bedrooms (preferably 4) and 2 bathrooms.
• We would like a living room and then a separate room for a den/office.
• Same general area, but a bigger town.  We definitely want to stay in southwest Louisiana, but there are a few towns around here that would be better as far as schools, entertainment, shopping, etc, but still close enough to our families, friends, and Keith’s job.
• Keith wants land.  At least 10 acres (he says he wants cows. WTF?).  I couldn’t care less – 1 acre is plenty for me (my rationale is that it’s just more crap to take care of, and I’m not a huge fan of yard work).  This point is pretty negotiable.
• I would like an older home or something with architectural interest.  No cookie cutter houses for me!  I’d love something with some great Southern plantation-style elements or something Victorian.  Keith doesn’t care, he just doesn’t want something that’s so old that we have to completely re-do everything.
• On the renovation issue, if the money’s right, we don’t mind doing some work (both of our father’s are contractors, so re-doing the floors, cabinets, tile, drywall, etc is not a big deal for us) and of course we’re planning to have to paint and customize.  We just don’t want to pay a ton of money for something that we’ll then have to invest a lot of time and work into.  Something that just needs cosmetic updating would be best.
• Not huge!  I may be the only person in the country like this, but I’m not a fan of hugemongous houses.  I definitely want more space than we have now, but anything too big is just a pain to clean.  Not to mention keeping up with a toddler in something the size of a museum…can you imagine?
• Trivial issues: I’d like wood floors, nice countertops, tall ceilings (I’m about 6′ and Keith is 6’6″, so doors he doesn’t have to duck under are a big plus), and a nicely landscaped yard with trees.

So there ya go!  We have the towns we’re interested in, we have a pre-approval from the bank (so we know our budget), and we have a few ideas about what we’re looking for.  We’re both pretty enthusiastic and not afraid of projects, so we’re excited to see what’s in store for us.  We’re looking at two houses this afternoon…I’ll post about those after breakfast!

Leave a Response »

 

My Place on the Interwebs Friday, Jul 24 2009

The title of this blog is My Place in Life, which sounds pretty heavy and philosophical and whatnot.  Except in this case, it’s not so much about introspective musings concerning who I am and what I want out of life and what I should do with my future (although those are all important things, to be sure…I just don’t smoke enough weed to care), and more about a literal place.  A physical location.  You see, we’re house hunting (and then we’ll be decorating), and I intend to blog about it.  I’m picturing an eventual header design with some sort of house illustration around the words “My Place”.

I’ve wanted a blog for several years now (the wannabe writer in me craves an outlet), and have even made a few lame (failed) attempts to start one.  The problem is that I’ve lacked focus.  I never knew what to write about.  What should the central theme of my blog be?  I’m a mom, but I didn’t want to be just one of the million other mommy bloggers out there (and let’s face it – unless you’re MY mom, reading solely about my kid and family? yawn).   I’m a photographer, but it’s just a side job, and besides that I already have a blog on my business site.  I’m not well-informed enough to write about politics or current events, and I don’t care enough to write about Hollywood (although it should go without saying that celebrity-bashing is always welcome).  I have my funny moments, but I’m not delusional enough to think that anyone would tune in daily for my particular brand of humor.  And while I suppose I could just create one of those “This is what we did today.  This is what I think about XYZ.  I like these shoes.” type blogs, for the love of Gawd (that’s God in Southern, in case you were wondering), haven’t Twitter and Facebook given us enough of that sort meaningless knowledge about other people’s lives?  (And before you get your panties in a bunch, I’m a card-carrying member of the tweeting and status updating club too.  I just don’t think the world needs to know even more about what I ate for breakfast or how my times my son refused to take a nap this week.  My life’s really not that interesting.  It’s okay, I’ve accepted it.)

So since I was never able to get the blog thing rolling myself, I had to find other ways to waste time on the Internet (if you think I would use my extra time to do something productive, like catching up on my Photoshop work or cleaning house, you obviously don’t know me), and I turned to other people’s blogs (thank Gawd for those of you who are more inspired and less lazy than I am).  For  a while it was wedding blogs, and then throughout my pregnancy and after my son’s birth, it was mommy blogs.  But in the past few months, that’s gotten rather old (although I still read my favorites daily, like Rebecca Woolf of Girl’s Gone Child and her sister blog over at Babble, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s Baby on Bored, the always-inspiring Heather Spohr of The Spohrs are Multiplying, and the fun and craziness that is the life of Sandi Benson and her cast of fourteen! kids).  So in searching for new time-wasting reading material, I ran into the home-decorating blogs.  I’m not sure what started it, but I think the first one I found was Young House Love (formerly This Young House).  I spent several days marveling over John & Sherry’s home transformation and enjoying all of their advice (their writing is entertaining too).  A link on their site led me to Dusty of All Things G&D, who is pretty much my idol in this new blogging endeavor, since she started out by blogging about her home and then managed to work in things like family news, recent events, recipes, etc.  That’s kind of what I hope to eventually do here, assuming that I get some readers and stay motivated to keep writing (I will…I WILL!).

Some other home/design/decorating bloggers I love are:

• Nicole at Making It Lovely
• Freckles Chick
• Kate at Centsational Girl
• Lauren and Courtney at Kelly+Olive
• Jessica at How About Orange

So yeah…I’ve been reading all this stuff, and we’re about to begin house hunting (we’re starting off by looking at two properties TODAY actually), and I just thought “Why not me?”  I could do that too.

And here it is.  My Place in Life will be my blog about the house-hunting process, then the moving and decorating process (and inspiration, including links to other great bloggers/sites I discover), and I’m sure I’ll be throwing in some random posts about my family, life, and other stuff too.  If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll decide to check back frequently.  It may be a little slow at first (I need to play around with the design and get some pictures up), but I intend to make it an enjoyable read.  So stick around, k?

Leave a Response »

 

Cast and Crew of My Place Friday, Jul 24 2009

Hi, I’m Stacy.  And this is my new blog, “My Place in Life”.  Thanks for visiting!  (That’s assuming, of course, that someone eventually visits.  Otherwise I’m just basically talking to myself, but whatever.)

This is the cast of characters you can expect to meet here:

Me – Stacy – 23  

Stay-at-home-mom (SAHM, to the acronym-savvy), student (working on finishing my education degree online…I’ve been on my “last semester” for the past three semesters), and photographer (I have a growing side business, which I guess makes me a WAHM too, huh?).  I’m also a number of other things like a wife, daughter, friend, sister-in-law (no siblings of my own), cook, cleaning lady, occasional translator (I speak Spanish, which is what I’ll teach if I ever finish school), and aspiring writer, but you get the idea.

Husband – Keith – 26

Greatest man I know.  Does something with cranes and construction planning that I don’t really understand, but hey, it pays enough to allow me to stay home with our kid and waste time on things like this blog, so it’s all good.  If I was cheesy enough to use a word like “soul-mate” (which I’m definitely NOT), he’d be mine.  We’ve been married for almost three years and I still can’t believe he actually picked me.  And then I watch him try to do laundry or cook or balance the checkbook, and I know exactly WHY he picked me (of course, he says it had a lot to do with my personality and falling in love with me and something about the way my ass looks in my favorite pair of jeans, but really, I think maybe he just needed an excuse to move out of his parents’ house).  ;o)

Son – Avery – 2

Cutest kid ever.  Smart as a whip, hilarious, looks so much like his dad it’s creepy (note to self: this blog needs pictures asap).  The light of my life, best thing that ever happened to me, and all that other sappy stuff that parents say about their kids (you think it’s lame until you have one, and then you turn into a big ball of mush like the rest of us).

Dog – Derby – 4 months

Derby, like the Kentucky Derby, because he’s gonna be as big as a horse.  He’s a blue Great Dane, and right now at 4 1/2 months old he weighs about 80 pounds.  And yes, he lives in the house.  He’s  basically a giant ball of goofy, lazy fun, and we couldn’t ask for a better dog.  I’m super proud that he just finished puppy obedience school and knows sit, down, come, stay, and walks politely on the leash without pulling me down.  Which is pretty important, since he’ll probably weigh more than me before long.

Goldfish – Sushi

I have no idea how old Sushi is, but we’ve had him since April.  He’s grown quite a bit since then so I’m guessing he was a baby when Avery won him at the fair (our town’s annual Railroad Festival – oh, the fun).  I named him Sushi as a joke, thinking that a) Avery probably couldn’t pronounce it and b) the fish would probably die a day or two after we got him anyway.  Well the name stuck and the fish stuck around too.  He now lives in a small tank in Avery’s room and we’re considering getting a friend for him, but only once I’m sure that Avery’s able to pronounce “Sashimi”.

There are also various other friends and family members (the vast majority of our intermediate and extended families live within 30 miles of us…gotta love the south) who I’m sure will eventually make an appearance here, but those are the key players.  I’ll probably also do an About Me type post soon so you can get to know a little about my fabulous self.  Examples:

• I’ve lived in Southwest Louisiana my entire life.  
• I’m overly fond of commas and the triple period ellipsis (…).  
• I’m deathly afraid of heights and spiders.  
• I Googled “what is dot dot dot called in grammar” to discover the term “triple period ellipsis”.  

You know, basic important stuff like that.  But now on to this blog, and the reason I created it.  I think I’ll make that a separate post though, since I have a tendency to be long-winded and also because I’ll feel like this blog is more established if I have more than one post.  Because it’s just possible that, in the past, I’ve been guilty of abandonment by creating one lonely post and then returning over a year later to delete the poor neglected blog.  And maybe that’s happened more than once.  But I digress.  That’s in the past, and I’m moving forward.  I hope you’ll join me.  Just follow the triple period ellipsis…

Leave a Response »