Eight Years... Looking Back... Inviting YOU

You are invited to see my HOME!!

Well, this is just weird, but what I want you to do is go to the END of this post and start reading there. Technical difficulties (I mean, brain difficulties) have made me post my pics backwards and I just don't have the patience to fix it or reload pics. So, play along with my game, okay? We'll just pretend I did this on purpose, okay?! :) Okay, so start from the end and read each paragraph under the pic after you read this paragraph. So, I am home alone and I started looking back at some old pics and let's just say a lot has changed in our lives. Remember ... go to the end NOW.

I just realize I need to make sure you realize that is Savannah in the costume above... whoa, she looks just like the pic on the sidebar of Sahara.... Our kids really are clones of each other!!! LOL!

And for whatever reason I feel like showing off my little ladybug in her costume that I made for her. She had hosiery on her arms to make her black and her wings snapped off to go in the car seat. See.. I told you she was "cheesy". Go look in my sewing category to see some pics of her modeling the one-of-a-kind children's clothes she used to model for me. She is a natural model, but we don't do that anymore. It was a huge hindrance in our lives. Weed out the hindrances!!! I just feel like passin on advice today. :) And before I close I want to make sure that I say that God sent us to this house... against our will even... He knew what He was doing and it is only recently that I have really started to see the profoundness of it. I have always know it, but even more now. Strange how God reveals His plan for our lives!!! TRUST GOD AND HIS PLAN!!! (I hope you are reading this Bridget!)

Around this same time we went to Johnny Carino's for our very first time and this was our date out with Savannah because she went with us everywhere (and they all still do). Little did we know this would become our favorite family restaurant. YUM! You can also see where all my kids get their curls from in this pic. When I was little my hair was the exact color of their hair, so one day I guess they might all have my black hair, too. Interesting... time will have to tell that story.

This is a "glimpse" of the interior .... can you say NEUTRAL... lots of beige and off white. I LOVED it... Loved being past tense. After about three years I started painting and re-doing and adding LOTS of color. I'll have to invite you back to see the inside sometime and some of my projects ...and my R~A~I~N~B~O~W of colors.

Just another view. I know it may not look all glamorous, but I can remember feeling like I stepped on the cover of Southern Living magazine... and were you paying attention when I said foreclosure. So, if I have any advice to give it is to check into foreclosed homes, BUT make sure you know what you are getting and the extent of needed repairs. And if you are buying a 100 year old home like this be prepared to have some projects. I have to say ours were minimal because the previous owners (Mr/Mrs C) had already done the major updating. We got this house for a steal.... but you have to know that we could not of afforded another dime. Our other option would have been to buy a much different type house... and much smaller. And if you envy us at all... let me remind you of the saying about "blood, sweat, and tears" because this house has had it's share from us.

This is the veiw from the back corner of the lot (3/4 of an acre) and the deck was a God thing!!! Thanks to Hurricanes Rita and Ike I am missing two of these trees now and the fullness the other trees used to have, but things happen and God spared our home. What a blessing!

You start to get a little better idea of the size of this house when you look at it from the sides. My daddy in "inspecting" it. Don't those dead azaleas make beautiful hedges? Uh, yeah... they needed that overhaul I gave them later.

And this is where we live now! This is what it look like when we first saw it. I have to tell you I am known for what some call having "vision" and a "green thumb". This house had been foreclosed on SEVERAL years earlier and the bank was letting it be used as a rental property. They were renting out a 3500 squate foot house for $600 a month!!!! Uh, do you have to be suprised that the tenants would not maintain it properly!?! The original owners (who are our current neighbors... Mr/Mrs C) had beautiful landscaping when they lived here. You so those horrid looking scraggly bushes on the right side? Those are all azaleas and they are all around the house, but at this point they were mostly dead. I got in there and cut them all back to healthy and got all the dead out and amazingly saved them. I even surprised Mr/Mrs C. They thought it would all die. Honestly, I had my concerns, but they looked awful. By the way, we thought this was a small house when we first saw it. It's frontal view is very decieving.

I had to include this pic of Savannah's big ole smile. She was and still is sooooo "cheesy"! No need to "say cheese" to get her to smile. I use this Pooh blanket even now with Sahara. Look close in the entertainment center and you will see VCR tapes, which are almost obsolete!... makes a person feel old! :)

I am struck by how young I look here... BECAUSE IT WAS EIGHT YEARS AGO! Wow! I think I was 28. My daddy helped me build this house and I paid for it as we built it in my early twenties while Cody and I were dating. Cody would come over and visit (and work). I lived in it single for a year and then, we got married and he moved in. He proposed to me on the front porch and we married in 1995. Five years later we had our first child, Savannah, in 2000. I thought I would live in this little house my whole life, but things change and decisions have to made sometimes that we never plan for. In this case, this house was SMALL... I built it with a plan to be single, so it was bursting at the seams with a family of three in it. The intention was to add on to it. I intentionally designed it the way I did with an additional floor plan for that add on, but ten years ago when my daddy had and emergency five bypass heart surgery I decided I would rather have debt and my daddy living. It was not a hard choice for me, but it was hard to leave that little house behind. In the pic you see there is an open room with baby furniture and clouds on the wall. That was really the dining room until Savannah came into our lives. I turned that little 8 X 10 dining room into a nursery for her and we squeezed a small drop-leaf table into the 12 X 14 kitchen. It was perfect really.... although it was cozy. We knew we were going to want one more child (Ha!), so it would quickly become too cozy without the add-on. I began searching for larger home and we would later move when Savannah was eight months old.