And so it begins!

Before photo of Farm Hill Cottage

After we finalized the purchase of our home, we had a “before” party. We pledged not to touch a single thing in the house. It had yellowed walls, smelled of must and cigarette smoke, and everything was generally dirty and grungy.

Before of Lola's room.

The day before the party, I figured at a minimum I would go wash out the kitchen sink as we were serving pizzas and we might need to use the sink. I turned the water on and bugs started crawling out of the drain. Eeeeeek!!!! I will never not have the creepy crawlies from that memory! It was SO gross. I immediately called an exterminator and told them they had to come ASAP and douse the property with whatever necessary to get rid of the demon bugs in the drain (turned out they were everywhere - spider crickets to be exact. Google it if you want a gross visual).

Before of the Kitchen. The most "updated" room in the house when we purchased it.

The night of the party, after everyone left (they all thought we were insane for buying this house) we tore into the house... literally. Ripped out walls, hauled out carpet, shoveled the padding from the carpet. When I say shoveled the carpet padding, I mean scooped up and threw in a trashcan. It was the consistency of dirt because it was so old and rotten. I wish I had a picture but I can't find one. We spent about two weeks gutting the house down to the bare bones.

This is now our bathroom and Keller's room.

I noticed throughout this process that I felt extremely tired. The kind of tired that was beyond explaining or pushing through. I would have moments where I would totally crash. Every day after work I kept telling Daron "There's no way I can go on, I'm going to have to take a nap before I can do anything else." I couldn’t believe the toll this renovation was taking on me.

A few weeks later, we found out that we were pregnant. SURPRISE! No wonder I was exhausted!!! Nothing like discovering your pregnant mid gutting your new downsized home! It didn’t slow us down though (well Daron, I was extremely slow in all that I did!), we pushed on with gutting the house and started altering our house plans to be more family-friendly rather than designed just for two.

Standing in our nursery that was under construction.

Daron is our resident "architect". He will spend hours and hours drawing house plans on graph paper to figure out what's going to be the most functional. I can't tell you how many different plans went through his head to make our little 1,300 sq. ft. house work for us.

He was finally able to come up with a plan that would give us a 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house which is what we were hoping for once we found out Keller would be joining our family.

I think it's important to note that at this point in the gut/renovation we were "homeless". We sold our previous house and were living with Daron's parents. The contractor promised us it would only take 4-5 months so we could totally handle a few months without a home. No problem! (insert sarcasm from pregnant Hillary here.)