And so it begins . . .

January 2009 - Basically an hour after we got back from our honeymoon in October 2008, we started thinking about buying our first house. We waited until after Christmas to really get down to actually shopping for a property. Being the manic type-A people that we are, we researched literally 1,000's of properties. Our real estate agent/best friend/groomsman John had to deal with our insanity as we tried to find something perfect, but cheap. 

The Little Old House that Could

One cold night in January 2009, John (along with his wife Melissa, who was one of our bridesmaids) took us on our first showing. It was an early 1900's house on Rogers Avenue on the border of Pennsauken and Merchantville, New Jersey. It looked like a combination of bungalow, craftsman, and farmhouse styles. From the outside it looked great. Great facade, two stories, big old-fashioned porch, an old two story carriage house/barn out back and the neighborhood was full of beautiful old homes.

However, inside was a different story. Most of the interior was resplendent in the gaudy decor of the fifties/sixties and it was obvious that after a "renovation" some fifty years ago (which basically ruined all the historic character of the building), absolutely nothing had been done to the place. Dirty teal and pink carpets covered the old hardwoods throughout the house. The faux paneled kitchen (complete with chrome trimmed countertops with a bronze boomerang pattern) was terrible. Complementing the dingy old kitchen was a powder room with glorious pink tile floors and wainscoting, a blue sink jutting out from the wall and blue and pink flower wall paper up to the ten foot ceilings. The second floor was more of the same with cracked plaster and a full bath that even hobos would refuse to use. 

Melissa and Monica had only walked a few steps into the house when they saw a little built-in cabinet in the dining room tucked under the stairs. Melissa turned to Monica and said "you guys are going to buy this house." Given the state of disrepair of the house (we were also pondering a strange hump in the dining floor at the time), we laughed her comment off.

After seeing all these problems, we left and continued on with several more months of research and showings, and offers and rejections. Every time we started to feel overwhelmed by our quasi-impossible search criteria (everything for nothing), we both kept coming back to that quaint old house on Rogers Avenue. Finally, we completely lost our minds and figured "yeah sure, we can fix that house ourselves.  We'll just need to buy some awesome tools and it will be a piece of cake."  Famous last words.

So we bought it on March 9, 2009 and immediately started the work on the afternoon of closing. We quite literally haven't stopped working since. This blog tells the tales of our joy and horror, through clouds of sawdust and piles of rubble, as we work to restore (and live in) our little old house.