Labor of Love
Our Background and History
I have heard it said by others, “Our form of relaxing is taking on new projects for the house. It is not work for us but a true labor of love” For us this could not be more true.
Eleven years ago now we began our labor of love. We had a vision of what we wanted in a home but in 2009 the housing market in the greater Seattle area was suffering. You would think that would have made finding a home easier but even in a down market, a nice house on acreage was pricy, so we knew then we would have to make some compromises.
We looked at some pretty interesting properties. What we found were properties in flood plains, houses that looked amazing in pictures but when you visited them they were falling down and uninhabitable (photographers are amazing) or properties that were on a cliff or next to a stream that becomes a river and washes out every winter. After searching for several months and becoming seriously discouraged, we came upon what we thought was a cute little house on just shy of 5 acres. At the time it was bank owned and had been sitting vacant for quite a while. It was out of the area that we thought we wanted to live but we liked what we saw so we went and looked at it several times. The more we looked at it the more we fell in love with it.
We shared it with friends and family and when they came to take a tour the comments sounded like “Wow I hope you know what you are getting yourself into”, and “It is going to take $100,000 to make this livable” and then my favorite “Sure it “could” be cute”. And who could blame them. At first glance it looked, well, nasty. The house had not been cared for a great deal. The house smelled of animals. The blue filthy bathtub and green carpet, that looked as though it had not been cleaned in 20 years, were a little off putting. And don’t even get me started on the “barn” and the land. But we had a vision! We knew that this house somewhere deep down in there had potential. We had a vision of a home where we could raise our kids and have our livestock and our horses and we were determined to make it happen.
Why Start a Blog?
Throughout the last decade we have put tons of time, energy and money into renovating our home and property. I would say that the majority of the work was done ourselves for various reasons. One, we really enjoy picking a project, doing the planning, working hard to complete the project and enjoying the finished work. Two, we have not always had an excessive flow of cash to pay someone else to complete all of the projects that we have faced. And finally, we wanted to make sure that things were done to our standards and after several runs of bad luck with contractors we were forced to learn to do much of the work ourselves.
So that brings me to “Why Blog”? It occurred to us during all of our processes that we are not the only ones that have faced the need or the desire to renovate their homes themselves. Thank God for YouTube and Google for helping us when we did not know what to do. But we also learned that renovating a rural home comes with many different challenges that you may not face if you were updating a suburban home or landscaping. We decided that if we were facing some of this stuff with our home and our land, that others are likely facing the same challenges. It was then that we decided to take a stab at blogging. The hope is that when we share some of our journey, the good, the bad and the ugly, that there would be people out there that would be able to use some of the information for themselves to help with their projects that may be unique.
Just to be clear, we are in no way shape or form professional builders, handymen, carpenters, etc. Neither of us have worked a day in construction. Everything we have learned has been by reading, researching and trial and error. We are not giving any specific advise to you about your projects but we are simply giving you some ideas and some tools to help in your process. We will tell you what has worked for us and what we have found to be junk. We will tell you where we purchase supplies and equipment because we are pretty frugal when it comes to getting quality stuff without paying through the nose for it.
Our hope is that you enjoy reading about our journey, that you may find inspiration for your own DIY project, that you gain some additional tools to accomplish what you want for a price that you can afford, and that you would share all of this with others that may benefit.
Renovating Together~
Erik and Sherrie
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Rural Home Renovations 