BEFORE and AFTER

In honor of my last blog post where I talked about us trying to sell our house, I thought I would post a couple of photos. The first one is the way the house looked the first time we saw it in May 2005, a week before we got married. Hideous, I know! We were moving from Georgia a few months later and had come up to meet with a realtor (who is now our friend) and look at some houses. We asked her to show us houses in a certain price range so we could get a feel for what we could get for our money here in Knoxville. We looked at a few houses in the neighborhood we're currently in (all fixer-uppers) and we looked at newer houses. We really DID NOT want a fixer upper because we knew things would be busy with Dan's new job and knew we would be starting a family soon. But we just could not find a new house that we both could agree on. Something about each one just didn't work for us. Either the houses were too close together or the yard was too small for our three big dogs, or because of how the house was designed there was no way to put in a dog door so the dogs could get into the garage and out of the weather. So, when we came back again in July, this house was still sitting here. No one wanted it. But we could see past its ugliness and knew we could make her look much better. We closed on the house at the end of August 2005. And this is how she looks four long years later. Better, huh?