First, I need to apologize for being radio-silent for the past couple months–I promise it’s for valid reasons!  And, I hope you’re sitting down for this post, because this is going to be a long one.  For the past couple of years, I’ve contemplated selling my town home and moving to a real, adult-sized home with a little more space and a yard for entertaining.  This past fall, I finally took the real estate plunge and started the house hunt.  The holidays at work are quite literally the most insane part of my job (seriously, I plan & execute 25 events in 20 days…), so my ideal time to sell / buy was going to be this spring, after I was able to get my tinsel untangled from the one million Christmas parties, and returned to being a sane person.

As some of you are probably aware, selling your house / trying to buy a new one in this market is one of the most stressful, emotional, and at times, gut-wrenching processes.  Having to keep the house “show-ready” at all times and attempting to keep a constant finger on the pulse of Austin’s utterly insane market made me realize how Britney Spears must have felt in 2007. Add on top of that, what I thought would be a “slow spring” at work quickly turned into 60-hour work weeks that made the previous holiday workload look like a summer vacation.  I don’t think I’ve cried more, slept less, or threatened to quit everything and move to Mexico more than I have in the past three months.  Whenever people would ask me how the house hunt was going, I was quick to tell them that I was just going to go live in a van down by the river.  My dad asked, “Well, which river have you decided to live by?”  Cute.  However after all of the heartache, a recent serendipitous chain of events happened in the last 10 days, and y’all, WE DON’T HAVE TO LIVE IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER! I FOUND A HOUSE! Suddenly, I felt like ‘2014 Britney’–you know, when they gave her a Vegas residency..

While it’s not the white brick, one-story ranch-style home I had envisioned when I started this journey–in fact, it’s quite the opposite–it’s in the area we wanted, it’s huge (which is good for camouflaging my furniture-hoarding tendencies), and it has a giant yard.  There’s probably more space than Phillip or I will ever know what to do with, but we’ll certainly have a fun time trying to figure it out.

So, here starts the journey. 

We met with my contractor, Bruno, over the weekend and laid out the ‘wish list’ of what needs to be done.  And y’all, I can’t sugarcoat it–it’s A LOT. I mean, we’re not doing major surgery or anything here, just a really good make-up job…and maybe a little Botox and filler.  Girl, needs WORK. 

Luckily, Phillip and I have very similar design aesthetics and agree on almost everything when it comes to remodeling and decorating–except for one thing.  When searching online other night for cabinet hardware and faucets, etc…he said, “Katie, not everything can be brass.” To which I quickly responded, “It can if you try hard enough.”  And while most everyone I’ve ever talked to has dreaded the remodeling process, I’m actually quite looking forward to it.  It’s been the carrot I’ve been chasing during this whole race to the finish line.  We’re finally going to be able to design a (very, very large) space that truly reflects our personalities & design styles–which wasn’t so easy to do in a cookie-cutter town home.

Speaking of the town home, I closed on it this morning and handed a key over to it’s darling new owner.  While, we still have a few weeks left in it while we start work on the new house, they’re going to be bittersweet.  It’s because of the town home that I discovered my love of decorating and DIY’ing and why I started this blog in the first place.  It’s been my HOME for the past 7.5 years, and as a first time homeowner, it taught me a lot.  Crap, now I’m crying. I realize there are rooms that I didn’t even share in the past year or so, so I’m going to try and do my best to make up for lost time in the coming weeks and share them here before it’s time to take them all apart and move.

Ok, I’m going to wrap it up now–and kudos to you, if you’re still reading this!  I can’t wait to share every detail of this journey with y’all.  IT’S ALL HAPPENING!