Hello friends! I figured that the best way to start this blog (about home design and lifestyle) would be to start with my home base… literally. Many of you may know that Jonny and I have both been licensed Realtors in Tennessee for several years, and on March 1, 2019, we bought our first personal home. We wanted to wait until we were married to officially make this huge purchase, and had talked about waiting until our lease was up (July 2019) to do so.

Well, folks, I’m a very impatient person, and when I make up my mind to do something, I don’t like the waiting game. We started looking in the Fall of 2018, just casually… and when I say casually, I mean we went to look at twelve houses in the span of an hour and a half. We know what we like, and we know what we don’t like! Especially as Realtors, we can walk into a house and immediately check it off the list if we see deal-breakers, and we know when those deal-breakers are reasonably fixable or not. We also knew exactly what we were looking for:

• Location–we knew we wanted to stay in either East Nashville, or make a move to Sylvan Park (two popular neighborhoods in Nashville)
• Walkability–we both love being outside, and walking to food and restaurants near us. Remember, a home is more than just an investment–it will determine quite a bit about your quality of life.
• Zoning–not many people have this on their list, but ya know, we’re real estate nerds and we knew what we wanted to do with our property… which brings me to:
• Lot–We knew that we probably wouldn’t be able to find a house with a garage in the neighborhoods we were looking in, so we decided to look for a lot that had the size and alley access necessary to build what we wanted to build. Our plan is to build an oversized two-car garage with a two bedroom apartment above it (another reason zoning was important) and use it for when family comes to town and as an income generating property (short term rental–think Airbnb).
• Character–I see so many houses every single day that I start to get a little tired of the same thing over and over… so uniqueness and character were important to me. If you follow me on instagram, you may have noticed my #dalmatiandiningroom5ever posts, and if not, go follow along so you can see proof that I do, in fact, have dalmatian wallpaper in my dining room. Sorry, Mom.
• Size–because it’s just the two of us (and Hank, our loveable, dopey pup), we didn’t need too much space, but knew we needed two bedrooms and two bathrooms at least. Entertaining space is more important to us right now than number of bedrooms, so that’s what we looked for.
• Something we could make our own–We both love a good project and renovation, so we knew we wanted something, if not a total fixer upper, that could use a little love and some updates.

And that’s what we’re all here for, right? Before photos? I don’t know about you but I love a good before and after… so stay tuned and you’ll see each room get it’s own refresh and updates. Keep in mind, these are unedited, on the day before we started painting, so don’t expect too much in the way of aesthetics… There was pink, and seafoam green, and dalmatian spots, oh my! Not to mention the previous owners had just stopped painting in certain areas. So the kitchen was mostly seafoam green, but right beside and above the fridge was tan. Nice.

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We’ve done a lot in the past couple months, and I’m excited to show you. Which room would you start with? Let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading!

XO

Grace