Flashback Friday...Our New Home, 2004

In April 2004, Dave and I purchased our first home.  We had looked in many places but finally settled on finding one in a decent location in the City because that's what we could afford.  Not having any kids at the time (nor thinking we'd have any soon), we purchased this little (900+/- square feet) ranch on Avery Street.  

I do love our house.  It has a HUGE garage, a nice-sized (for the City!) fenced in backyard that doesn't back up to anyone else, and a gigantic dry basement full of possibility.  Unfortunately I am not a big fan of sending Nathaniel to the City schools and the crime and problems in our neighborhood have escalated over the last 6 years.  We've moved from "innocent" little car break-ins and thefts of personal property from our yard, to actual home break-ins and shootings down the street.  I'll pass.  Anyway, I thought I would take a little walk down memory lane with this Flashback Friday and post some photos of our home from when we bought it.  

Our new home!

April 2004

The ugly mint green, maroon, and yellow kitchen with dark green carpeting!

When we moved in that refrigerator had been closed and RUNNING so it was nasty!  It took me HOURS to clean that out!  Dave took to tackling that green carpeting and tearing up the (asbestos!) tiles underneath.  He laid new subflooring and put down a new linoleum tile floor that really helped to spruce the kitchen up.  

This was Nate's bedroom, complete with pee soaked shag carpeting where the old man who lived here would sit in his rocking chair and not quite make it to the bathroom in time.

Our vintage 1970's dining room, with gorgeous (*cough*), gold velvet curtains, gold chandelier, green carpeting and scalloped blinds with fringe!

Here is Nick helping to tear up the pink (!) rug that was in the master bedroom.  Also pee-stained, thankyouverymuch.

Our less than drab living room that had no TV, only a sitting room where people must have sat around and talked (*gasp!*) to each other!

(The living room/fireplace after we painted - much better!  We had every intention of painting this room the soft powder blue we had purchased, but my artistic sister begged me to let her at it.  So she pulled colors of the bricks out to choose the wall color and complimentary accent color for the trim and I think it looks fabulous!)

I have many more photos like this to show the progress we made with weeks of painting, cleaning, replacing carpets/flooring, etc.  There are a million other things I would have loved to do to this place if we were going to stick around and wanted to invest the money (sliding glass doors, deck, finish the basement, etc.).  But the point is that over the last 6 years we have made this house our home and given it a touch of us and I will truly miss this place.