Well it’s been a minute since I’ve sat down to write a full blog post. My last blog post was probably my favorite post I’ve done, so it is hard to top! Since my last post was an entire before and after of the Heights House, I thought that it would be fitting for the first post on the new house to be all of the “before” photos.

Side Note: I’ve decided to call the “New House” the “Park House” so that I can differentiate between our old old house (“The Bungalow“), our old house (“The Heights House“), and finally our New House, “Park House”. Why Park House? Because we moved to this neighborhood for the family friendly feel and the parks. My son goes to the parks twice a day (not even exaggerating!), and our favorite weekend pastime is to walk and grab a coffee and take our son to the park.

Even though we’ve been living in the “Park House” for almost half a year (crazy!), I’ll give yall the before house tour. I think it makes so much more of a impact to see a space with the before.

What We Loved About This House

There is so much to love about this house. First and foremost, we love the neighborhood and location. We are still about 15 minutes from downtown, but our neighborhood is its own city! We are a small city within a big city and have our own police, fire, mayor, water, etc. We can walk to Whole Foods, lots of parks, and restaurants and we take advantage of it all. Before we moved to the Heights House we had been looking at this neighborhood, but didn’t think it made sense for us personally until we had children.

Additionally, we love how open it feels – from the high ceilings to the open floorplan, it feels like so much space! This house is about 1.8x bigger than the Heights House and has a large game room that we were really excited about for Grayson. The floorplan was great “as-is”, and other than moving that one wall in the kitchen, there are no other structural modifications we needed to make.

The next thing we noticed was all of the details – the trim work, moldings, tray ceilings upstairs, and how meticulously the previous owners took care of this house. Compared to the Heights House that severely needed some love before we moved in, this house had been pristinely cared for by the previous family.

Finally, we saw all of the potential! I could look at these photos and just imagine what it could look like with a little updating.

What We Didn’t Love About This House

To be honest, I loved the Heights House. The exterior was just so so beautiful with the double porches and magnolia tree, so it was hard moving to a new house that didn’t have as pretty of an exterior or a front porch. I also miss having the guest apartment – even though it didn’t get as much use as it should have!

Before Listing Photos

Where Are We On the Renovations?

The renovations are taking longer than expected (I sound like such a rookie 🤣), but I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel….hopefully this doesn’t jinx me! If you follow on Instagram, I’ve slowly been showing the rooms that have been updated (and sneakily hiding the ones that haven’t, hah!). We are supposed to be getting a landscaping quote soon since a lot of the plants died in the freeze last year and need to be removed and replaced. I’m hoping we can get that done at the beginning of Spring or sooner, but it looks like we aren’t over the cold weather just yet. There are of course other smaller details that need to be done (hanging a few light fixtures, floor touchups)….so maybe this house will be done by 2023! 🤪

What did you think of the before photos?

Thanks for stopping by! xo, Kinsey

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