I come from a family that has been involved in construction and renovation for as long as I can remember. When I was born my parents owned a paint contracting company, apparently I used to run around the job sites and play as a child. From there, they started buying residential properties and rehabbing them. I’ve been painting walls and trim since I could hold a brush. My mother would bring me along to hundreds of houses as they were looking for “the perfect one.” As she would walk through and discuss the changes she would make in each home to bring it to its potential, I too began to see the vision. Early on, I began to start envisioning my own changes to properties. I would walk through friends homes and think of all the things I would do or change or update. To put it mildly, I fell in love with renovating. I have a passion for making outdated things pretty again. I love walking in a room and sharing my vision. And so, my husband and I have continued the tradition.
We bought our first home the week before our wedding. It was a beautiful house, but had some things that I definitely wanted to update. Nothing too serious, just cosmetic fixes. We were planning to move in when we returned from our honeymoon. A week after our honeymoon, we had a giant slab leak. A pipe burst in the foundation, and I came home to several inches of water inside our house. The rehab process took over three months, there were countless sleepless nights, tons of stress and many times I felt overwhelmed. But there were also design choices, trips to pick out tile, paint, granite, baseboards, lighting and home decor. It was exhausting but I fell in love and I fell hard.
A year and half later we bought a condo in College Station, TX. This is where Texas A&M is located and where my husband and I both went to school. Property was appreciating quickly and we knew we wanted to buy a rental property that we could hold onto for years to come. We found a condo, but it needed to be completely redone – and we lived 3 hours away. We didn’t let that deter our decision to buy it. I could see the potential. It was the perfect location, great layout, on the bus route for the university, and we got the perfect price. We were all in. We drove down almost every weekend for 3 months and we renovated the entire condo ourselves.
We learned how to texture walls, install tile, install cabinets, move walls and tons of other fun DIY projects. It was a fun, exciting and exhausting time in our lives.
And I couldn’t wait for our next project.
Fast forward 2 years. We were still living in our house, and the commute for my husband was taking him 45min. We had just had a baby and family time was super important. So we decided to sell the house we loved and move closer to his job.
It turned out to be a fabulous decision! We made enough on the sale of our home to pay off my student loans, my new car, and we had a tidy sum left for a down payment and renovation for a new house.
2 years prior I got my real estate license. I knew that it would come in handy eventually and I would be able to help family and friends find a home too.
We searched for months before we found the perfect house. It had the perfect location to my husband’s job… and it needed tons of work! And that brings us to today… currently in the middle of a renovation on a house that I have fallen in LOVE with.