Under Construction: #Throwback Thursday Our first renovation

Don't want to miss out on any of our renovation shenanagins? 

Click here for a full list of my posts on it!

As many of you know, Adam and I are project people. Our first renovation was truly a labor of love and it set the stage for how we purchase houses in the future and what we know we can handle in terms of what kinds of projects we can tackle and what level of construction we can handle living in on a daily basis. I mention our first renovation on here every now and again, but on this #ThrowbackThursday I wanted to share some of the pictures of what exactly we started with. Then come back NEXT Thursday for what happened!

We bought the house as a short sale and went into it knowing that we'd take every aspect of that house and change it. We did a full kitchen renovation, updated bathrooms, all new hardwood flooring and carpets and painted every room. The yard was a total mess and in the 2 years we owned the home we completely turned it around and made a great profit, even though it wasn't intended to be a "flip."

This was our dining room upon purchase of the home. It looked like someone changed the oil of a motorcycle in that room! We had asked the previous owner about it and he said it was a water stain but even I wasn't born yesterday ;) All the carpet and flooring was promptly ripped out.

This was the original kitchen. Not that bad to the naked eye - but open any one of those cabinets and it would have been completely rotted out and filled with all kinds of nasties! Those were also promptly ripped out upon move in..

And that is how our downstairs started out on our first day of owning this home. It was about 9 months of working full time on weekends and after work to get the kitchen into it's final stage, which I can't wait to share with you how it looked when we were all done!

This was the backyard. Over 50% of it was overgrown with very mature bamboo, which is a b*tch to remove, let me tell ya! It took the entire two years to cut it down and push it back into a small manageable corner of the lot. Parts of me really wanted to contact the local zoo to see if I can rent a panda for a day...

Click here for the final reveal!