Breaking Ground

Welcome to our Blog and thanks for reading. Travis and I have been house hunting for the last 8 months and looking for a home that we could do some renovations on. While there are a lot of great homes on the market in Nashville we really wanted to stay close to where we are currently living and this made our house hunting more challenging. Travis found a home back in December that was foreclosed on and loved the location of the house. He drove me by it one evening and said that this was the house that we were going to buy however it was not listed on the market. He called the bank the next day to see if we could go through the house and they would not let us look at it until it was on the market. We continued our search and even put an offer on a home but lost it in a bidding war. Then in April the home that we had wanted in December came on the market and four days later we were under contract.
My husband is on top of things and lined up an architect to draw up plans for the addition as well as some renovations that we wanted to do inside. We then met with our friend, Brandon Jenkins, who is the owner of Grove Park Construction and who also built my in-laws home and hired him as the general contractor. Travis spent time each day lining everything up and on the day that we closed on our home we had our permits pulled, the construction loan in order, and the drawings finalized for the addition. We closed on our home last Wednesday  and the following day the renovations on the home began.
I wanted to start this blog because this is such an exciting time in our marriage and I wanted to share everything with our family and friends. Brandon is wonderful to work with and we hope to move into our new home around the middle of August. Although this is going to be a stressful two months for us we are exciting about restoring this home. I will continue to post updates on the progress and have included some photo's of our new home. Since they started construction the day after we closed I did not get a chance to take any before photos so all of the photos are from the first day of construction.

Our New Home in Green Hills.

The footers were poured for the addition which is going to include a two car garage with a bonus room, bedroom, and full bath above the garage.

In the living room we are going to convert the woodburning fireplace to a gas fireplace and add a built in bookshelft to the right of the fireplace. 

                 The dining room does not need much work.  We are just going to paint and add a light fixture.

In the kitchen we are going to install hardwood floors, replace the counter tops, paint, and add a back splash.

We are going to remove the desk at the end of the kitchen and add cabinets so we can extend the counter.  The entrance to the new addition will be off the back of the kitchen.

 This is going to be our master suite.  The wall on the right hand side is going to be knocked down and extended into the next room which is currently the bathroom.  This entrance to the bedroom will be walled up and you will enter it from the other end.

They already tore down the walls to the existing bathroom which will become part of our bedroom.  The room you see straight ahead is going to be our new master bath.

We are going to remove the carpet going up the stairs and refinish the hardwood throughout the house.

This is the small bonus room at the top of the landing.  We had the laminate floor removed and we going to add hardwood.

We removed the carpet from the upstairs bedroom and found hardwood underneath.  The floor looks bad in this picture but it is only carpet glue and once they are refinished they are going to look beautiful.

This is the other bedroom upstairs that also has hardwood floors.  I was so excited to have found hardwood under the stained carpet!

This is the upstairs bath.  We are only keeping the tile and everything else is being removed and replaced with updated material.