The House: Before

Because several of you have very sweetly asked, here are a few photos of our house in Oxford. I'm calling them "Before," because they were taken last year when I first listed our home on AirBnB for football weekend rentals. (We have our first two rentals coming up next month, and I am excited—and very nervous.)

Anyway, since these photos were taken, we've done a lot of little updates: recovering that ugly yellow rocking chair (you should see it now!), hanging more art on the walls, updating the bedding, which was quite literally falling apart. I'm hard at work at the moment trying to finish sewing the quilts for the boys' bunk beds that I started, oh, when Archer was born. But now I've got a deadline. (Did I mention the weekend renters and the falling-apart bedding?).

There are so many more projects on my To-Do list: updating the bathroom fixtures and cabinets, painting Virginia's room, hanging more art on the walls, but we have discovered that our energy level—not to mention our budget—is a lot lower than we had anticipated. 

When we moved in to this house last July, I made a list of "updates" I wanted to do over the course of a year, tackling one room per month. And, you know what? A little over one year later I still haven't finished the first month's room: the kitchen! The inside of the kitchen cabinets are still as half-painted as they were 12 months ago. So I guess I had better add that to my running list of things to do before the weekenders arrive! 

Now, what you don't see are the time-consuming (and, sadly, expensive) projects we've undertaken in the yard: dead tree removal, new perennial beds on two sides of the house, a chicken coop and run, a fence and arbor, deck repair and painting. It has been a major turn around out there. But two-months into a drought is not the time for me to take pictures of my yard...

So, here are some photos of the house as it was a year ago. I will try to take newer and better photos of the place before I hand it off to my first renters at the end of October. Because, goodness knows what we will get back!