Our Home

My name is Lauren Musick (pronounced like music, but spelled more awesome) and I live in Texas with my husband, Tony, and our two dogs, Maggie and Vincent. We bought our house a little over three years ago as an investment property, in a matter of speaking. My husband is a construction manager for a local home building company, so his skills were completely wasted living in an apartment. I love home decorating and designing, so I was climbing the walls in an apartment as well. I painted every wall in our 1100 square foot apartment twice in a two year period trying to make it feel more like home. After the second coat, it just wasn't cutting it. It was still a space that wasn't ours, but in colors that we liked(ish). We were 26 and 23 (I'll let you guys figure out who's robbing the cradle), buying a home was something that other people do....you know...grown ups. Then came the government's incentive to buy a home.

Very suddenly we were swimming in a sea of affordability calculators and savings plans and FICA improvement plans......and worst of all......priming the apartment back to white. It was definitely a learning experience for us (for example, buy the good primer...it may be more expensive but it requires 3 less coats than the cheap stuff). We were finally going to purchase our own little piece of the world.  Tony and I were very lucky to have people in our lives that we trusted to help show us how we needed to get this transaction done with as few headaches as possible.

We finally found our house in the spring of 2009. It was a great floor plan, with great potential, it was just super basic and super off white.  We had a lot of big plans for this house from the day we signed the papers, but as most big plans go....there was a holding pattern. We didn't do anything to the house for a year, except paint it (colors that only lasted 2 years!). We decided to live in the house a bit to see what really needed to be changed. Once we got our heads out of the clouds we decided to take a look at what practical changes could be made to the home for two reasons: 1) Make it more ours and NOT like every other house in the area, and 2) Improve our resale value. We finally got to making our changes the Fall of 2010 and we are hoping to finish all of the major changes by the end of next year, the little stuff is never done with me in the house.

This blog is intended to show our journey in making our house a home for us and all who enter. From cooking and cleaning to decorating and demolition, we cover it all.