A breath of fresh air?

I was ready to buy a house before we were ready.  I didn't have the money nor any idea of why, exactly, the idea of owning was feeling like a such a good one. I started calling the numbers on For Sale signs more than a year before we bought. I walked through dozens of houses and had narrowed down the neighborhoods we would consider before Rob had even proposed.

By the time we saw the house on West Johanna Street our wedding was about a month away.  We were both sure this house was the one.  The large Live Oak trees canopy over the entire roof; the large front porch is so inviting.  We didn't know anyone else who would be willing to take on this sort of project, but, for some reason, the spotty foundation, the holes in the floors, the rotting walls, the ducktape on the windows didn't deter us.

Kitchen Shelving... the roach can should have told us something...

hallway door

our bedroom wallpaper

Shower

Rot in wall of second bedroom

We were so sure that this was the house for us that even the less than convenient closing date (just over two weeks before our wedding), had no impact on our decision.  We had both recently accepted new jobs, were weeks away from getting hitched, and decided to throw a home purchase in the mix.

The first thing we decided we needed to do to prepare for the move was to scrape down the popcorn ceilings (so it wouldn't get all over our craigslist furniture, of course).

We just wouldn't be able to live with the golden flecks, we reasoned.  Behind me in the above picture you can see the seams we worked hours to expose.  We spent a day exhausting ourselves, covered in flakes of who knows what.  All that work and possible lung damage and, in three years, we never repaired those ceilings. We went to bed every night looking up at the patchwork quilt of plasterboard and caulk.