That’s right! After five years in our house in east Austin, we are moving just up the road to Balcones Woods in northwest Austin. I am sitting among boxes as I write this, and I have so much to do that I’m in complete denial about the entire situation. Sounds like the perfect time to write a blog post!

Seriously though, I did want to do a little tribute to our house before we go. We bought it on a shoestring budget back in 2012, and it was in rough shape. With the help of Micah’s parents, we gutted it down to the studs and completely renovated it. We always joke that it only cost us a portion of our marriage and our sanity, but we did it! Totally worth it!

Micah was the visionary. I have to admit, I was not believing when he told me he thought this house was the one for us. The entire place smelled like dog pee. In fact, the house was on the show Property Brothers. If you haven’t seen the show, they basically find the most disgusting houses you’ve ever seen and renovate them. Our house was one of the nasty houses not chosen. It was pretty funny watching the show later and seeing all the gross things they pointed out. “That’s our house!”

Micah has an eye for spacial design and could see what I could not. And Y’ALL, Micah and his Dad did almost the entire thing by themselves! Just call him Chip Gaines. I am no longer a naysayer because it turned out more beautiful than I could have ever imagined!

Before we owned a house, I remember desperately wanting a permanent place to call home. I wanted to decorate for the long term, not just haphazardly hang things on the wall because we’d be moving again in a few months. I wanted a big living space where we could host our friends, have my small groups over, and throw Halloween parties. This house was the answer to all those prayers and then some! I did not take the blessing of owning a home for granted.

Almost our entire house was furnished by my obsessive searching on Craigslist. We decorated slowly over time with help from my Mom and Target. My Dad gave us almost all the blinds in our house from one of his neighbors. We brought Nora home to this house where we had prepared a place for her to live. Micah let me put funky wallpaper in our guest bathroom even though he secretly thought it was stupid. We’ve taken pride in every square inch of this place, and needless to say, it’s hard to leave. In fact, I think one of the main reasons I wanted to write this was just to process it all. Change is hard!

My small groups meeting here is another memory I will cherish. The amount of tears shed on our couches (around a table full of snacks) could fill up Lake Travis. They weren’t all sad tears either, I regularly laughed so hard I cried with those college girls! And Jesus showed up again and again to teach us something new about himself. It’s funny how big moments are often anticlimactic, but the tapestry of little moments woven together over a long period of time are collectively unforgettable.

So, before I cry too hard, I thought it would be fun to show you some before and after shots of our beloved house…

FRONT EXTERIOR