Foreword

My Littl' Piece of Earth...is a journal about our renovation project. Thanks to my great Principal and friend, Mrs. Berger, who understood my excitement and gave me these words "Your little Piece of Earth"..there is plenty to be excited about"..she said. I now think about my new home as that precious little grain of sand that I will have to take care for in years to come.

After some painful years of waiting due to a "QUIT CLAIM", for those who knows what that means, we finally bought our home. We started looking at houses this past Summer. After looking all over, we decided to look for something that was going to be comfortable, practical, manageable, and most importantly reasonably affordable, without commitments.

We have been debt free for many years and did not want to get ourselves in a mortgage that was going to take us away from our comfort zone. So, thanks to the market, we looked at Foreclosures.

When looking at foreclosures, we prepared ourselves for the worse, but had an open mind. We focused in "potential". These are some questions we thought before we entered a house: What can we do with this house? Is it big enough for the 2 of us? Will our puppies have enough space and yard to run around? Can we fix it ourselves? How much out of pocket will we need?

We didn't think of granite counters, updated kitchens, nor top of the line flooring, though it would have been a must.

We looked at many properties, and some really needed lots of money to be back into the "livable" condition: no floors, some had holes in walls, mold all over, you name it , we saw it; until we came across Danforth Rd.

My husband fell in love with it, the first time we saw it. It had personality but needed TLC, some bunchs of it....but it was going to be manageable.

Here is what we saw:

 

It had potential!It was enough for us! So we went for it!!!!

Our TO DO's: 

1. Remove weeds, clean up

2. Paint, paint, paint-prime-prime-prime to get rid of Dungeon colors, as I called them.

3. Remove all doors and trims-replace all and repaint.

4. Remove carpet and kitchen-laundry flooring

5. Reface-redo kitchen cabinets somehow.

6. Replace sink-faucet.

7. Remove all shelving from garage

8.Tile lanai and paint

9. Bathrooms: we planned to repaint- will upgrade later.

10. Remove greenhouse on back- build brick patio with built-in grill: Pretty Cool!

So these were our thoughts. Plenty to do, but affordable, and did not need to hire anybody to do it but the carpet man! More savings for us.

We put an offer, we went though the "hula-hula" dance of waiting, and inspections, and everything else, and we bought the house. Great deal, affordable, manageable, and plenty of space for my husband, myself, and my 2 cocker spaniels. My son still lives with us but is preparing to go to UCF next year. So we made room for him..:)

This is now our Little piece of Earth.