Homes Of The Past: The Saga Continues

(I just discovered a treasure trove of old photos which means we officially have a series.)

(In this case "series" doesn't translate to "interesting" to anyone except for me.)
(Which is why it's a good thing it's my blog.)

HOME #2 - June 2003- April 2005

(Our first home is here)

Where did we leave off? Oh yeah. It's been 6 years, and although 1400 square feet had felt ginormous coming from an apartment right before we had Sierra, our family had now grown to six. Which meant that while sharing bedrooms was just fine, those rooms needed to be bigger than 8 x 10. Or the children needed to stop growing. Neither of which I knew how to fix.

After looking for weeks and getting more and more discouraged, a friend at church told us that their neighbors were getting ready to put there house on the market and maybe we might be interested...

AND?

A month later we moved in. A whole whopping two streets over from our first house.

I originally had said no because the house was lavender. As in PURPLE.

Luckily paint color can be changed.

And yes, those are black shutters and a black door. Because some things NEVER change.
The house needed work, but we gained an extra 500 square feet and we were in heaven with the extra space.

You better believe that an 80's house is going to have an 80's kitchen.

Once the stove that you hand to light by hand was gone, along with the crackled burgundy walls, it was on it's way to something a little more tolerable.

The next phase was paint and ripping out the 20 year old tile,

then taking down cabinets that we didn't need to open everything up. Even before chalkboard paint, I still had a chalkboard door.

Big clocks, bamboo blinds, black painted furniture...did I mention that some things never change? After years of having the washer/dryer in the garage, we finally had a laundry room. And some lovely stencils to paint over. The formal living room (music room? office?) all staged for sale, even though we used it as a big boys bedroom/playroom.

And then I got pregnant with #5, which left us wondering where in the world we were going to put another baby. Hayden was born and we knew that as much as we loved this home, there was no way that it was going to be our forever house.
Just about that time I got the itch. The itch to finally leave Fresno, after spending most of my life there. An itch that was music to my California-hating husbands ears. It was just about that time that his company was opening a new market in the Phoenix area.
Arizona, huh? Neither one of us would mind living there...