Update - Meeting with our Agent!

Here's one place in Portland we won't be looking at houses:

As you know, we met with our new real estate agent for the first time on Wednesday!  We really liked her and are excited to work with her!  She is incredibly knowledgeable about real estate and about houses and she loves to work with first time home buyers and share that knowledge. 

Kitchen Crappy to Kitchen Happy

We just love Dave and Joi's kitchen renovation featured last week on Design Sponge.  They have been working on this renovation slowly over the past several years from painting the cabinets and walls and replacing the counter-tops to updating the appliances, adding a hand-made island and so on.  The finished product is beautiful!  This is exactly the type of inspiration we look for in a kitchen renovation.  Click on the pictures to check out the original post on Design Sponge or click here to see Dave and Joi's whole kitchen journey.

By the way, the other kitchen renovation featured in the Design Sponge post is a little more involved but also very beautiful.  Check out Katie's New Kitchen Here.

NE Portland Renovation

Last week Apartment Therapy featured a renovation of a Portland home located close to some of the neighborhoods we're interested in!  Risa and Nick moved to Portland a few years ago and have been working on updating and renovating ever since.  With Risa's background in architecture they were able to do a lot of the work themselves, including a two story addition off the back of the house.  The renovation is much more upscale than we will be able to afford, but it is nice to get a view inside a local house.  To see the entire house tour just click on the pictures below:

A Fireplace Makeover

Exciting news... we're meeting with a real estate agent this week!  A good friend recommended that we work with this particular agent and we're excited to meet her!  We are mainly looking to find out if she thinks that our plans for purchasing are reasonable, what she thinks the level of risk is since we are not planning on keeping this house forever and what the next steps are for us.  We'll be bringing along our financial information, our Needs vs. Wants list and the list of neighborhoods that we're interested in and we'll see what she says!

Speaking of our needs vs. wants list, remember when we said we want a fireplace?  Well if we do end up with one and it turns out to be ugly (we hope so!), this $82 fireplace makeover from The Lettered Cottage will be a great inspiration.  Click on the pictures to check out the full post or visit www.theletteredcottage.net

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