Beautiful Old Fixer and Green Shag Carpet

On Saturday we went out and looked at five houses with our real estate agent.  I wanted to share a few photos from two of the houses that turned out to be really good possibilities for us.

The first houses we looked at is located in a beautiful quiet neighborhood in North Portland.  The location is a little bit outside of our ideal area, but a house like this just might be worth it.  The house is priced high in our range and would need a lot of work, including a lot of lead paint removal, but the potential is just gorgeous.

Scoping Out Neighborhoods

Tomorrow we're going out to visit a few of our favorite houses with our real estate agent!  To get a better idea of which houses we want to visit we've spent the last two afternoons driving around the neighborhoods where our favorite houses are located.  It's amazing how much you can learn about a house just by walking by it.  As a result of our afternoon adventuring we've actually knocked two of our favorites to the bottom of our list, confirmed a few of our previous assumptions about certain houses and surprisingly moved a few houses we weren't really considering to the top of our list.

How to do Junk Right

This week Donna over at Funky Junk Interiors was featured as the first stop on the Poppies at Play Parade of Homes.  We don't plan on taking the junk style quite to this level in our own home, but Donna's use of found and vintage objects is an inspiration for both style and saving money.  Here are a few of our favorite shots of Donna's home, but check out Donna's full house tour over at her blog by clicking here!

Fixable Kitchens

Hello again.  We're back from vacation and diving back into the house search.  For the time being we've narrowed down our long list of houses to fifteen that all seem to fit at least some our our needs.  Our biggest priority is potential for resale so we are seriously thinking about the location of the house and it's condition.  When you want to increase the value of your house buying the nicest house on the block is about the worst thing you can do.  What better way to increase the value of a house by taking an ugly kitchen and turning it into a beautiful one.  Several of the kitchens we've come across are about as ugly as they come and we're getting really excited to dive into an awesome kitchen renovation!  Check out some of the fixers we've found: