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:

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

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Bungalow Inspiration

We found this great Chicago bungalow renovation via Apartment Therapy.  Catherine and Jarret bought their 1931 Bungalow in May 2009 and spent the next year and a half updating just about every room in the house.  They worked quickly and on a tight budget and did a beautiful job.  Click on the pictures below to connect to the original posts or visit www.bungalowbungahigh.wordpress.com

The Budget

You heard it here first, folks: you can't buy a house with out money.  A LOT of money.  For most of us, especially those of us in our mid-twenties still in grad school and just barely starting out careers, coming up with that much money means lots and lots of saving.  And for us, at least, this kind of saving calls for a strict budget.  

We've had some sort of a budget plan pretty much since we started saving every penny we had for our month-long cross-country move to Portland.  But since then our budget has often acted as more of a guideline then an actual restriction on our spending habits.  Now that we've decided to seriously pursue homeownership however, we're going to have to take our budget a bit more seriously.  We've been working for months at figuring out exactly how little we can realistically live off of.  We've cut expenses, frivolous habits and sharpened our smart shopping skills.  As of now the budget breaks down like this, and if we can stick to it we'll be in pretty good shape: