OMG we painted it black!

Completely changing your life is stressful. It has been a constant struggle going from elated excitement to straight up panic attacks. Selling our house is an integral part of the plan. Once the house sells we will buy the airstream and the truck to pull it with. For the past three weeks we have been preparing to list our house. We have replaced large chunks of fascia and a good amount of the cedar board and batten siding. We’ve painted the interior and thrown away or donated like 70% of our belongings. We painted all of the cabinets and installed new appliances, faucets, door knobs and cabinet pulls.

After multiple trips to 84 lumber and Lowe's Eric and my dad got the siding back up.

Between painting and declutting, my house looked like this for weeks.

Learning to live with less is going to be hard, but worth it.

In the past week alone we have rebuilt our front porch and painted the exterior! And yes we totally painted our house black, well Thunder Gray to be exact. Painting your house such a bold color is scary. We got halfway through the project and had to go get more paint. As we backed out of our driveway I looked at my half yellow half black house and began to sob uncontrollably. “OMG its so much darker than we thought! Holy S*** it's black, we painted our house black! Who does that? Is that even a thing? Do people paint their houses BLACK!” Eric tried to reassure me but in my mind all I could think was that we have ruined our house and it will never sell. Looking at it now I realize its going to take more than 15 gallons of black paint to crush our dreams! Three days later, we have received compliments from everyone who has seen it. The entire neighborhood is abuzz with how nice “the kids” house looks (All of our neighbors are much older and much wealthier than we are so they lovingly refer to us as “the kids”). The life lesson learned here was to trust yourself. I picked an awesome color, second guessing myself only caused unnecessary stress.

Demolition of the poorly built front porch.

My dad 'supervising' the porch rebuild.

The little house that dares to be bold!

Another life lesson I am actively working on is rolling with the punches. Today was our list day goal. The weather set us back, so we will miss that goal by a week. I cried when I realized it was just not possible to paint all of the exterior trim, stage the garage, lay mulch, and deep clean the entire house in two days. Even more unrealistic are the little things that I plan on doing, like having all the coffee cup handles facing the same direction and fresh flowers in the bathroom. (I’m hoping the flowers and coffee cups say “this woman really has it together… she must have good taste and be totally awesome. I want to buy her house”). I had to realize that doing all of this in such a short amount of time was just too much. My fitness endeavors have taught me the importance of taking pride in how far you have come, rather than worrying about how far you have to go. Eric and I have done a lot in these past three weeks, so I'm not going to beat myself up over not reaching my overly ambitious goal.

The new plan is to list on Friday the 28th. Wish us luck and here's hoping for a week free of panic attacks!