Our first home

So, when we went off to vet school back in 2003, we decided to buy our first home in Boone, Iowa. Oh how we loved Boone. We couldn't have asked for a nicer town. I have often said I wish I could have grown up in my parents era instead of my own. Well, Boone is about as close as you can get. The movie theater showed one movie at a time and just about all of Boone would show up for it. When the seats were full, people would sit on the floor to enjoy the film. The bakery was a couple blocks away and one of our favorite hang outs--that is, for us an the elderly population of Boone. Of course, everyone else in Boone would stop buy the bakery to pick up a quick sugar fix. We could walk the kids to the library or to the park or to the local YMCA. Teenagers would swarm the main drag on weekend nights. People are friendly and help each other out. There is always someone you can rely on when you need something. Sunday walks always provided opportunity to socialize with friends and neighbors who would be out walking too. It was so wonderful living there. Well, anyway, when we went to visit Boone to look for a house, we knew we couldn't afford much. So, all of the houses we were looking at were pretty tiny and run down. But, in Iowa, real estate is cheap and as we were walking down the street we noticed a house with a for sale sign. It was, to us, a big, beautiful house that we knew we would never be able to afford. We joked about how funny that would be if it were our first home. We decided to take a chance and ask the Realtor about it. Turns out it had been on the market for quite some time and was in our price range! So we bought it! And it gave me an opportunity to exercise my creativity and carpentry skills as I fixed it up during our time there in Boone. It was a sad, sad day when we left that house and all our wonderful Boone friends. We still feel like it is our real home. Hopefully we will come to enjoy our new home as we did our old. Since we were starving students raising two boys on the amount of money I could make teaching piano in a tiny rural town, we really didn't have any budget for our home improvements. So, I feel that my greatest accomplishment was changing the look of the house on very little money. With the exception of the the nursery (for which we needed new furniture and such), each room cost less than $100 to change and many less than $50. The following are some before and after pictures of the house.