Before we moved to Virginia, we cleared out the house, cleaned it up, and made a few repairs before we left in preparation for renters. While we took a few of our favorite fixtures with us (and replaced them with new ones), the house has never looked better. I snapped a few pictures for memory's sake and it brought back a lot of memories of when we first moved into the house.
While we don't know how long we will live in Virginia (maybe a few years, maybe forever, who knows?), what we do know is that it would be hard to come back to California if we sold our home. So we wanted to keep a place to come back to if needed. We are working with a property manager since we are so far away and he gave us a few pointers on what we needed to do to get the house ready to rent.
One of the updates we made was touching up paint including our front and back porch. While I loved the rustic look of the chipped paint, giving it a fresh coat definitely provided a bright welcome to the house.
Getting the house ready took a little longer than we had hoped for but thankfully we had friends and family come by to help us with the work and hold the baby.
Clearing out all our junk sure made the backyard look amazing! A good lesson in purging sooner than later so that we can enjoy our home now.
The side of our house has served many purposes through the years - sometimes storage and for a short summer - a vegetable garden.
On the inside of the house, we touched up paint and had the house professionally cleaned.
We kept a few of the original light fixtures and mirrors that were put back in so we could take some of my beloved finds with us across the country.
We had never completed the trim on our fireplace so my father in law helped us out by adding the last row of brick to finish it off. Another one of those projects that we wished we had done sooner. It ended up turning out great and I like how it helps balance out the large mantel.
It was hard to say goodbye to our little home. It was the place where we lived when we got married and the house we brought home our baby boy. Two months in to our new home in Virginia and things are starting to feel more familiar. But I still think of our California home often, full of such sweet memories together as well as all the love we put into making it our own.
I am so proud of the home we created over the years and can only hope that renters will enjoy the fruit of our labor.
You can see pictures of what our home looked like before we moved in here.
