Happy Wednesday, friends!! We are so overwhelmed by the super sweet response we received from so many of you after we shared that we bought our first home on Friday morning! WOW!! Can I just say for a second just how much it means to us that we get to share our little life with so many of y’all? The fact that you guys care so much about what’s going on in our life, whether you’re another photographer, a past or current bride, or just someone who happened to stumble upon our business via social media, means the WORLD to us.
We wanted to pop on here really fast and share a bit about this exciting new journey for us!! So, here we go! First of all, YES- this is our first home that we have owned!! 🙂 When we moved in together after we got married, we rented the sweetest little apartment (that we actually talk about missing from time to time!) for just over a year, and after that, we moved to the precious rental house we are currently in! We’ve never lived in anything above about 1,000 square feet, and we actually have really loved the whole small-home deal (but I won’t lie- the fact that our square footage is going way up is NOT a bad thing!)! 🙂
While we could have bought a home by now, we have just felt God tell us that we were supposed to rent and wait to buy a home until the right time and until He brought the exact right home our way. Over the past year, we’ve been wondering when we’d feel it was time to move again and invest in our first home, and Luke was the first one to start expressing that he was feeling a pull to at least START the process of looking for our first home. I (reluctantly, not going to lie!) agreed that we should just start the process, and we both agreed that if God kept opening doors, we’d keep walking through them, and if He shut them, we’d be content living where we were!
Well, that was pretty much last month- so you could say God kept opening doors!!! 😉 And here we are, less than a week after closing on our first home together! Yay!! This home literally checked every box on our must have list (and most of our “would be nice if it had” list, too!), but the moment I think we both knew this was the one was when we walked down to the floor beneath the living area to find a massive room with a separate entrance from outdoors… and we knew God had given us the perfect in-home studio slash office space. I remember looking at each other and just knowing this was too good to be true. You can’t make up this stuff, y’all- it’s so God and His goodness! God totally did NOT have to give us a home with the most ideal in-home office space OF all time, and yet He did. So special. There are so many moments I could share here that have to do with the specific ways God showed us that THIS is the home He had for us, and I love that so much.
This home needs a little bit of TLC and a bit of freshening up cosmetically, but we are so blessed that the family who lived here before us took AMAZING care of everything and left it in phenomenal condition for us! We are already pumped to have you guys follow along with us as we update things and make this house OUR home. If you know me, you know I LOVE to decorate, so you can bet I’m literally itching to get started!!! Here are a few things we’ll be doing to get started:
- Pulling out the (blue!) carpet in 2 rooms and a hallway and choosing new hardwood floors (we’re already going back and forth between super dark wood and a more gray and tan wood- we’ll see what we decide!
- Painting every room the perfect shade of light gray (send us allll your favorite gray paint colors!)
- Replacing all outlet covers, light switch covers, most doors, and most lighting fixtures (hello, white farmhouse chandelier in the dining room!)
- Changing the (also blue!) backsplash in the kitchen (currently debating between gray subway tile and white marble subway tile… decisions, decisions!)
- Renovating that office space into the perfect C&L studio (we’re planning on printing some awesome canvases and even being able to host client meetings here!)
- Freshening up the landscaping and outdoor spaces (this includes new shutters, cleaning out the landscaping, and making the entryway super adorable and welcoming!)
We’re so fortunate and thankful that 90% of the things we’ll be doing are cosmetic! There are only a few small non-cosmetic fixes to make, which is such a blessing!
There you have it, friends! We are super excited for this new season to start! Be praying for us as we jump into this new journey smack dab in the middle of wedding season (this is our third and hopefully final move during wedding season!), and be watching for plenty of updates here and over on Instagram! I created a Highlight in my Stories just for new home updates, and we can’t wait to share our progress with you all!
Here’s to a new beginning and making this house God practically dropped in our laps a HOME! Yay!!! 🙂
Xoxo,
Caitlin & Luke
