Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog! I am so excited to be starting this and sharing our life with you. I have been contemplating writing one for some time now. We have so many exciting things happening in our life right now that I needed a place to share our thoughts and pictures. This blog is not just a DIY home renovating blog, and its not just a blog about our family life. It's also not just a blog where I can share my thoughts. It is a combination of all three, or whatever else I feel like posting. I guess you never know what you're going to find, so check back often! I can't wait to hear your comments!

First, let me introduce myself, if anyone reading doesn't know me. My name is Allison Kelly. My husband is Matt and we currently live in Charlotte, NC. We've been married for about a year and a half. For that time, we have been renting an old ranch house that needed major help. Since our landlord is my father-in-law, we have a lot of freedom with what we do, as long as it's nothing major or expensive. We have painting ever room in the house and planted 30 new shrubs in our 1 acre yard. Currently, Matt and I are both unemployed, so the challenge has been how to make this house livable by spending as little money as possible(landlords do pay for what we buy for the house i.e. paint, bushes).

Matt and I own 18 acres of land in the nearby Gaston Co. town of Stanley. It is heavily wooded and we have been working for the past 2 years to clear out a place to build our house. Since we are doing most of the work ourselves(and have no money to do it), we are actually building a temporary living space first, so we can get on our land and stop paying rent. We recently starting construction on our garage/apartment, in which we will live until we can build are permanent home attached to the garage. I will be posting pictures as progress gets made, along with my little design tips.

No, our house doesn't look like the ones in the magazines or the ones on all the other DIY blogs. We are UNEMPLOYED. I would agree that most of the other DIY bloggers don't go crazy with their spending and they do some creative things on a small budget, but when you don't have an income, you don't have a small budget, you have NO budget. So I fix things little by little. And always go to my neighborhood yard sales to see what needs a good coat of paint. I make no excuses for it. For it is.... A Work In Progress.