Mississippi Fixer Upper

Some of you may remember a story series that I posted on instagram back in October last year. My mom had spent months looking at a house that was in serious disrepair, going back and forth on whether or not she should buy it as a fixer upper project. The house continued to sit on the market and overtime, God put it on her heart that this was her house and she needed to buy it. She of course had no idea why but she eventually purchased it and my mom, dad, and I got busy on fixing it up!

It was so much fun to work with them on design boards, sourcing, etc, and they also flew me in for a weekend to get my hands dirty with the renovations. I brought my paint sprayer and painted every surface of that house. Dad and I went to granite yard after granite yard looking for the right surfaces and the tile guy was lined up to get started on the kitchen backsplash. I live for that kind of stuff.

By the end of December the project was basically done aside from a few details that kept us from putting it back on the market. We still hadn’t gotten hardware, a few bathrooms needed touch ups etc. So the house sat there. Dad was eager to get moving on it and ended up going over there to put little finishing touches in during the wait that we hadn’t ever talked about. He added additional recess lighting throughout, dimmers, etc.

Meanwhile, as all of this was happening, my parents house had been on the market. It had been on the market many times and for many years so this wasn’t anything new. In January of this year however, the right buyer came along and it quickly went under contract. Mom and dad started looking at houses to move into and dad switched his attention from the fixer upper house to getting their house in tip top shape for the next owners.

And then everything changed in a second. The roofers were on the roof doing an inspection and dad climbed half way up a ladder to point towards an area where they had had issues before. The ladder snapped and so did my dads neck. He was gone. 

The next chapter was unexpected, overwhelming chaos. The house already had a closing date set so we needed to pack up decades of family things in addition to sorting through and getting rid of all of my dads things in a short amount of time--And figure out where my mom would go.

Enter that fixer upper. We had no idea what was coming when God put it on my moms heart to buy that little house and I’m beyond thankful that he did. Saying goodbye to dad and also our family home felt like a giant door slam on decades of memories and on everything that felt normal. But it’s also such a gift that I have so many memories of working with dad on the fixer upper house and I see him everywhere in it. In the lights, in the demo of what I knew used to be there, in everything. Mom feels like she’s at home too and this house has been a blessing that we never anticipated.

I have a few before and afters of the whole project but I wanted to share the before and after of the kitchen that we worked so hard on!

Moodboard

Before

After