The Charming Home Project

New Kind Of Dream Home The Charming Olive

We bought a house to fix up!!! And an Airstream!!!! Oh my gosh you guys, this is something sooo amazing and I’m beyond happy to finally be able to share it with all of you!!

We FINALLY found the right place for this phase of our life!! John and I have a very specific vision that we’ve been refining for the past 10 years. This property wasn’t exactly what we had in mind starting out, but it ended up being exactly what we needed. It surprised us in the most unexpected ways and it was a total answer to our prayers. We went through lots of trial and error to get to here. This is our second time around as homeowners, and if you read my last life update blog post, we really weren’t happy with our previous environment. After finishing the remodel on our last home around 2016, we wanted to move but as you would suspect, life happened. I started my blog, launched my Instagram, I was working around the clock, plus John and I were traveling quite a bit. Hence the reason behind my silence these past few months as we went through the moving, planning, designing, and transitioning. Thank you everyone for being so patient with me!! I love you all!! xo

We didn’t settle for anything less than what we knew we needed. But we also knew that anything we found within our budget in an amazing neighborhood would be a pretty big project. Some of you may recall that John and I met in architecture school. After we graduated he continued on with architecture and I went into design. I grew up living between home remodel projects and began remodeling homes with my dad in the 90’s. To this day I can’t imaging buying a brand new home! There’s so much love and creativity that goes into making it remarkable and your own. Or making it special for someone else too. I have the same philosophy when it comes to food and I enjoy making my own everything. Cooking is my other passion (aside from this blog). 🙂 I feel so fortunate to have found a partner in this life that shares the same interests as me. Especially when it comes to architecture, John is the Architect of our new home. I’m there for all the design aesthetics and quality control, he’s been making everything else happen. Most importantly, we welcome the challenge and it’s a total dream come true to be able to express our design backgrounds in such a creative way. And we’re thrilled to share this journey with you guys!!

This time around we knew exactly what we needed and wanted in a home. It was well worth the 2-3 year search. Crazy long, I know.

On Our List:

Single story home.
Super family friendly neighborhood, one where you actually see and interact with your neighbors … we got so lucky and have the best neighbors!
To be walking distance to downtown, coffee shops and stores.
To be in San Luis Obispo, California where the weather is perfect, sunny and warmer than our last town as well as more people our age out and about.
To have the ability to have more bedrooms plus a detached granny unit.
A more cozy living situation
A more usable yard that interacts well with the living space.

We were shopping for a total fixer upper project in the best neighborhood. As you can imagine the competition was super high. We kept getting outbid by all cash offers.

And in the end that’s exactly what we found!! We’ve been here several weeks now and we absolutely adore our new neighborhood and neighbors!! Many of our neighbors have lived here between 40-60 years and are the original owners. How incredible and RARE is that!! There’s lots of people our age and young families with kids. We couldn’t have asked for anything better. We just had to be extra patient and persevere through many let downs to get here.

The problem we kept running into was we needed 2 places, one to remodel and one to live in. After our last project, which wasn’t nearly as big as this one, we knew we didn’t want to go through living in the midst of a remodel with no clean zone. We needed to be able to escape and decompress from the project. Also, we wanted to be connected to the action and live as near to the project as possible. Our solution, AN AIRSTREAM! I had a dream about it one night, and we just ran with it.

For the time being we are staying on-site of our project in our favorite floorpan of a 25′ Airstream! We can’t say enough good things about it. We absolutely LOVE it! We went from 2,000 sq. ft. of living space down to 200 something for the time being. 2 dogs and 2 humans living the dream while we work on our new dream home. A true pinch-me kind of moment!! I can’t wait to show you guys what we do with our property!!

We searched between Santa Barbara and Paso Robles for our Airstream. Took us about 3 months before finding it in Paso. Everyone was so nice, and we got exactly what we wanted.

Time to let our talents and spirits shine!! 🙂