Hi! We are Andy and Candis (picture us waving excitedly/awkardly to you.) We have talked about starting a blog for quite some time now to document our historic home renovations…I don’t know why it has taken so long…possibly because I am a control freak graphic artist who wanted our blog to be perfect before launching (spoiler alert: it’s not), but we are TOO excited to not write down all of our happenings!

If you are coming here from instragram…THANK YOU! We absolutely LOVE our new friends from Insta, and it has been such a fun experience to share the everyday with all of you! (Our feed is @andycandylovehouse, if you are new!) We seriously see some of our insta-friends coming over and hanging out with us, in a very non-creepy-internet-stalking kind of way. I think what we love most about instragram is that we all encourage each other to keep going, on renovations, on life, etc. It’s been a pleasure getting to know like-minded people, and those who are completely different from us as well. Except those people who hate old homes……there is something wrong with those people.

So….let’s get to know each other! My name is Candis, my darling Husband’s name is Andy, we are both going to write posts, mostly because I think Andy is hilarious. We have 6 boys. Yes 6, under the age of 9. You will hear all about them, they are amazing kids.

We have 7 historic houses, 5 that are in the process of being restored and 2 that are “done for now.”

Here is the breakdown: we name them because, well, we are weird.

• Love House: Our home, where we are going to live FOREVER and raise grandkids etc. We are almost finished and we focus a lot of our energy here. We call it Love House because we want it to be a place where everyone can just feel loved and happy, not because of the love shack connotation or anything. Freak, if I had a dollar for every time someone sang that d*** song….. anyway, more on that house to come. Lots more.
• Little Love House: The home right next door to us that we are in escrow with…fingers crossed!! Andy’s brother and sister-in-law will live there.
• The Cabin: an 1850’s log cabin with 1870’s addition…being restored, 4 houses down from us, going to be a rental.
• Center Street Manor, or CSM: an 1855 pioneer adobe home…the second we restored. I could devote an entire site to that labor of love. Being rented.
• 323 House: 1884 adobe home, the first of our restorations. Rented.
• NeoNitta House: 1890, a cute little NeoClassical home that we will be working on soon, right now there are college students finishing out their contract there….blah.
• Art City: 1899 adobe and sandstone brick pioneer home that is taking MOST of our time these days, but beautiful! We will sell this when it’s finished.

We will go into depth on all of the houses in posts to come! A lot of people ask us what the h*** we think we are doing…our parents are sometimes worried, but our mantra is simple:

“Save as many old houses as we can without LOSING money.”

We follow our two simple rules…the houses must bring us closer together as a couple and (see above) not lose money. So far, so good. Although I truly believe that renovating is not for every couple…it can be hard and extremely stressful, but luckily Andy and I have a real passion for it, so what others see as stress, we see as excitement!

Well, enough from me! Can’t wait to meet more friends and start planning our housewarming party! Stay tuned tomorrow as we introduce LOVE HOUSE officially, including all of the TERRIFYING before pictures!

I hope you visit often, I am not going to obsess over making my posts perfect, there will probably even be spelling errors (curse of a graphics person…words=pictures) but we will post often and share the good, the bad and the ugly.

See you soon!

-Candis