It has been almost 6 months since I’ve posted here formally- and what a six months it has been! We bought a new home and quickly sold ours after we closed on our new home. Y I K E S.

Get ready for a big one- I feel like I have a lot to share/explain before I get back into the swing of things.

Yes, it was the most stressful and hectic period of my life to date. Buying alone is stressful but then the added pressure of getting your current home ready to put on the market (LATE) while your husband is traveling the country on work trips Monday-Friday? Pure madness here, my friends. One of the reasons you never saw an end of summer garden post? Because our poor garden really got neglected with everything going on!

I wanted to write a post to share a bit of “the story” behind the purchase and process of acquiring our new home and introduce a new angle for Cheese & Weim- lifestyle. This blog always had bigger intentions for incorporating my day to day life, not just what I’m cooking and while I still will keep food 100% at the forefront I will be incorporating more entertaining stories, house projects and decorating and all-around family life things.

To be honest, writing recipes is so time-consuming and while I know so many people turn to the blog for food (I do too, it’s my personal digital recipe box)- I ALSO know I have many people that are interested in my day-to-day as well. I say ‘day-to-day’ loosely as this won’t be turning into some 2020 version of Live Journal where I talk about my dreams every day, don’t worry. So before this post gets ridiculously long- while I most definitely will be posting recipes and foodstuff, with this small shift I can incorporate some more content that isn’t totally food-related get you more reading material sooner!

SO before this post gets any longer allow me to introduce our new home!

We stayed in Connecticut just moving to a different town, Woodbridge to be precise. Briefly, for those who are local and would understand this, we chose Woodbridge because we wanted to be in the Amity school district which is one of the best in the state. Our decision to stay in New Haven County versus moving into Fairfield County (where we make long commutes to work) stems from staying nearby our families who are so active and involved in Rowan’s day-to-day. We are incredibly close to our parents and my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew (soon to be nephews!). They all only live 5-20 minutes from us, despending! It really does take a village when raising young children and I am so thankful to have so much support around us.

Ok so enough about us- let’s talk about this house. They aren’t sure of an exact date it was built but it is speculated sometime between 1720-1750. With an addition added on in the 80s (which is the kitchen, all-season sun porch, and master bedroom).

We closed in early October and moved in just before Thanksgiving. We had started looking at homes in March of last year and eventually stumbled upon this one in early June. The moment we walked up through the back door I was enamored. Brett, on the other hand, spent the entire time talking about how old it was and couldn’t wait to get to the 1970s ranch on a lake we had lined up to see afterward. Something about the house felt like home, I grew up in an older home and a lot of the features reminded me of it. The house had been empty for what was probably a year at this point so some of it felt like a museum. In fact, the old owners had left a loom in the dining room and I begged Brett not to come in to see it because he would have just called it right there. He saw it and instantly kept griping about how old it was and that we would never stop working on it. In the car afterward we kept talking about each room and what we would do with it…he eventually said “I think we both love the IDEA of it but we don’t have the time to put into this” and we left it at that.

Then we went to Block Island for our annual family vacation and had dinner (just Brett and I) at The Atlantic Inn, which is only 127 years old, while we were there we started talking about how much history and character was in the building and discussing that old house…after a few other showings that didn’t wow us this one stuck in our mind and was staying with us. We immediately started texting our amazing agent, Holli, and she laughed that we should be vacationing, but sent us some additional paperwork and we scheduled another showing the day we got off the ferry.

From then it was a roller coaster of negotiation and inspections but we made it!

One of the first things we fell in love with and restored were the original hardwood floors. I am SO happy we had the whole house done before we moved in. It would have never been done otherwise.  I’m going to share some before and afters below.

And then we moved!

Coming up in the future I will be sharing some of the projects we’ve accomplished, have still in progress and plan to work on. We are constantly doing things here so there is no shortage of content! I, of course, will continue to post up recipes! I have a lot of them banked to get up here for you all. So stay tuned! Until then, I leave you with my favorite photo from our first Christmas in our new home.

There’s no place like home.