Home Renovations 2015

Since purchasing this home brand new in 2012, it sat undecorated and disorganized. As part of my 2015 New Year's resolutions, I am going to each room to renovate, redecorate, and organize. We knew when we moved here, we would have only a little over half the space of our other home in oakley, CA (now our second home.rental property). So, how do you move from a 4,192 sqft 5BR/4.5BA/3CAR to 2409 sqft 4BR/Loft/2.5BA/2CAR? PURGE-- lots of purging!!! Follow me as I turn our blah and disorganized home into one that is worthy of Pinterest (I hope)!

Another reason why we're doing home renovation is because of our homebased baking business, which we run in this modest home. We meet with clients, mostly brides, to do cake tasting and design consultation. Some of our clients also prefer to pick up their orders rather than have us deliver to them. We cannot ask our guests to take off their shoes all the time because they don't need to do that at other bakeshops. Since we are saving on commercial lease, we would like to put some improvements in our living areas, where we meet our clients. Nothing is more important than first impression, so we'd like to be able to provide a presentable, cozy and comfortable place to meet our clients. 

Why Clustered Sanctuaries?

Perhaps using Clustered Sanctuaries as my blog title is a misnomer. After all, by definition, sanctuary means a sacred holy place such as a church, mosque or temple. Although, our new home is not "unholy", it's far from being what you call sanctuary in its real sense. I thought of this title only because our community is called Sanctuary at North Village, which is located in Vacaville, CA. Our builder further describes our community as offering refuge and serenity, which are both characteristics of a sanctuary. It's a community of clustered homes. If you are unfamiliar with what clustered homes are, Wikipedia has an excellent information on it here.

Now that I got the blog title defined, let's move on.

As per my first post back in July 26, 2012, we moved to this new home the day after. We decided to rent out our former home in Oakley, CA to a wonderful family. They are still renting from us and we couldn't be happier. They love our home and they are taking care of it. We don't know when we will be back to that house, if we will ever be, but for now, renting it out is working for us. It is now our investment property.

Moving into our new home in Vacaville, CA has proven to be a challenge. It's much smaller than the house in Oakley, not only in terms of square footage, but by the number of rooms and storage spaces. Before we left Oakley, we sold a lot of our stuff via Craigslist and garage sales. We've given up items that would not work in the new layout. Right now, the biggest challenge is making this house a home. After more than two years, we're finally trying to redecorate and renovate our home to make it more livable. So, my next posts will be to provide updates to what we're doing as part of our home renovation project,

New Chapter...New Beginning

So, we're almost moved in to our new home. Tomorrow, our home in Oakley should already be clean. The holes on the walls where we hanged art pieces and mirrors should already  be patched. To think that less than four months ago when we first started looking for a home to move into that's closer to UC Davis.