When my husband and I were first married, the only house we could afford to buy was a fixer-upper which needed a lot of help.

But to us it looked like heaven, since it was our first home together. Family and friends may have seen a dirt yard, peeling paint, and beat up wooden floors, but we saw potential.

That summer we worked every day after work and every weekend. We scraped, painted, varnished. We installed aluminum fencing. We laid down sod, sanded and buffed floors, and we painted anything that would sit still.

By the time fall leaves covered the ground, the fixer upper had become home. And it still is.