There’s a house on a creek in Johns Creek, Georgia, and it’s been our project since 2021.
We bought it at the height of COVID, which is its own piece of context. We’d been looking for a vacation property in the mountains; somewhere to escape to, somewhere small, somewhere that would just be ours when the world felt like too much. We looked at a lot of cabins. We talked about it a lot. And somewhere in the middle of all that talking we realized what we actually wanted wasn’t a place to escape to. We wanted a real home. The kind you settle into instead of visit.
So we stopped looking at cabins and started looking at houses, and the one we kept coming back to was a fifty-year-old place on Long Indian Creek. The first time we walked the lot the water was up and the light was doing that thing it does in late afternoon through the trees, and a doe walked down to the creek bank like we weren’t there. Zach and I looked at each other and said “yeah, okay.” The house itself was a sell. We told ourselves we’d “fix a few things.” Y’all. We had no idea.
It had been flipped before we got to it, which means a lot of what looked finished was cosmetic and a lot of what looked fine was hiding something. The Old House series on this blog is the long, ongoing inventory of what we’ve found, what we’ve fixed, what we’ve lived with, and what we’ve learned to laugh about. Living with water on a property is its own kind of education. So is realizing that the previous owner’s “renovation” was mostly paint over problems.
This section is where I write about all of it.
What goes here
The Old House series, in installments. Renovation posts with honest before-and-afters and honest budgets. Infrastructure posts about water, drainage, irrigation lines, the things that make a property function instead of just exist. The barn we built in 2022, now four years old and with opinions. The original master bath we redid in stage one. The drainage issues we will eventually stop pretending we don’t have. The windows that need to be replaced. The trees we’ve lost and the trees we’ve planted. Posts about the creek itself; some of them quiet, some of them not. Long Indian Creek has a history that goes with its name, and I’ll get there.
The hardscape and landscape infrastructure also lives here. Retaining walls, paths, drainage solutions, the work of dealing with a creek-bank slope, fences, the bones of the property as a property. The stuff that’s about this place specifically and wouldn’t translate if we moved.
What does NOT go here
The vegetable garden lives in Garden. The four raised beds, the companion planting guilds, the front yard edible-native-pollinator redesign, the saffron crocus experiment, the actual growing food part of the property. The test I use: would this post still make sense if we moved? If the answer is yes (irrigation principles, planting strategy, seed-starting workflow), it’s Garden. If the answer is no (running water lines out to the beds from this specific house, dealing with this specific drainage situation, working around this specific creek-bank slope), it’s here.
Personal essays that happen to take place at the house but aren’t about the house live in Personal. The line there is fuzzier; I trust my own judgment on it post by post.
A note on what I’ll name and what I won’t.
I’ll tell you we live in Johns Creek. I’ll tell you the creek is Long Indian Creek (and I’ll get to the name, eventually). I’m not going to pin the house on a map for you. Photos of the outside happen when they serve the post, but I’m not running a tour bus, and there are a few proper nouns around here I haven’t earned my way into writing about yet. That’s an editorial choice, not paranoia.
How to read this section
Mostly what you’ll find here is the truth about what it means to take on an old house on a piece of land you love and slowly, expensively, occasionally hilariously try to make it work. Some posts are practical (how we fixed the thing, what it cost, what we’d do differently). Some are reflective (the creek at six in the morning, the year we lost the dogwood). Some are the receipts on the flipper before us.
The deer are still here, by the way. They were here when we got here, they have opinions about the garden, and they’ll be here when we’re not. That feels right.
We’ve been at it since 2021. We’ll be at it a lot longer. The creek doesn’t care either way. It just keeps running.
P.S. The flipper who renovated this house before us made some choices. I am cataloguing them. The catalog is long.
P.P.S. We didn’t get the mountain cabin. We got something better. I think about that a lot when the crawl space is doing whatever the crawl space is doing this week.
P.P.P.S. If you’ve ever bought a fifty-year-old house and thought “how bad could it be,” welcome. Pull up a chair. We’ve got coffee and a lot of stories.