Hi there!
Welcome to our life, love, and home! We are Michael and Cristy, just a goofy couple who likes making things look pretty! In late 2018 we started our dream home restoration/renovation, a late 1800s Victorian mansion in Howell, MI (Greenaway-Ballard mansion) where we got married on the front porch in June 2020! In April 2021 we welcomed our first baby, a little boy named Lincoln. He is the absolute best thing to happen to us! We are both home grown Michiganders with a love for old things and making them pretty again.
We are so thrilled to be able to have this opportunity to take on The Iron Victorian, but with that also comes a lot of challenges! We have to find time during nap time, bedtime, after work, on the weekends, or early mornings before work. Luckily, we have the same eye for things and have the same concept in mind for the design we want in the home so that definitely helps when deciding all the things like floors, paint, color schemes, and furniture.
This project certainly has a lot of pressure to make sure this home is restored in a way where it is respectful of it's history but also has a reflection of who we are and the design elements that we like. We want to keep things as original as possible but also we realize that this house has to be functional and set up in a way where we can live there and love and enjoy it. We definitely will be putting our own stamp on things.
We are now waist deep in this home restoration and as of right now, we probably don't sleep enough, or eat enough well-balanced meals, and maybe we wear the same shirt two days in a row because we have no time for laundry, but we are loving our life together raising our little family and restoring The Iron Victorian and we love being able to share it with anyone who is interested. We feel so fortunate to have each other to lean on, our families support, and now the support of the community, as we are now well under way on this journey together!
We are on this journey to not only teach how to restore this old fixer upper but learn even more along the way.