Meet Our House

We’re finally ready for another post! We closed on our house on August 3, so I think it’s time for a before-renovations house tour. Our first few projects include painting ceilings and walls, ripping out the carpet downstairs and replacing with engineered hardwood, and removing part of the stairwell wall to open up the stairwell to the front entryway. I’ll have posts for each of these as our projects move along!

Here’s some pics of the outside of the house, I’ll do a more detailed post about the yard later.

For inside, I’ll start off with a rough sketch of the house layout, since everyone likes sketches. The house is about 1700 square feet, a little more upstairs than downstairs since we have a bonus room/4^th bedroom over the garage. We liked this house so much because of the circular floor plan, and every room leads to another room.

Here’s some pics of the front door leading into the small foyer. To the right is the living room, and apparently that’s the only before pic I took of that space…you’ll see more what it looks like when I get to the painting post.

    

And to the left of the door is the dining room, with 2 windows:

And here’s the kitchen…pretty old, so I’m excited to see what we can do to update it without breaking the bank. I tried taking some panoramic shots.

And here’s some more normal pics:

   

   

And we have a small powder room off the hallway between the kitchen and dining room, and across the hall is a closet with washer/dryer.

     

So that’s the whole downstairs, here’s the stairs going up. One of our first projects will be to knock down some of the left wall, to open that space up to the front door and make this stairwell seem less claustrophobic.

        

This is the upstairs layout, with the 4^th bonus room/bedroom off to the left over where the one-car garage is. Then there’s a guest bathroom and 2 small bedrooms (they aren’t as big as they look on this not-to-scale sketch!), and then the master at the end of the hall. These pictures are pretty terrible, it’s hard to really show a plain room on camera!

Hallway:

      

Guest bathroom:

        

Bonus bedroom:

First bedroom:

Second bedroom:

Master bedroom with ugly curtains:

Walk in closet:

Master bath, with Nik washing his hands after messing with the toilet that needs some new parts inside the tank:

So that’s it! As you can see, this house is about as boring as it gets now, but I think this is one of the things we love about it – it’s a blank slate. When we started painting inside (coming in another post!) we soon realized this house has never had any other color than what I call “landlord off-white.” It makes me happy that we’re the first people to live here who will love this house and make it pretty.

Of course, we had to start our first night off with some champagne. We camped out in the home the night after we closed, and on top of all the excitement of buying our first house, Nik and I also got engaged that evening! Now we’re in it together for the long haul to make this house our home.

        

The next few posts will detail our destruction of that stairway wall, then our painting of the downstairs, then maybe a post on the yard which I’ve had the pleasure of mowing twice now (no sarcasm intended, I actually love mowing and it is even more satisfying when it’s your first lawn!), thanks to a donated lawnmower by Nik’s awesome boss.

My first mowing:

Oh, and we also have our engineered hardwood floors ordered that will cover the entire downstairs and here’s the wood we picked with a teaser for some of our painting ideas:

And we bought a new vanity for the downstairs powder room. So many projects! With all this house stuff, it may be a while before we work on any furniture, although we do have a few projects in progress (hint – that wooden structure in the dining room was found in the dumpster for free, and will become our modern dining table!).

I promise we’ll try to post more regularly now so we can keep everyone caught up with all the changes we’re making in the house!