One-Month Check-In (A.K.A. the monster has been released)

30 days into our home-owning experience, and I have to say, things are starting to look and feel like home around here.  Most of the boxes have been unpacked, most everything has found its own place, and we’re falling into a new routine.  And best of all, the interior designer in me is indulging and reveling in the decisions I’ve been making for the past many years, preparing for this house, for this moment.  The home I’ve been planning in my head is finally becoming our reality, and, since this is (kind of) a blog where I like to brag talk about decorating and design and such, I thought I’d give you a sneak peek of the befores-and-afters.

We started in the living room.  Obviously, besides the kitchen, it’s the room that gets the most use.  And since we needed new living room furniture, we kind of got to start from scratch here.  The funny thing is, we actually decided to keep the same wall color we used in our rental when we painted last spring, so we weren’t really starting from scratch- just kind of.  Being consistent in the wall color has definite benefits though; for example, the stuff I had on the walls still works.  And the wall color really brings out the warmth of the wood floors and the banister on the staircase.  And finally, the contrast between the living room and dining room wall colors is really eye-catching.  Wanna see?  (Obviously, if you don’t, you probably aren’t reading anymore.  Which means I’m basically talking to myself.  Moving on…)

So, we can start with our living room at our little house, to really add the element of contrast:

Our living room at our "little house," after our spring face-lift last year

Living room in our new house: before

Living room in our new house: after

So, yeah, maybe I was being a little facetious about the “contrast” between our old living room and our new one.  There are some definite similarities, and the wall color pronounces them in a big way.  Oh, and the angle looking into the dining room:

The living room, however, is literally the only room in our new house that bears resemblance to our old house.  Take the kitchen, for example.  I thought the kitchen in our small house was huge.  And, compared to the rest of the house, it really was.  Remember that room?  We just painted it in October:

Here’s our new kitchen (before I made Ryan slave with a paintbrush and roller to splash my color of choice on the walls):

…and our new kitchen, post move-in:

…and, looking into the eat-in area:

Finally, I’ll show you the master bedroom.  We love this room- it’s really, really big compared to our little house.  This room posed some major design problems that we didn’t realize until after our closing.  See, the previous owners had put up wallpaper that they later painted over, and decorated with a chair rail.  Our plan was to remove the chair rail and paint (we didn’t know we would be dealing with wallpaper).  So when we got in here and started trying to remove the wallpaper- both by peeling and using a steamer- we discovered that it wasn’t going anywhere without taking the drywall with it.  We decided to paint over it (again) and hope that our color covered the dark stripes that were showing through the paint job that was done previously.  Here’s the “before”:

And, (from a different angle), here’s the after:

And for now, that’s kind of it for our improvements.  For being one month in, I don’t think we’ve done too badly.  We Ryan still has some painting left to do, but he’s been a real trooper (even though he’s opened at least two of the paint buckets and thought that his wife had completely lost her ever-lovin’ mind).   Our weekends, for the next, well, couple of decades, will be filled with projects and items from the honey-do list, but we’re comfortable with what we’ve accomplished so far, and we’re excited to continue making this home our own.

 

Cheers!

xoxo,

~d

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