The new house tour in its current state

Welcome to the new house! Today I’m going to walk you through the first floor as it is. I sort of cleaned, but I didn’t stage anything. I do not think its nearly as embarrassing as these before photos. I can’t believe I actually linked to them again. You don’t really have to click on that.

Anyway, coming through the front door leads you to an entryway. A foyer, if you will. A space that just didn’t exist in our old house. We have a real coat closet and the stairs start out in the open– not tucked away in the very back corner.

When we bought the house, this room and the entire second floor hallway was covered in wallpaper – probably one of the reasons why it sat on the market for so long. It really didn’t make the best first impression. We’ve since removed it, but we’ll talk about that more in a future post.

To the right of the entry is the living room, and to the left, through that opening above, leads you into the kitchen (turn right) and to the half bathroom (turn left), that’s where we’ll head first.

Look at that skinny little half bathroom door.

Kind of strange, right? Super skinny. HUGE vanity. I mean that honker is 36″ wide. THREE FEET! You almost feel like you have to shimmy past the vanity to get to the commode. It’s also so skinny that its hard to get any better angle for photos. Clearly, we’ll be updating this…it will still be skinny but I think a smaller vanity is going to do wonders…and new floor tile…and wallpaper…

On to the kitchen. This was actually recently redone, which is nice because even though there’s a lot of things that we wouldn’t have done, “redoing the kitchen” is not on our list of things to do. We’re just planning a few minor updates like paint, window treatments, and replace the faucet. Obviously I have loftier plans which we may get into in the future since I’m learning as I work in it that this kitchen has a couple major storage issues…

And No, before you even ask, you cannot fit an island of any kind in this kitchen. I’ve tried every possible scenario short of moving the basement stairs which are located behind that door smack dab in the middle of the kitchen.

And yes, that is a basket of rags that just sit out on the floor. It’s 1. Convenient, and 2. acting as a door stop. I wasn’t kidding when I said, “sort of cleaned, no staging” prior to taking these pictures.

We do need to find an actual place for those.

This shot above is taken in the family room. A room that was added on at some point, and if this house didn’t have this room, we would not have been interested in it.

It’s a huge room. Nearly 14’x20′ and just to give you a sense of scale, our old house had a total footprint of 16’x32′. The footprint of our old house is almost completely captured in that photo up there. As you can tell, we clearly don’t have enough furniture to fill it. I’m super excited for this room. It’s going to be a great place to hang out and just live. Plans are in the works, my friends! Currently the room is “filled” with Sully’s toys, misplaced furniture that has yet to find its rightful home, and a pile of “this isn’t staying here” stuff that hasn’t managed to actually leave the house yet.

Continuing around the corner from the kitchen we have the dining area. Since everything is so open it’s not really a dining room, just an area to dine. Our table is the perfect fit for the space, but we have enough room to actually put the leaf in the table if we need to fit more people around it.  Since we had the built in bench on the one side at the old house, we currently have stylish folding chairs to accommodate extra guests.

Finally we go to the living room. I switched it up on you and this photo is taken right next to the entry instead of continuing on from the dining room, ahem, area. This is where we currently hang out since this is our only place to really sit down. The TV is temporarily set up to the right outside of the photo frame. Ultimately the TV will move to the family room and this room will be a little more formal. We’ll keep the sofa in here and get a bigger, cushier one for the other room. We love that huge window looking out into the backyard. That window is 9 feet wide. It’s HUGE, but in a good way, not like that stinkin’ vanity.

That travertine table you see in the background is another predicament we’ve found for ourselves. That was the previous owner’s table and we got it during negotiations….along with an extension ladder. I was actually more excited for the ladder, B wanted the table. The previous owner was probably happy he didn’t have to deal with moving either of them. Anyway, it’s a nice table, but currently it is too big to go in front of our little sofa with that chaise. I’m not sure what the answer is yet, but having it sit under that fabulous window is not the final plan.

The rug that was once in Sully’s room is also temporarily there as a place for him to roll around and play. We plan to put our old living room rug down (you can see a snippet of it rolled up in the foreground) but we’d like to get it cleaned first and we’re waiting until we paint before really putting everything together.

We’ll end the tour at the fireplace. It’s both wood burning and gas log ready. We’re planning on getting some gas logs because who wants to deal with the mess of burning wood logs indoors?! Lucy likes to pretend the fire is already going and lays in front of it quite a bit. The mantle is beautifully styled with paint samples, a Christmas ornament of Sully, coasters, and some faux marble candlesticks (?) I found on super clearance at Kroger. Yes. Kroger.

And that’s the first floor! Next up, the upstairs.