Our New Home ~ The Before Tour

First off, thank you so much for all the sweet comments, emails, messages, etc. after I wrote about the story behind our recent move. It meant so much to me to read your kind, supportive words! Thank you, too, for reading this little blog of mine :) I very much appreciate it! If you haven’t already, there’s a little box over on the right hand side of the blog that says “Subscribe Via Email” and you can enter your name and email address to catch up on the posts around here. You’re email won’t go to anyone else, and right now I’m only sending out an email once a week as a recap of the week’s posts so you won’t get bombarded with emails from me, I promise! I hope to do a monthly newsletter at some point on design tips and ideas, but right now we’re working on getting through one day at a time :)

Part of this new journey is updating our new home so it fits more of our lifestyle and design aesthetic, and I want to share that process with you! We’ve updated each house we’ve lived in and this one is no different. We were able to do a little more updating up front on this home compared to the other two, which will be nice once we move in. Not as fun while it’s extending your already long hotel stay, but at least some of the major things will be done by moving day. Which is next week, I might add!!

I made a trip out in spring once our house in San Diego was under contract to look for our next home. We had been looking for months really, and had an idea of where we wanted to look. After putting an offer on another home and having it fall through, we knew the neighborhood we really wanted, but there was hardly anything on the market. I had seen our house online and remembered I liked it, but had forgotten why I had dismissed it at first: It didn’t really check off any of the boxes I was hoping to fill in our next home. But it had a good vibe {does that make sense? homes to me have “vibes” and this one had a good one} and I liked the potential.

The great room has vaulted ceilings and space for some great built ins. Changing the built ins was one of my first priorities because the space for the tv wouldn’t fit the tv we have and I didn’t really want it over the fireplace. I also felt that it would be a great way to set the tone for a new look. We always wanted more built ins in our last home and it will be nice to have a place for storage, books and display. Our new built ins should be done next week and I can’t wait to see how they look!

The fireplace surround needed an update to go along with the built ins. The stone for the surround should be in soon and the mantle and surround are already in place.

The majority of the flooring in the house was another priority to switch out. The green carpet was in good shape but doesn’t match any of our furnishings. With little kids, a dog and a busy life, along with some of us having pretty bad allergies, it made sense to take out as much carpet as possible and replace it with hardwood floors. I have just found they are so much easier for me to keep clean.

This was me while we were touring the house back in April. I love that the kitchen is huge! I love to cook and we enjoy entertaining so I love that this can be a gathering spot for our family and friends.

That green wallpaper will come down eventually. We stopped the updating at the kitchen for now. We may end up tweaking this existing layout and painting cabinets and getting new appliances, etc. or do a whole new kitchen, but we shall see. I do know that I want a new island in the nearer future. As it is, it only seats 2 people and if I reconfigure it and make the one side longer, I can fit 4 people and maybe up to 6.

There is no dining room, but because there is a big enough space in the kitchen for the table, that was fine with me. We will be using our dining table for our every day table. My grown-up, not regularly used, pretty dining table I’m sure will have scratches and marker on it in no time :( :( :(. But what good are the things we have if they aren’t used? I’ll be repeating that little sentence to myself in order to stay calm when one of my children digs their fork in the unblemished top.

I have not figured out window treatments yet for this house. It’s a long story, but after thinking my drapery from our old house was coming with us and then having it not come with us, I will need to figure out what to put on our windows. I love all the natural light that comes in here, and I’ll probably do some drapery on this large window.

Our staircase is pretty steep. And the rail was low. And we have 2 boys, one in particular, that I’m sure at some point will try to slide down this rail. That scared me and I wanted to add a wall coming down about 4 stairs to add some privacy upstairs and not have such a drastic drop off. However, we ended up forgoing the wall and re-did the rail. In that process, the entire stair case trim was completely re-done. It was so fun to visit it each day and see the craftsmanship by the carpenters.

The entry to the master bedroom was super narrow and really odd. I knew I wanted to open it up to make it less confining.

The office had lots of red wallpaper. We joke that Every. Single. House. we looked at had one room of Nebraska Red. Seriously. Every single one. It may have been a bathroom or the basement, but not one house that we looked at skipped out on their Nebraska Red :)

While my parents were here visiting to help out with everything with the new baby, etc. my dad got to work on the office and the boys’ room. To save some money, I decided to leave out painting the rooms I could paint myself. Yes it would take longer, but I wanted to save some money for the things we couldn’t do. Turns out I saved money and my dad got a heavy work load during his visit. Thank you Dad!!!We all pitched in to take down wallpaper. This was the day before I had our little girl. I felt like I needed to be productive and it was fine if this extra work sent me into labor.

And this was my hubby’s contribution. We had been working for about 2 days on this room, getting our technique down and getting all that red off the walls, and he came in and was overly productive in one swoop. My dad told me over lunch that day, “Jason may have overdone it a bit on the wallpaper. He took off a pretty good chunk and it’s down to the backing.” We were trying to get by without having much patch and repair done to the drywall in this room. I had missed this little contribution before we headed to lunch. YIKES! I swear he might do stuff like this just to get out of home improvement projects ;) Needless to say, he was dismissed from wallpaper removal duty!

Contractors and family alike were curious why we maybe didn’t do more before we move in and I kept telling everyone the same thing. We HAVE to get moved in here, sooner than later. I want my kids to feel settled in their home before starting a brand new school and I want to feel somewhat settled before my kids start a brand new school. I always say that changing paint colors can lead to a kitchen remodel. It seems as though every home improvement projects has a domino effect on updating more and more, and sometimes you have to stop somewhere and take a breather. I couldn’t take too many more decisions and tasks in order to get more completed before we moved in. And having some of the spaces looking completely not updated gives a little more fire under us to save up and get the next project completed sooner rather than later! I will be sharing more of the before and afters as we complete each space. I’m so thankful we are able to get so much of this updating done and I’ll be sharing the progress next week. Until then have a great weekend, friends!