Okay, guys, I’ve been dying to write this post. I’m SO excited about our new house and to share it with you. Before we moved in I went and snapped some pictures without anything in it. It’ll be pretty cool to do before and afters with that. Currently, we have everything in the house and out of the boxes, but it’s so far from photo-ready. We have lots of little projects to work on and some big ones too. Don’t worry, I’ll be sharing it all. I can’t wait for you to see what we have in store, it’s going to be so fun! But, let’s start with the blank slate.
I’m going to take you through it like you would walk through it. So, here’s the outside and the porch, which I LOVE. I can’t wait for warmer days where we can sit out there and enjoy the sun. My mind is reeling with summer cocktail ideas…
When you walk in the front door, there’s a small foyer and from there you can see straight up the stairs and all the way back to the end of the first floor. The living room is there on your left, through the doorway is the dining area, off of that is a “bedroom” (it’s in quotes because as-is it’s not much of a bedroom, it’s not private at all. Currently we’re using it as an office), and then through the next doorway is the kitchen and a full bath (weirdly) off of that.
We get so much light, especially on the left side of the house and it’s really refreshing. In the living room we have a couple windows and a non-functioning fireplace that came with that really strange little plaque. Ha! We’ll see what we can do about that. I also love the way the staircase is framed in the doorway and that if you sit across from the windows there’s so much outside you can see.
The heart pine floors are one of the things that really sealed the deal for us with the house. And they’re really special because they’re much more rare now. Here’s the dining area, which is bigger than I remember (yay!). I can’t wait for the dinner parties. I can see it now, all our friends gathered around the table laughing amid candle light eating really delicious food. I. CAN’T. WAIT.
Right off of the dining area is that “bedroom.” Right now it’s not much of a bedroom, it’s in the middle of all the common spaces downstairs and has a set of glass-French doors, so there’s no privacy at all. Currently we’re using it as an office. Eventually we think we want to move the kitchen in here. The current kitchen is really small and when we bought the house we knew we were going to renovate it in some way. Moving it here for more space and openness is the front-runner right now. But, we’ll probably live with it for a little while before making a decision in case we don’t use the space the way we thought we would and want to change the plan. Plus, we have tons of little projects to keep us busy in the meantime. Don’t you love the built-ins? I do. And I hate those ceiling fans. So ugly! Oh well, in time my friends, in time. (that’s what I’m telling myself anyway ;).
Just past the dining room is the kitchen and bathroom. The door to the left of the stove is the bathroom and to the left of the refrigerator is the laundry room. It’s not very big at all, but the laundry does have it’s own area so that’s a plus. Right now the kitchen is SO SMALL. Which is a major struggle for us, even when we know we’ll renovate in the future. It’s not the smallest kitchen we’ve had, but it does have the least amount of storage of any kitchen we’ve ever lived with, including our San Francisco ones. We like to cook and overall just spend a lot of time in the kitchen so this is really tough for us. But, until we change it we’re making it work. Even if we have to store some appliances in random places around the house. Ha!
Now that we’ve seen the whole first floor, we’ll head upstairs. I actually think I like the black stairs. I never would have chosen that color, but think it looks okay. It may change in the future because the stairs (and the whole house, really) need a fresh coat of paint. But, for now I think it’s nice. Upstairs is the master bedroom, a guest bedroom, and another full bath. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs. So I’ll show you that first. It’s definitely been renovated. Xan actually thinks they had to add it because when the house was built (over 100 years ago) there probably wasn’t any indoor plumbing. That’s why it’s all hardwood instead of tile. Visually the did an okay job with the reno, but some of the craftsmanship is a little shoddy, so we’ll eventually be fixing that. The list is getting long, isn’t it??
Right next to the upstairs bathroom is the guest bedroom. It’s pretty basic and I think will serve it’s purpose really well.
And last, but certainly not least, the master bedroom. It’s actually pretty large, but the best part is the huge “San Francisco” closet. I call it that because for some reason even though apartments are tiny in the city so many of them have insane walk-in closets. At our last apartment the closet was so big that it really could have been used as another bedroom (by San Francisco standards anyway). When we were in our studio our closet was big enough to fit a big Ikea dresser and so that’s what we put in there. When we bought it we weren’t thinking about aesthesis at all because it was going in the closet and then we were able to the same thing in our second apartment. I thought for sure when we moved in to a house here we’d have to put that ugly thing the bedroom because there was no way that we’d find a closet to fit it in. I seriously cannot believe we did – I feel so lucky! The other thing you might notice in the room is the big crack on one of the walls. Most the walls in the house are plaster, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing some posts about how to repair plaster walls. But that’s another thing that makes me strangely happy. I had never heard of plaster walls until SF and that’s what we had there, so it’s a little thing that brings back some fun memories.
And that’s it! There are tons of things we want to do and some weird little parts because it’s so old. But, that’s also part of the charm and I couldn’t be more excited.