I'm really excited to show you how I've decorated my house. If I could I would invite you all over for a house warming party and take you on a tour. But since the majority of you will never have a chance to visit Alabama while we are here, this is the next best thing.
I hope this post doesn't come off as braggy or snooty or anything like that. I feel extremely blessed to have a house like this one. Only three years ago Brandon and I were living with three kids in a two bedroom apartment. So I'm still kind of in shock that a place like this is available to us.
Let's start with the dining room because this is one of my favorite rooms in the house. I'm really happy with how this room went together. Since the kids (and I) are all messy eaters I knew that we would need a rug to protect the carpet under the table. I didn't want to spend a lot of money on something that we were just going to drop food onto so I went to Goodwill to get the rug. It cost $30 which is a great price for a 5 X 7 rug.
I had sort of planned on re-using my red curtains from my last dining room, but the blue rug changed that. Instead I bought new curtains. They would have been $18 a panel, but they were hanging under an incorrect price at Walmart and so I got them for $11 a panel. It was totally worth holding up the line at the checkout counter while a lady verified my assertion that they were labeled $11.
I put my large dresser in the dining room because the room needed some storage space. The dresser stores craft supplies, table cloths, high chair trays, and all my fancy serving dishes. I kind of want to paint some of our chairs a cream color to match the dresser. But that's a project for when I'm really bored.
We still have our tiny dining room table. Maybe one day we'll up-grade to a large table, but for now we don't mind squishing. Right now our biggest problem is that we don't always have enough room for our food. I kind of want to get a skinny dresser and use it as a buffet along the wall.
This shows where the dining room is in relation to the kitchen. At first I was a little unsure how I would like having a formal dining room. It seemed like it would be a big hassle to go into another room to set the table for every meal, but really that hasn't been any different than setting the table in our old dining room. I love that we don't have a lot of distractions from the rest of the house while we eat. It seems like we are able to have better conversations now - but maybe that's because the kids are older. I also really like that we can leave the table messy after a meal, but we don't have to look at for hours.
I'll show you the kitchen in a minute, but first let's check out the other rooms that you can see from the dining room. The door with all the bags on it is the door to the laundry room. The other door goes out to the garage.
My favorite thing about the garage is that we have an automatic garage door opener. I always had to manually open the garage door at our old house so this little thing has simplified my life.
There's also a nice storage area for all of Brandon's tools, the bikes, the Christmas decorations, and other things.
Our last house had built in storage in the garage, but this house didn't. So we had to buy some shelves. We found them on clearance at Walmart for $40. (It's crazy how fast we adapted to Walmart being one of the only close stores.)
Back inside the house, this is what the laundry room looks like. It's long and skinny and still slightly disorganized, but it gets the job done.
I like that the washer and dryer are far away from the door. We hardly hear them at all - even when the door is open.
Okay now we can go in the kitchen. I thought that I would miss having an island, but I kind of like that I don't have a giant clutter pile in the middle of my house anymore. Instead the dirty dishes and random things hide up against the walls.
I plan on filling this wall up with the kids' art work. I even put a white board down low enough that they can draw on it whenever they want.
This is the "office supply and other important things" counter.
Sorry, that bright window kind of washes out the picture, but you can still see the beautiful dark wood cabinets. They are so pretty.
This is what the house looks like when you come in from the garage. The laundry room is through that doorway on the left, the dining room is through the opening on the right. Then the kitchen is through the opening on the left, and then you come to the living room. Beyond that is the hallway with the bedrooms. The door at the very end is the door to the bathroom.
This is what the living room looks like from the kitchen.
And here it is from a different angle.
I'm not completely satisfied with all the art work up in this room. I'm kind of bored with decorating with my wedding pictures, but I don't have any ideas for what else I would do, so this is how it is right now
This how the living room looks from one of the corners. You can see the hallway that leads to the bedrooms on the right. The other hallway is the front entryway.
I love how wide this entry way is. I like that my bench fits in here. There is a closet next to the bench. We keep our shoes in there and it's so nice to sit on the bench to put on our shoes.
The door to the patio is on the opposite side of the room from the entry way.
You can't really tell, but the pattern on these curtains is green. I got these curtains for $13 for two panels. They are kind of see through, but they do a good enough job.
This is what our patio looks like, We have one of the biggest patios in the neighborhood, and I kind of feel bad just putting toys on it, but hey that's the stage of life we are in right now. Our lawn is a work in progress. Half the yard is dirt. I have a maintenance work order in to get it re-sod. Hopefully that happens soon.
In the meantime, this is what happens almost every time it rains.
One interesting feature of our backyard is that we don't have a privacy fence. Instead everyone's backyards are open for everyone to see. I kind of miss our big wooden fence (and the wilderness behind it) but I also like how easy it is to talk to my neighbors here.
And this is how close we are to the park. I couldn't imagine that there could be a park even more conveniently located then the one that was across the street from our old house, but I was wrong. A park basically in my backyard is amazing. We go there every morning after breakfast. It's so nice that Charlotte and Lydia can run home to use the bathroom and I don't have to remind them to look out for cars.
Back inside the house, this is the hallway that leads away from the living room. Three bedrooms and the bathroom are have their doors in this hallway.
Charlotte and Lydia's room is the first one on the left. Their beds are set up as bunk beds, but there is enough room for the beds to be separated if we ever wanted to do that.
They have a little play area set up in one corner. They spend hours playing in here.
They have a large closet with their dresser in it. (This picture is so deceptive - those doors are always open and there are always clothes on the floor.)
The next bedroom is Derrick and Veronica's. Their room faces almost directly east and the sun rises at like 5:30 here. Veronica was waking up pretty early in the morning until we got the curtains put up. Even with the curtains she'll still usually wake up before 6:30.
Brandon set up Derrick's bed. I was worried that Derrick would freak out about it, but he was just fine. It is a lot higher than I ever expected, but Derrick is able to climb up onto it. He loves to jump from it.
What's funny is that Derrick never climbed out of his own crib, but as soon as I gave him a real bed he learned how to climb in and out of Veronica's crib. I gave away my nursing glider chair before we moved, but I still like having somewhere to sit when I put the kids to bed, so I put one of my green chairs in the room.
I was happy that I could still fit both dressers in the closet. Putting dressers into the closet frees up so much floor space.
I didn't take a picture of the bathroom, but you can imagine. The final bedroom in the part of the house is the toy room.
It also has our big storage shelf thing. The movers took this thing all the way apart, and they were very happy when I told them they didn't need to worry about putting it back together. Brandon took care of that.
And here is the closet. One of the keys to having a good toy room is having storage containers that let you clean it up quickly. I mean, I could go to the trouble of making some sort of organizational system, but I'm sure the kids would still dump everything out. So instead we just have big bins where we can quickly toss all the toys.
And with the doors shut, no one is the wiser.
There is a long hallway that juts off of the hallway with the kids' rooms. The living room is on the other side of the wall in this picture. The hallway leads to the master bedroom.
Let's talk about my bedroom for a minute before I show it to you.
This is totally a "first world problem," but I really struggled with the size of the master bedroom. It's such a large room that it was hard to make it feel like a room instead of a small cave.
The fact that nothing in the room really matched didn't help either. I wish I'd taken a before picture to show you how disconnected all the things in the room looked. You'll just have to imagine. I had a giant blue bed, a brown table, a green chair, a black and brown desk, a maroon lamp, a gold lamp, and a bunch of blankets of different colors hanging on a tan quilt ladder.
I puzzled over the room for many days until I decided that I needed to unify everything with the color white I've always lived in houses with white walls so I've never thought about decorating with white. But the walls here are tan with white trim. Decorating with white opened up all sorts of possibilities in this room
Check out how good it looks. I found pictures that had white matting and put those up. I made a white table cloth and put it under the glass of my round table.
This is a king size bed, but it looks small in this large room. Without the white it didn't have anything to make it stand out at all. It was just a blue square. Using white transformed the bed into something luxurious looking. I used an old queen size sheet under the mattress as a inexpensive bed skirt. The white pillows were also from the queen bedding set. I thought about buying king size pillows for the blue pillow cases, but I didn't really want to spend money on pillows Instead I stuffed some folded quilts into the large pillow cases. Brandon has had a poster of a Eifel Tower for years. I finally bought a frame for it, and since it was white it earned a spot above our bed Finally I traded out the maroon lamp for a lighter (albeit smaller) one.
The white theme continues along the other wall. Brandon hated the lamp that I'd brought for our room so he used parts from the maroon lamp and an old rusty rake handle to make a new one. I had fun sanding off the rust and making the handle shiny. We already had white primer and spray paint so all I had to buy was a lamp shade. The end product is so pretty. I also used the spray paint to paint the quilt ladder white. We had a surprising number of blue quilts so I made sure all of them were on display on top of the ones that were different colors. Someday I would like to get some sort of storage bench to put my sewing stuff in, but until I find one I'm using a plastic tub with a white sheet over it. It works great. About the only thing that doesn't have white on it now is Brandon's desk. But everything else goes together so well that I don't really mind.
I bought sheer white curtains from Amazon for like $9. They arrived yesterday, but Brandon hasn't had a chance to put them up yet, so just imagine how nice they will look on this window. This window looks out on the patio.
The door that's next to my bed leads into the bathroom. As you can see I'm totally taking advantage of the fact that I have a ton of counter space and my own sink. One day I'll get it all organized, but not yet.
And here are the his and her's closets with clothes in them. The racks wrap around so don't worry those aren't our only clothes. Again this is somewhere I could organize better, but I don't really have to yet.
Well that's the end of the virtual tour. Thanks for letting me show off my house. If any of you want to come see it in real life you are totally welcome to visit.
