I Just Can't Help Myself!

So, you all know by now that we bought our first house. Or, more accurately, are in the process of buying our first house, since we don't close until March.

And I've been trying to not let myself get too excited too early. After all, we haven't done our home inspections yet (happening this weekend though!), and something could be wrong with the house, and we might not be able to go through with the purchase. Or the sellers could still back out. Or something else could happen that would cause us not to actually get this house. Until all the paperwork is signed, we hand over the biggest check we've ever written in our lives, and the keys are in our hands, this house isn't ours.

But yeah. Sitting idly by, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for our closing date just isn't my style. I have to do something to pass the time, and dreaming about how we're going to decorate our new home is about the only thing I can think about lately.

So throwing caution to the wind (because everything IS going to work out and this house IS going to be ours <-- sending those positive thoughts out into the universe can't hurt!), I've been busy planning color schemes and designing furniture layouts and making mock ups of 2D walls to bring to life some of my plans. I just can't help myself! And of course, I felt the need to blog about these ideas! If only to be able to look back once I've got the rooms decorated, to see how/if my initial ideas play out in the end.

But the first order of business was making a cleaner digital version of our house's floor plan, rather than the photo of a print out of the floor plan that I'd posted before.

Then, once I had the floor plan laid out (in Adobe Illustrator), I could start playing around with wall colors. Being a renter for the past 11 years means that I've always had to live with no color on the walls, and add color to the rooms with furniture and accessories. Now, I'm excited to finally be able to paint our walls in bold colors, and invest in more neutral colored furniture. After all, if I ever get tired of the colors in the future, it will be easy to paint the walls another color, that will still work with neutral colored furniture.

As you can see, as of right now (I'm reserving the right to change my mind, especially since all of this playing around with colors is just for fun until I'm 100% sure. Plus, I want my hubs to sign off on the paint colors, to make sure he'll be happy with them too.) I'm thinking of using lots of greys, and repeating the same shades throughout several rooms in the house. Hopefully this will allow me to use different color schemes throughout, but still make the rooms feel tied together. You can also see I'm thinking about jumping on the stenciled walls trend, in the dining room, entry way, and even on the ceiling in the laundry room. These are a few of my inspiration photos:

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I still don't know yet what we're going to do in the master bedroom (although likely it will end up in the same sage green, chocolate and cream color scheme we have currently, at least at first), the bonus room (aka the pool table room, which may end up with similar colors to the formal living room), the office (I know, it's weird, but we're thinking about making that the 'cat room,' where the kitties can have their cat door to outside, we'll build them a new kitty jungle gym, and they can have their own out of the way space to hang out. Yes, we're those people. We have more rooms than we need, so might as well give one to our fur babies!), and Alex's home office, which he'll probably never want to paint or decorate. And I've got nothing figured out for any of the bathrooms yet either. Eventually we'll probably re-tile them, so color scheme decisions are much further off for the bathrooms.

But as far as the rooms I'm already decorating, I've put together little color scheme boards, to start playing around with the accent colors I want to incorporate, and looking at some different patterned fabrics. I put these color scheme boards onto my floor plan as well, with the wall color being the largest square in the top left corner.

I just did these color boards in Illustrator as well, making squares from colors I like on the Benjamin Moore site, and finding fabrics on sites like Joann and Fabric.com.

Here is a closer look at the formal living room color scheme (for which I'm planning to search flea markets to furnish on the cheap. Hooray, furniture to paint and re-cover! This is going to be our "hello, person at the front door, glance over my shoulder to see how clean and orderly our house is" room. It's main purpose will be to look pretty, so people won't know what a mess our real living space is! 'Cause otherwise, I don't really know what to do with a formal living room, even though every house seems to have one.):

My dining room color scheme board:

If this color scheme looks familiar to any of you, it's probably because it's the same colors I've been dreaming about for a dining room since last May. You might remember this room mock up I did in Illustrator:

Yep, I'm still thinking about doing something very similar to this for our dining room!

The family room colors (which will also spill over into the breakfast nook and kitchen, since they're all open to each other. This is a similar color scheme to what we've had in our main living space for years, with bright blues and greens, but I'm hoping to achieve a more sophisticated, but still fun, look this time around, and bring in some accents in red and yellow, to tie in the living room and dining room colors.):

The guest bedroom color scheme:

Which was inspired by this headboard. I'm hoping for a posh beach house feel to the room, and would eventually like to add white beadboard wainscoting to the walls.

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And finally, the color scheme for what is going to be my combination home office/craft room/walk in closet bedroom. I'm going to try to make the most of the small space by dividing the room with some custom cabinets I want to make, so I'll have a defined office space and clothing/closet space. And this room uses some of my very favorite colors, and is close to the colors used for our wedding, and this blog!

Anyone else enjoy playing around with color schemes and planning which colors to paint walls? I can't wait to get into our new house and start painting--we're hoping to hold off on moving in until about a month after we get the keys, so hopefully we can get a lot of the painting done before we have furniture in the way!