House Tour: One Year Down

Exactly one year ago today we closed on our house!

So I thought it was finally time to do an official house tour post. Back when we were playing the House Hunters game, I showed photos of the house with the old owner's belongings, but since some things are definitely looking different now, it was high time for an update.

It will probably be pretty obvious, but I should note that we are still planning on changing a whole heck of a lot in the house. Like take our front yard. We haven't done anything at all to it (except I keep changing out the front door wreath, right now I've got my Ruffled Felt St. Patrick's Day wreath out), but hope to start making some landscaping decisions soon, before the weather heats up. It will be much greener in a month from now though.

Oh, and before I jump into the house tour, a refresher on the floor plan might be useful.

Entering through the front door, you come into a little entry room, that looks straight down a hallway to the back of the house and into the breakfast nook.

But if you turn to the left, you'll see the formal living room (and all of the wall patches that the previous owners left for us).

Nope, haven't done a single thing to the living room yet, except shove some old furniture in here. And scrape the popcorn ceilings. Eventually we'll get to the rest of it!

And yes, we have random doors just hanging out up against the wall in the front entry. They go to the kitchen pantry and two front hallway closets, and someday I'll get around to painting them so they can be put back up.

Continuing through the living room, you come to the dining room. Yet another room that we really haven't touched, except for the ceilings. We don't even have a dining room table yet, just two filing cabinets with an outdoor tablecloth over them to simulate a table!

Through the dining room, you enter the kitchen, which is open to the breakfast nook and family room.

In here we did remove the cabinets that were hanging down over the peninsula, to open up the room.

But haven't really done much else so far. Sooner or later we'll be redoing it all though, and definitely getting rid of the dark wood, including the wood paneling cabinet doors! One thing that I don't want to change though is the general layout, since the kitchen has the perfect sized work triangle for me, and plenty of storage. My mom actually suggested once that we could extend the kitchen into the dinning room, since the living room is big enough to become a joint living/dining room, but I said no way. I don't want to have to clean a kitchen that big!

To the far left in the below photo is the front hallway that goes out to the front door, and to the right of that is the pantry that I updated, since it used to have dirty pink carpet in the bottom of it. We still haven't put the door back on the pantry, but I kind of just like it off, since it's easier to access things when cooking.

Our breakfast nook, in which everything from the light fixture to the flooring to the placeholder folding table and outdoor chairs will be changing. But it is a lot more open now that we removed the railing that used to divide the nook and the family room.

If you turn around from here, you'll find the family room, which is an in-progress room. Early on we scraped the ceilings, and painted the walls and trim. And we've recently gotten a new couch, pillows and rug.

We've also been working on building a fireplace facade to cover most of the huge floor to ceiling brick fireplace. It still needs to be painted (since we've blissfully taken the last two weekends off from home renovations, because we needed a break!) and we need to install the bottom cabinet doors, but it's already made a big difference to not have so much light-sucking dark red brick in the family room.

The far side of the family room hasn't really been touched yet, and eventually we'll replace the placeholder chairs and bring in more furniture for another little seating area.

Looking back toward the kitchen.

Now, through the door at the far end of the family room, if you turn left you enter the den. Or the storage/cat room, as it's being used right now. The kitties have their cat door in the window in this room, we've got our beer and wine fridge, and a whole lot of half empty boxes of decor items.

There's a lot of useful built in shelves in here, and even a small closet under the stairs, but so far we haven't used this room for much more than a dumping ground.

Back to the door to the family room, you turn the corner and go up the back staircase, to the bonus room above the garage.

Someday this will be a game room, once we get our pool table set up. We plan to add a board game table in the corner, hang our dart board, and hook up our old TV, as well as paint the walls and decorate, so it will be another fun hang out spot in our house. Someday!

For now it's kind of just a catch-all room. we've got my ironing board, another random door up against the wall, our old family room couch, and a ton of random boxes and things that are waiting to be put into the two attic access points off of the room.

Speaking of attic access, we've taken to keeping a box at the bottom of the stairs to the bonus room, so bad kitties can't come up here anymore. About a month ago we were going in and out of the attic with boxes, and our youngest cat, Rascal, somehow slipped in the attic without us knowing. A full 24 hours later I finally heard him meowing, and let him out of the other attic door. He'd climbed through the rafters to get to the other side! And he's not the smartest cat, so I'm not willing to bet he's learned his lesson, so for now, we've got a makeshift pet door blocking off the stairs.

(Rascal is totally looking up at me, and wishing he could go get trapped in the attic again!)

Back down the rear stairs and into the family room, if you turn left you'll enter a short hallway, that goes to the laundry room, garage, downstairs bath and a bedroom. 

Our laundry room is still in a sad state after we tore it apart as part of our downstairs bath renovation. The sub floors have been replaced, but we still need to put up some of the drywall. This is pretty low priority for us though, so we might hold off on redoing the floors until we're ready to tackle all of the downstairs flooring update in a couple of years.

Through the laundry room is the two car garage, which we basically use as a workshop and have yet to park our cars in here.

Around the corner is a little storage room where we usually keep our lawnmower and other yard tools.

Soon we're going to build custom workbenches and some storage shelves and get the garage organized. I really want a utility sink put in too, but I have a feeling I'm not going to win that battle.

Back inside through the laundry room and straight across the hall is the downstairs bedroom, aka my husband's home office. He's got a soldering station along the far wall, and lots of gadgets laying around.

And his desk is always a mess, covered with electronics. I took this photo while he was working, so you can see the dedicated video monitor in the corner. Once the west coast office comes online for the day, he can see into the office, and they can see him (and another remote employee, on the bottom of the screen), so all offices can be in constant contact with each other throughout the day. He even uses this system for client meetings, since someone from the main office just takes him along on an iPad, so he can be in on the meetings.

And also off of this hallway is the downstairs bathroom, one of the only mostly updated rooms in our house so far. For more photos see here.

Now, back through the family room, back to the front hallway to the front door, you turn left to go up the main staircase in our house.

If you turn right at the top of the stairs you'll enter the master bedroom. Which is pretty dismal, as far as decor or furniture goes. On move in day we basically plopped our mattress and old mismatched bedside tables down, taped up our old curtains, and plugged in our TV, and it's been that way ever since. The room is pretty big, so we've got a lot of space to work with whenever we get around to it, but so far, this room has been pretty low on the priority list.

Around the corner is the walk in closet, which my husband uses exclusively. He's definitely not utilizing the space in there though, although he claims to "have a system." Obviously the system doesn't involve actually using clothes hangers!

Our master bathroom, which is the smallest of our three bathrooms. And in need of a complete gut, although after just recently finally finishing the downstairs bath, it will be a while until we're ready to tackle another bathroom.

The tile in the shower is newish, but the previous owners didn't properly seal the grout (and grouted the corners where the walls meet, instead of caulking, so it's already starting to crack). We had leaking a while back down into the laundry room, so we've since just been really good about keeping fresh silicone caulk over the grout to make things waterproof. You can see in the below photo all of the white caulk in the bottom of the shower, which annoyingly took several hours to pull up the old caulk and put down the fresh stuff. Luckily it lasted a good 6 months from the last time we had to caulk it, so we can live with the maintenance for a year or two until we're ready for another bathroom renovation.

Across the landing at the top of the stairs is the guest bedroom, which is the only other mostly done room of our house so far. You can see a lot more photos of it here.

The guest bathroom is also off the landing. It is the biggest of our three bathrooms, with room for a double sink. It's just too bad the counter is the ugliest fake marble laminate ever!

Lots of the grout is cracked on the floor, and pretty much this whole bathroom just needs to be gutted too. Good thing we've got practice redoing bathrooms now!

The final bedroom upstairs is my home office/craft room/walk in closet bedroom. I've shown off some photos of the progress on my office/crafting side of the room already here and here.

Behind the divider on the other side of the room I haven't really done much, except hang up my clothes. I've still got three huge boxes of shoes in the bottom of the closet that I just keep digging through. One of these days I'll get motivated to do some organizing in here though!

And this room brings us full circle back to the bonus room, if you go through the door next to one of my shoe racks. Now you can see why I have my ironing board in the bonus room, since really it's just off my closet area.

That's about it for the inside of our house, other than the many closets that I didn't bother to photograph. As far as the backyard, we also haven't really done much out here. But we do enjoy the large deck, and I can't wait until everything starts turning green in a month!

The only real thing we've done to any part of our 4/5th of an acre is building a fire pit terrace last summer.  More photos that look a lot better here.

And a look up at the back of the house from the path to the fire pit.

So, that's our house, one year in!

Seems like we've done so much already, but boy, do we have a long way to go. Good thing this is our "forever house" so we've got the time!

Do you ever reflect on the progress you've made decorating your house?