Our New Home – The First Tour

For a more updated home tour that gives you a sneak peek of some changes we’ve made since I published this post, check out our merry and bright Christmas home tour I shared this holiday season! 

In the two years since we got married, Jordan and I have moved four times.  FOUR times.  We had two horrible experiences with cheap apartments (chain smokers below us and feral cats in the roof above us.  #apartmentlife).    Our next home was a small, two bedroom town home that we loved and felt more comfortable inviting people into.  And now…drumroll please… we bought a house!  Is there any sentence that feels more grownup to say than that? We are homeowners. And it sure is fun!

We moved in during a beautiful, rare,  fifty degree weekend in January, and these last three months have been a whirlwind of painting a million walls and miles of trim, thrift store/Ikea trips, and convincing my husband to hang yet another picture frame I will probably want to move 20 minutes after he hangs it.  He’s a trooper.

Decorating a space as big as our new home has been an exciting and exhausting process.  Although moving to three different spaces before this one has helped me to develop a sense of my style and what I want our home to look and feel like, having a blank slate with about twice as much space as our previous homes has been overwhelming at times.  Over the next few months,  I am excited to unpack some of the things I’ve learned about developing my own style and embracing imperfection, about DIY and starting scary new projects, and about the steps we’ve taken to make our home a place where people feel welcomed and loved.

I’ll eventually post some more detailed pictures of rooms before and after we moved in, crafts, and DIY projects that have come together to make our house a home, but for now, I’ll give you the big picture.  The only real “before” pictures we have are from the online listing of our home when it was for sale, so keep in mind none of those decorations or furniture items are ours.  I’m hoping these more professional photos combined with my iPhone snapshots will give you a picture of our space and what we’ve done with it!

And now, without further ado…here’s a tour of our work-in-progress nest after three months!

Entryway

One of our favorite things about our home is how open it is.   Anyone who walks through our door is immediately right in the middle of our world, and we love that. The week before we moved in we painted  all of the trim and walls on almost the entire main level (Behr Wheat Bread and Behr Ultra Pure White). We removed the baseboards and added taller, white trim. We’ve also added lots of prints, art, decorations, etc and are liking how it’s shaping up!

Dining Room

This room was a fun space for taking a few risks and steering away from the neutral and light tones we used in most of the house.  We painted it a darker shade of gray called Behr Anonymous and are eventually hoping to add some crisp, white wainscoting to the walls.  It gets such pretty light from the windows and with the map and light fixture from World Market (which still needs to be shortened.  Oops!), it has a more dramatic, vintage feel than the rest of the house.  We love having people sit around this table.

Living Room

This room looks completely different than when we moved in.  We painted the mantel Behr Ultra Pure White and added these “built-in” Billy bookshelves from Ikea. We still need to add some trim and finish them, but I love how clean and full of color the living room looks with the shelves! And our super comfy Ikea Ektorp sofa is pretty cozy too. (Just ask Olive. She has taken WAY too many naps on that thing!)

Kitchen & Breakfast Nook

This room has also seen big transformation.  We painted the entire kitchen, added a new light fixture (also World Market), and added strips of repurposed barn wood to the back of our kitchen island (peninsula?).  Painting these kitchen cabinets a dreamy shade of gray is high on my DIY to-do list for summer!

Master Bedroom

The paint color in this room is one of my favorites: Dolphin Fin by Behr.  It’s so soft and soothing! This room is home to some of my first adventures in furniture painting.  The dresser is a Craigslist find I sanded and painted gray, and the two bedside tables are Ikea Rast dressers painted gray and then white.  I’m thinking about adding another coat of watered down white paint to give these end-tables a different texture, but hubby was a little impatient to get our end tables back after they sat in the garage for two weeks.  So good for now!

Guest Bedroom

This bedroom is pretty important to us, not only because we love hosting, because we have officially listed our house on Airbnb! You can check out our listing (or even come stay with us!) here.  We’ve already had 10-12 guests from around the country come stay a night with us and have 10 reservations scheduled over the next few months.  It’s a great way to make a little extra income and we love meeting new people.  Win-win!

There are a few others bathrooms, bedrooms, and a finished basement that I’m sure we’ll post pictures of eventually, but these rooms are where we’ve made the most changes so far. We have lots of dreams and projects we are excited to work on for the house and will keep you updated as we work work work. But for now…we’re pretty darn happy with how it’s all turning out.