The Obligatory House Tour

In my opinion every home blogger needs to give the tour of their house. Kind of an “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” thing. So here you go! All of the individual posts about our house assembled into one spot so that you can take the grand tour.

We bought our home in 2010 and have been slowly working on getting it decorated. I’m trying to remember that interior design is a marathon, not a sprint. We hope to live here forever, so I’m trying to make conscious decisions about what to change instead of jumping on the latest trends that I might regret later. I know that it’s impossible to not have trendy things since the idea of what’s in style changes so fast.

So let’s get this tour started! Welcome to our home!

We are sitting on just over three acres of land with sweet, sweet privacy growing up around us now that Spring has arrived and the trees are budding out their leaves. Here is the view down the lower driveway of our front yard. Not much grass to mow, which is great!

The house sits up on a hill, so we get a great view out the upper windows of all the greenery. I have a love/ hate relationship with the rock staircase leading up to the house. It looks really pretty and it’s an excellent place to take photos of my son, but the steps are uneven and I’m so scared someone (aka: me) will fall down them one day. They make me really thankful for my main level garage on the back side of the house. We usually tell guests that the driveway circles all the way around the back so we use our back door as our “front” entrance 99% of the time. The only people who see my front door are Jehovah’s witnesses and pizza delivery men. Both are usually out of breath when they knock. 🙂

The house was built in 1996, so parts of it were updated by the previous owners and parts of it have been updated by us, but there are still a few walls covered in pink rose wallpaper, I’m not gonna lie. Those rooms are not on the blog yet! Maybe one day soon pink and green wallpaper borders will come back in style and I won’t have to redecorate. Until then, we have had nearly every single room in the house painted since we moved in. I’ll provide a paint chart at the end of this post for anyone interested in my colors.

Here is my approximate floor plan of the main level that I drew in AutoCAD:

and the upstairs:

I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves for the majority of this post. Most of these photos below are clickable and will open to the original blog entry so feel free to ramble around and visit each room for more info. Since we rarely use our front door, I don’t have a ton of photos of the front stoop. Here is one from the Fall with pumpkins and mums.

When you walk through the front door the DIY photo collage on a column is in the foyer. I made this from an old MDF column that I found at an architectural salvage place.

The stairs are just to the left when you walk in the front door. The living room is open to the stairway, which I love. I really opens up the space.

The Staircase

The Foyer

My husband made the coffee table from an old exterior door. It’s awesome having a handy husband!

The dining room is just to the right of the front door. It’s open to the foyer and connects to the kitchen through the butler’s pantry.

The dining room got a fresh coat of slate blue paint as well as a oil rubbed bronze spray paint on the old brass chandelier. That was one of the best things I could have done for that room! Spray paint is such an inexpensive and easy way to update old fixtures.

I also stenciled a design onto the back of the china cabinet to match the wall better. I’m so happy with the results of the stencil.

The Kitchen and Breakfast Nook got some paint and new crown molding, as well as an updated kitchen table after we moved in. Before we moved in the previous owners updated the cabinetry and counter tops. They did a beautiful job.

Here is the kitchen looking through the butler’s pantry area into the dining room. The pantry, laundry and garage are through the door to the left. Since it’s where I enter the house everyday the butler’s pantry is my catch-all spot for junk. I’m trying to be more organized. Most days I lose the battle.

The sunroom is off of the living room. It’s a half-octagonal shaped room that lends a great view of the entire backyard. It’s one of my favorite rooms in the house. I’m sitting at the desk in the sunroom as I type this.

The decor in my house doesn’t stay in one place long, but I loved the way this lantern and wreath looked together on the desk.

You might recognize my sunroom from this picture of my little boy that went viral on Pinterest last year. Here is the photo that gave me my Pinterest claim to fame. 🙂 My fifteen minutes was glorious! LOL

There is a small half bath right off the living area on the way to our master bedroom. I believe the previous owners had a wallpaper removal mishap in this room and fixed it by smearing mud all over the walls. It’s not exactly my style, but I don’t feel like scraping mud and starting over so it stays for now!

The master bedroom is on the main level. It got painted Sherwin Williams Retreat when we first moved in. I like the way it makes my light colored bedroom furniture really pop!

The Master bath also got painted when we first moved in, and I’m already itching to repaint this room. It’s on my 2012 To do list.

Moving upstairs, there is a large balcony area where we have a desk (we have a lot of desks in this house!), some bookcases and a small seating area. Here is a photo before it got painted. It looks a lot different now, but I haven’t taken any updates pics lately.

This is one of my most favorite things in the house. My husband made this window shadowbox for me as a wedding gift.

At the top of the stairs is a small, windowless room that is our guest bedroom/ Migraine room. My husband loves it because it’s dark and quiet when the dreaded headache sets in. I haven’t done much in here, other than some new bedding from Company C that I couldn’t resist.

At the other end of the balcony is our 4 year old Garrett’s Big Boy Bedroom.

Garrett’s Playroom is a FROG (finished room over garage) that is accessed from inside his bedroom. This is the perfect setup for a playroom, because when it looks like a hurricane hit it I can just shut the door and no one is the wiser. My good friend Allison from HalfofVAMH flew all the way down from Minnesota to help me paint this room. We went with a beach theme, and it’s perfect. It totally brightens up this windowless space.

The third upstairs bedroom just got transformed into my personal office space. I wanted to get this room finished in time to include it in this house tour for Karen’s blog so I pushed to get it finished over the weekend. Thanks for the incentive, Karen! It’s become such a wonderful place for me to be, create, hang out, craft, whatever I want to do. I love this room. It included all of my most meaningful things that was a lot of fun to design. I’m really happy with the way this home office turned out.

Last year we finished a huge basement remodel, so let’s move downstairs now!

We had board and batten installed on the steps to the basement. Here is the before and after of that project.

I used a bunch of leftover paint samples to make the staircase unique with different colored risers. Love the way this project turned out.

Around the corner is the little arcade niche where EVERYONE gravitates as soon as they step downstairs. The pull of the Pac-Man is strong, my friends.

Just off the arcade room we created a home theater room!

My husband scored some actual theater chairs from Craigslist that we are using in the room along with some more comfortable sofa and chair.

One of my favorite parts of the room is the crown molding. We painted both the wall and the ceiling and added rope lighting to give a nice ambient light in that room without having overhead lights glaring.

Also in the basement is a finished bathroom where we ride out the tornadoes.

My husband really spruced things up by adding some new cabinet knobs and DIY molding to the mirror. Such a simple idea that made a huge difference in this room.

That wraps up the basement. Would you like to see the backyard? Out on the patio is my Pottery Barn knock-off ladder chandelier.

Just steps away from the patio table is the swimming pool. This is the old school type of pool with a diving board, even. You don’t see many of those anymore, huh? I’m thinking we will remove the diving board at some point, but for now nobody uses it so it’s not a big deal.

I thought the retaining wall needed some color, so we bought these pretty blue planters to break it up a bit.

So there you have it! That wraps up my home tour. I hope you guys enjoyed peeking into my house.

Here is a listing of the paints that I used throughout:

Foyer/ Staircase/ Living room/ Kitchen: Restoration Hardware Silver Sage
Sunroom: Sherwin Williams Seasalt
Dining Room: Custom matched color similar to SW Foggy Day
Powder Room: SW Latte (flat)
Master Bedroom: SW Retreat
Master Bathroom: SW Connected Gray
Basement Theater room: SW Smoky Blue
Basement Kitchenette: SW Awning Red with a few extra drops of black added
Basement Arcade: SW Latte

I wish that we could all sit around my patio and have a drink together instead of meeting online, but I’m still glad we are able to share this blogging community to connect. If you’re like me, you can’t get enough of home decorating and decor blogs. I’d love seeing inside other people’s homes, so if you’d like to link up your home tour please feel free to add a link in the comments here! A blogger Parade of Homes, if you will.