The Downstairs Home Tour

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I hope you are ready to scroll through 1.2 gazillion pictures, because that is exactly what I have for you today. Somehow I managed to get the downstairs clean enough to take pictures,(read: shuffle junk out of sight from room to room as I photographed) to be able to give y’all a tour of our main living area!
If you need a refresher, or if you missed the tour of the upstairs from last week, you can check that out HERE! Upstairs has three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a host of closets.
I’m not going to give you a tour of the basement today. We have long term plans to finish it out completely someday. It is 850 sq ft down there, so we would like to add another bedroom/bathroom/living space/and laundry room. Our hopes and plans are to be in this home for a VERY long time though, so that will be many, many years down the road.
Moving on!
The rest of the house is downstairs!
When you first walk in there is a little landing and a step down into the rest of the house. Straight ahead is the living room, to your left is the kitchen/door to the basement, and to your right is the bathroom and guest room.

This is what you see when you first walk in. Who wants to buy me some furniture? Anyone?

Hopefully this gives you a little of an idea of what it looks like! This picture is taken from the stairs looking down.
Aside from needing furniture and decor to cozy up and fill out this space, this entryway also needs:
A New Light Fixture 
Skim Coat(remember the peeling painted over wall paper? yep. allllll over this space)
Fresh Paint. I’ve had swatches up for a while now and I’m really feeling Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter. But I haven’t settled 100% just yet.
And this is our living room!
It is one HUGE space and I’ve been working hard trying to figure out how best to break it up and utilize all of it. I’m really loving what we have come up with so far, but it still has a ways to go.

The back of the built in’s is the color that the entire room was before we painted. The tan was actually a nice color, but all over the place was “touch up” paint that didn’t match at all. So we just went ahead and picked a new color(hello white, my current obsession) and got it all freshened up. I am considering painting the inside of the built in’s a fun color though for a pop. But we’ll see. I’m not very exciting.

It was so funny when we hung this tv up. In our last home, this tv was more than adequate. But as soon as we got it over the fireplace here we were both like, “huh. Guess we’re going to need a bigger tv, eh?”

We’ve got our eyes on some upcoming Super Bowl sales, so, fingers crossed we can check that upgrade off the list here pretty soon.

I was about to delete this picture when I noticed that sweet baby arm reaching out and I just had to include it 🙂

That closed door leads to the pantry/door to the basement/kitchen. I’ll show you more if you keep scrolling!

I keep a bunch of Abigail toys in the coffee table in front of our couch. Out of sight- just the way I like picked up toys! But I’ve started to keep a few Mabel baby toys in this cute box I picked up at TJ Maxx recently. So cute!

And even though I am the world’s worst panoramic photographer in the history of ever, here is this crappy photo to help you get an idea of what the room looks like as a whole.
The things we’ve done in this room so far are prime + paint, buy a new computer desk, lay down a new rug, and a few new pieces of small furniture.
Still to do in here is: 
Buy and Hang Curtains
 
Upgrade TV
 
Get new furniture/decor/SOMETHING for the massive walls on the left side of the room
 
Straight off the living room is our dining room
Also known as, the hot mess express(not really. But that’s what I think of it as)
These pictures actually make it look lovely and beautiful. And someday, it absolutely will be. But today? It is not.

The red, the white, AND the ceiling are alllll painted over wallpaper. And it is crackling and lifting and peeling up BAD.

Yes. The white is not wainscoting. It is painted over wallpaper that they nailed pieces of trim over to make it look like it.

Whyyyyyyy

These doors lead out to our sun room
 And right off of the dining room is our kitchen!

We haven’t done anything in this room except move in our furniture.

Things to do in this room:


Skim Coat

Paint


Replace Chandelier 


Buy and Hang Curtains


Buy Rug 


Build a Farmhouse Table(yes!!), bench, and chairs 

And here is our sun room!

It is a light, airy, and cheerful place that needs a tonnnnnn of work. First off, there is no heat in here, so it is FREEZING. Which is why we keep the doors to the dining room closed all of the time.

The door through this room has access to our deck and you can get to our garage through here, though, we use the door in the kitchen as our main entrance/exit.

(Psst, the pot of flowers is a piece of transplanted lilac from our last house. I hope it makes it!)

Basically this room needs everything. A lot of the windows are broken(seals) and the walls and ceiling need to be updated/fixed. It needs curtains and a non-Applebee’s light fixture, a rug for the floor, HEAT, furniture, and decor.

That’s everything, right?

And now, onto one of my most favorite places in the house…..our kitchen!

So far all we’ve done in this room is paint the walls, change out a chandelier for a school house light, and hang some art. Oh, and we had to buy a fridge the day after we moved into this house because the one that came with it died completely *grumble grumble*

The things we still want to do in here are:


Install an island


Put in a disposal


Install a faux beam on the ceiling


Plank the ceiling 


Finish decorating the walls


Decorate the corner cabinet( what to put inside that thing??)


Install new lights


Figure out pantry situation


Install new pantry door

To the left of the fridge is where our pantry lives. The blue that is in there is the color the entire kitchen used to be. It was sucking away at my soul, so I went ahead and painted it all white this last weekend. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that little blue space yet so I’m waiting to paint it. It has a telephone jack and a place for a telephone book. So…that’s fun and vintage.

The door on the left goes out to the entry and the door on the right goes to the basement.

 Voila!

And just because I know you were dying to see the inside of my messy and unorganized pantry….here you go.

And this brings us back to the entry! annnnnd over to the guest quarters, heh.

We didn’t have a guest room in our last house, so we had to buy a new bed + bedding. Everything else in here is a hodge podge of stuff from the last house. I’m not thrilled with how the wall decor is, so I’m 100% sure I’ll be changing all of it. We’ll also be bringing in the TV from the living room to put on our old entertainment center once we get a new TV.

We will also be painting in here and the hall, and I would also like to get a rug to place in here. Oh yes, annnnd a ceiling fan!

In this hall are two closets. The closet for the guest room and our entry way coat closet.

Jim has already changed out the light fixture in the hall for a school house light- and discovered peeling, painted over wall paper once he did. Yay!

And this is our main level bathroom. Is it weird to love a bathroom? Because I love this bathroom.

We have changed the mirror and the light fixture, hung the baskets, and a new shower curtain. If you look closely you can see the old wall paper peeking out around the light, so we will need to repaint in here at some point.

In this bathroom there is also only a bathtub. So pretty soon we will be installing a shower and pulling the subway tile up higher on the wall to accommodate that change. Once we have a working shower down here, then we’ll be able to start working on the bathroom remodel upstairs. How exciting is that?

PHEW! If you made it to the end of this post, then GOLD STAR FOR YOU.

As I’ve said before, I really do hope to blog more about the whole process as we fix things up and work on projects in the house, but I’m also terrible at it. But I’m going to try!


What do you think? What would you like to see more of? Which space is your favorite?
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38 Comments

  1. Thank you for the gazillion pictures!! I adore your house! It's so charming and i love your vision for it. Good call with the white – everything looks so BRIGHT. Your windows are gorgeous and I love all of the personality your home has. Can't wait to see the projects as you start to tackle them. I'm also curious about this skim coating you speak of – never heard of it and it gives me hope for the house hunting we're doing because soooooooo many homes are covered in wall paper. Congrats again on this dreamy place 🙂

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  2. Oh my gosh I LOVE this house! !!!!
    Living room suggestion for the built in- we all love the golden chair- if you can handle it there's your color.
    I made a built in in my home and it's painted the same as my living room. I am an eclectic colorful person so it works for me but if I ever paint again, I really don't want one have to paint that back wall 🙂

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  3. Love all of the pictures. Your house is so charming. I love the light fixtures in the kitchen & hall. 😉 so jealous of all your built-ins! Love how you styled them. Now, please don't hate me, but what if you wallpapered the backs of the shelves in the living room? I know, I know the house has a ton of painted wallpaper, but what about something fresh & cheery??

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  4. I am loving it! I hate the peeling wallpaper. I think in old homes they left the wall paper up so the walls wouldn't flake off and fall apart. So inconvenient!!! The lights are perfection, by the way!!

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  5. Love, love, love! We had to do the same with our TV when we moved into our house. We thought our old 42" TV was huge, then we got it into our larger living room and it looked microscopic. We ended up with a 60" and that even looks small. Your decor all goes perfectly in your house – I love it! Where did you find the baskets hanging in your bathroom? I've been looking for baskets similar to those and I love yours!

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  8. I love your house! I love older homes – so much character and charm and little quirks! 🙂

    I'd love to hear more about what you end up doing with your sun room. I bought my first home a year ago and I have a sun room, but I cannot figure out what to do. Like yours, it isn't heated so it's FREEZING this time of year (I live in KC). It's also where I enter and exit my house most frequently so now it's turned into more of a giant mudroom. 🙁

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    1. Thanks so much, Erin! I never used to gravitate toward older homes, but they are definitely my cup of tea now! 🙂

      I'll definitely be blogging more as we fix up the sun room. We contemplated making it a mud room and using it as our main entrance/exit, but ultimately decided to use the kitchen and side door as our main entrance instead. We basically just use the sun room door if we're going out to the backyard.

      I really wanted to make it our office area, but because it isn't heated + the windows(hello burglars lol) it really didn't work to put any of our computer stuff out there. SO as of right now it's just our craft/school supplies room. Who knows what it might evolve into though!

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  12. I just love your new home. Love, love, love. Every little thing is just perfection, and looks so very warm and homey. Take your time with all the updates and renovations – if you're like me at all, the thought of all of them may stress you out, but you have all the time in the world to get around to them now that you are in your dream home!:)

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  15. So much fun to take a good look around. I say you leave the dining room. Baha ha!

    I bet Jim was just so sad about having to get a new TV eh? We have a pretty huge one too, but when you have a big wally it looks funny if it's small at least that is what the guys use to buy the biggest one possible.

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  16. Love your house, all the little details! Can't wait to see what you do to this fantastic space. And I heart Benjamin Moore paint…we painted pretty much our entire house with that brand (It took us 5+ months to paint everything ourselves…luckily we didn't have kids so we had the time) But we basically painted every wall 4 times (most of our room had super bright/dark paint colors so it took 2 coats of primer to get rid of the color, before we could start on painting it the colors we have now…I feel for you. Some of the rooms had wallpaper and we paid someone to get rid of it for us, lol. We tried and it took us 6 hours to peel 1 foot of wall…we gave up.

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  18. ahhh I love it!!! seriously full of charm and beauty!!! also I am pretty sure our kitchen is painted over wall paper!! i'm sure some future owner years down the road will love that but for now you can't tell ha!

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  23. Ok, so I saved this post for last because I knew I was going to spend a long time looking at all the photos. I am in love and have so many things I am swooning over. I'm all over those wood floors throughout!!!

    Entryway: I know it's only a picture but I think I like the lighting fixture!!

    Living room: those buildings are so awesome, I almost want to continue them on the other side of the fireplace. The bay window area has to be one of my favorites AND the fact that there is an overhead light in the living room – that's basically unheard of in so many homes!!!!

    Dining room: I don't hate it but one nice thing about having the red painted over the wallpaper…you won't have to have as many coats of primer to cover that red!!!!! A farmhouse table would be so dreamy and I'm going to love it with your buffet/hutch – which I am still incredibly jealous of.

    Sunroom: a dream room for my dream house! Although I agree it needs a lot of work. I'm living how the outlet plates are about 60 shades darker than the walls…. But those doors and those windows, Fantasic.

    Kitchen: pretty much what's not to love…the new wall color is the best and I am all about schoolhouse lights! I want them so bad in Ellie's bathroom and our hallway. And that oven/range is to die for. It's going to be such a nice space and with the addition of an island….you're never going to want to leave. I especially love the window next to the sink, can't tell you why but it might be my favorite.

    Guest room: oh to have a guest room would be a dream. I love that you already have it set up with a bed and everything!!!

    Bathroom: that mirror has me. As does the lighting fixture. I can't believe it's just a bathtub- how funny these older homes are!!

    Ok that was just about as ling as your post!! Oops

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  26. Oh my gosh! I want to hate you but really I'm just insanely jealous of your GORGEOUS house!!!! No joke. Courtney, it's amazing! I LOVE it! One day (ONE DAY!!!) I will have a house of my own and I'll need you to come decorate! I love what you did with those built ins in your living room! (oh and I love everything else too!)

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  27. I LOVE your new home and I think you guys are doing a beautiful job decorating it! I'm a big fan of people taking their time filling their homes with meaningful pieces that they love over filling it all up with stuff right away, know what I mean? making a house a home takes time 🙂

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  30. Your house has me swooning. Seriously. And I cannot wait to see what you have in store with your updates and such.
    In other news – what the hell were the previous owners thinking about all that wallpaper and paint?! Oy.

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  31. How exciting for you to have such a beautiful home and all these fun projects planned to make it exactly your own. I just love it. Can't wait to see all you do! It's so difficult to choose one particular space because the whole thing (upstairs included) is just. breathtaking! The character of this home is something I hope to find when we take the buying a home plunge one day 🙂 I think I'm going to go with the bathroom too though. I don't know, that kitchen is gorgeous. Ya know, I really love the layout of your home as a whole. The whole thing is just amazingly gorgeous, gf! xx

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