House Tour

I think it's about time that I post a tour of our new house!
Now that we've lived here for 2 weeks, it is definitely starting to feel like home. That being said, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

This tour will be much the same as the tour I showed after we bought the place (found here). Except that now it has our stuff in it. Consider these pictures to be the Before version. We are hoping to repaint everything. And redo a few things (bathrooms/kitchens).

Let me start with the front of the house. I think it's pretty cute looking! I love the dormer windows.
My hopes for the front: To repaint the ugly brown front and garage doors. Colours yet to be decided.

The Main Floor

When you walk in the front door, the hallway connects all of the room on the main floor, and has a stairway going up to the bedrooms.
Joe and I are wondering if it will be possible to somehow shave off the globs of plaster on the ceiling. Anyone have any ideas?

We bought a bold paint colour for the hallway. Plumage by Martha Stewert. It should offset the neutrals we plan on putting in the rest of the main floor.

To the left of the entryway is our long living/dining room. We contemplated making it a sitting room only, but once we started placing furniture in there it just seemed kind of...empty! So, now it will be our living and dining room. One flaw of this room is that there are no lights installed in the ceiling. That is another thing we hope to add.

**We have already re-painted this room in Behr's Parisian Taupe. It looks SOOOooo much better. We also went out and splurged on a new couch and chairs....Photos to come soon!

To the right of the entrance is what is supposed to be the dining room. We have decided to use it as another sitting room. We are even contemplating getting a TV to put in it (*Gasp!*). Right now we have a rug we bought in Bolivia in there. I'm not so sure about it, but Joe loves it, so we'll see!

**We have also repainted this room! We were busy last weekend. It is in Baked Biscotti by Behr. I will show photos of this soon, as well.

At the end of the hallway is the kitchen.
At first I hated this kitchen. I still don't love it. But it is functional, and will probably stay this way for a while. We are going to see how repainting the cupboards look, and maybe doing a complete redo in a few years. For now, it will have to stay as is.

Upstairs

The office room: 

The bathroom. I'm still trying to decide whether to completely renovate or to try painting the tile.

The guest room

The Master Bedroom.

The Basement

Right now, the basement is almost empty. There is a spare bedroom, a main area, a bathroom (the Funhouse) and the laundry room. I think it will be a while until we get around to doing anything down there.

The Backyard

The backyard was probably the selling feature of our new home. It is beautiful. Here are a few different views:

That's it for now. 

I'm excited to get going on all of the changes we have planned :) 

Dining Chairs!

Yesterday Joe and I got down to business.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we need new furniture.

Probably the one things that has been driving me the *most* crazy in my house is our old dining chairs.

I got them for free when I moved out on my own from a friend who used them through university.
Needless to say, these chairs have been very well loved.
I also got the bench that we use on the side of the road on garbage day. Imagine that! And it has also been well-loved.

So, after searching the internet for inspiration, Joe and I decided we wanted to pair our old table with a more modern dining chair, and more specifically with an Eames-style chair, as seen in these pictures:

I feel like the mix of modern and traditional is just what I am going for. So, after much searching, we finally found some at Schreiters Furniture (in Downtown Kitchener).

And here they are!

They look better in person... and will look much better once we repaint the walls to a bit of a nicer colour :) It is a work in progress!

Oh yeah, and we leave for Europe in 1 month today! Woo hoo!

Let The Blogging (re-)Begin!

Hello everyone!

After months of anticipation, we are FINALLY in our new place!
And for the most part... it is great!
The first few days involved living in a pile of boxes and a disorganized mess. Last weekend we put our butts into gear and unpacked almost everything (except for one spare bedroom, which is still a pile of boxes...that we will ignore for now.)

After a whirlwind of a week, things are starting to look a little more organized around here. (I will try to get a house tour up sometime in the next couple of days!

Let me re-cap our lives since the move. We have gotten around to a few little things on our to-do lists, but nothing major yet.
For example, we changed the yellowy-orange lights that lit up the front of the house:

And replaced them with bright, white lights. (This seems like a small change, yes, but you have no idea the change it made in person!)

We bought planters for the front and back yards...9 in total! We got a good deal at the local market. Getting them home in the Rav4 was...interesting!

We also put in an automatic garage door opener, and installed a few new register covers. So, nothing too exciting, but stuff that just needed to be done.

Of course, we've taken some time to enjoy our new place, too :) Look at the poppies that began to appear the first morning we were here! We have been LOVing the backyard, the pool, the hot tub, the privacy. It is awesome.

And Mira seems to be adjusting alright, too. She even found a way to get on the roof so that she could meow at us through our window at 5:45 am. That little....

However...we have a *little* problem. We need new furniture. ASAP.
The only existing couch we had was the blue one that used to look really cute in our old place. We had plans of putting it in the basement here and to get new (at least to us) furniture for the fireplace room. But, the couch doesn't go down the narrow stairway. Back to the drawing board!

I've also been putting my creative juices to work and trying to pick out paint colours! It's exciting...but I can't seem to make up my mind. The people at Lowe's must have thought I was a crazy lady hoarding all of the paint guides and paint chips in sight!

On a completely unrelated note... did I mention it is report card season?
And did I mention that my Mum got married on Tuesday? It was a great day! Married in style :)
My Mum and Rick looked amazing and happy, and dinner was a blast. Thanks, guys!

Needless to say, it has been one busy week. I'm excited to get thinking about the projects we will take on over the next months!

3 more days!

It's hard to believe that it is only 3 more days until we move.

We did our final inspection at the new house yesterday, and got to see the pool and hot tub up and running! Super exciting.

Right now, our entire house is either full of boxes and things, like this:

Or else empty, like this:

Needless to say, we are ready to move!
What else have we been up to, you might ask?

1. Buying a sweet teak buffet (that we plan to use as a media unit for Joe's record player.Yeah!) We found it for $125 at a thrift store! Not too bad!

2. Enjoying Spring. It has been particularly beautiful. Of course, I cut some lilacs for our kitchen table... my favourite spring smell!

3. Having random dance parties with my cute 15-month old nephew. Oops!:

4. Enjoying our lovely backyard for our last weekend with a campfire.

5. Mira has also been enjoying the nice spring weather. She's been bringing us daily "gifts"...her latest specialty is baby rabbits.

I may get around to blogging one more time before the big move, but afterwards it will be a WEEK before we get internet access again!! Bummer...I'll see what I can do before then.
Until next time!