• Home Decor,  Life & Family,  The Country House

    The Country House: Home Tour Before Photos

    Hey there, friends! Are you enjoying your summer? We’ve been super busy these past few weeks and are gearing up for the kids to go back to school soon. Pinky, our 11-year-old daughter, will be in 6th grade and Sweet Pea, our 5-year-old son, is starting kindergarten. Gah! Kids grow too fast! Anyway, we are excited to announce that last Friday we closed on The Country House, so now we are free to start working on all of those projects we’ve wanted to tackle. (You can find out more about our decision to move from the city to the country [here] and the positives and negatives of moving into this particular house [here].) I know that I promised you guys a tour too, so here it is… The Country House Home Tour Before Photos . Let’s get started!

    The Country House: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

    Front Entry & Living Room

    Welcome to our home! This space is nice and roomy but it definitely could use some paint and flooring updates. Well, the whole house needs those kinds of updates, but we are excited to tackle them in what we are considering a chapter 1 makeover. Meaning that we will be doing simple and fairly inexpensive makeovers to all of the rooms to make them more our style. This will allow us to live in the space a bit and really get a feel for what we want to do to each of the spaces before we take on chapter 2, i.e. major renovations, and sink a bunch of money into things. I like to refer to them as chapters since this process will be part of the entire story.

    Country House Home Tour Before

    The other end of The Living Room with our piano – As you can see, this house is heated with baseboard units and we currently have window eyesores air conditioners in some rooms, so it will be interesting to try and decorate around those until we install a heat pump.

    Country House Home Tour Before Living Room

    The Dining Area

    This room is also pretty spacious, at least when compared to our previous breakfast nook. We would like to get a bigger dining table to accommodate guests and maybe a cool buffet.

    Country House Home Tour Before Dining Room

    The Kitchen

    This kitchen may not look amazing right now, but it does have a ton of storage, with two pantries and a lot of cabinets. We don’t have a dishwasher right now, so we would like to add one and update the other appliances too.

    Country House Home Tour Before Kitchen

    The Laundry Room

    In addition to just doing laundry in here, we also pass through this room to get to our attached two car garage (we also have a detached garage.) And even though you can’t see it, there is a decent sized closet on the opposite end of this room which we hope to make into a little office of sorts.

    Country House Home Tour Before Laundry

    The Hallway

    Nothing special here. Just a semi-dark space that needs lightened and brightened.

    Country House Home Tour Before Hall
     

    The Bathroom

    Our one and only bathroom is very builder basic. We plan to brighten everything with some new lighting and paint.

    Country House Home Tour Before Bathroom Vanity Country House Home Tour Before Bathroom

    Bedroom One

    Here is Sweet Pea’s room. Each of our bedrooms has a good amount of closet space, but the rooms themselves are on the small side. We had to reassign furniture based on what would fit well in each room.

    Country House Home Tour Before Bedroom 1

    Bedroom Two

    This is Pinky’s room. Another item we want to change out in each room is the window coverings. Even though I’m totally a drape-y curtain kind of girl, we are thinking wood blinds for most of the rooms because of the baseboard heating issue. If you have any awesome ideas for our windows, I would love to hear them!

    Country House Home Tour Before Bedroom 2

    The Master Bedroom

    Even though it may look small, this is the biggest bedroom in the house and has a roomy walk in closet. We’ve considered the possibility of adding a small bathroom in the closet, but aren’t sure we want to lose that storage space or what kinds of options we would go with if we did. Also, look at that carpet. Eek! It is pretty worn and discolored, so it will be coming out pretty soon.

    Country House Home Tour Before Bedroom 3

    So there you have it! A photographic country house home tour before we actually get down to business here. This home has great bones and we do feel like it will be pretty easy to work with. What do you think? We would love for you to follow along with us as we take this place from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After!

  • Life & Family,  The Country House

    The Country House: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

    As you probably know by now, we’ve moved to the country! We love our new place, but as I mentioned in a previous post, our new house is not necessarily our dream home. There are aspects of it which are super great and others that are just so-so. No worries, though. We’ve got this handled. In true DIY fashion, we will make this place our own! So, let me share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly.

    The Country House: The Good The Bad The Ugly

    The Good

    Space – We have land, people! Like… acreage. That’s a big deal for us since we barely had any outdoor space when we lived in the city. We are so excited that our kids can play outside in our huge yard and the neighbors are fields away. (Not that they are bad. Our neighbors are great!) One of these days, we would eventually like to add a barn with some animals to our farm and maybe even a pond.

    A tiny view of one side of our yard. The dirt in the back will eventually be grass.

    View of the Side Yard

    Family – The biggest bonus to moving here, is that we are so close to family. I grew up just a few miles from this house, so my parents are close. Plus, this house once belonged to my great aunt and the land has actually been in the family for years! My great-grandparents moved here in the 1920’s when my grandpa and great aunt were kids. My dad and uncle celebrated holidays and played here when they were young. So did my sister and I! It is really cool that our kids will get to grow up here since there are so many amazing family memories.

    My great grandparents, grandpa, and great aunt.

    Great Grandparents, Grandpa, and Great Aunt

    The Bad

    Replacements – Unfortunately, this house is not perfect. It looks like, over the next few years, we will probably need to fix/replace a few big ticket items, like the roof.

    Square Footage – One hurdle we will be facing is space indoors. Although we have a great area outside, a couple of storage buildings and a two car garage, the interior of the house isn’t everything we’ve ever wanted. We have 3 bedrooms (technically, enough for all of us) a living room, dining area, kitchen, and laundry room. However, the biggest issue is that there is only one bathroom. Of course, it’s not the end of the world to only have one bathroom, but with 4 people in the fam and one of them being a pre-teen girl, I can only imagine that we will probably desire another one soon. We have yet to determine if we will be able to build on. If for some reason we can’t/don’t go that route, we would also consider building new. That is a story for the future, though. For now, we plan to stick it out.

    Thank goodness for garages!

    Two Car Garage

    The Ugly

    Cosmetics – The country house is a cute little yellow ranch home and, on the outside, it doesn’t really need a lot of updating. Maybe a little power washing and landscaping, but other than that, nothing crazy. The inside is pretty decent too, and as far as updating, we will probably do some pretty simple and inexpensive stuff to make it our own. Lots of painting, some new flooring (the carpets are pretty old and ugly), appliances, lighting, etc. We don’t want to sink a lot of money into this house, especially since we don’t know what the future holds.

    Ugly Old Carpet

    This week, we are on vacation, but I plan on sharing a “before” type home tour with you sometime after I get back!

  • Kids,  Life & Family,  Room Makeovers,  The Country House

    Baby Boy Farmhouse Nursery

    Happy 2018, Friends! You may have missed the arrival of our little bundle earlier last month. (January 12th to be exact!) Our little guy came a few months early at only 29 weeks and is currently hanging out in the NICU while he grows and his lungs get a bit stronger. Since we weren’t quite expecting him to make his debut so soon, we hadn’t made any progress on what would be our baby boy farmhouse nursery!

    Baby Boy Farmhouse Nursery NICU

    This post contains affiliate links. Click here to read my full disclosure.

    As you may know, the Country House isn’t a mansion. With only 3 bedrooms (all occupied) we were stumped as to where we would put the newest addition. Of course, he could share a room with one of his siblings, but since they are both a bit older and need to get a good nights sleep for school, we were hoping for a more private spot for the little guy. At least for the baby/toddler phase.

    After some brainstorming, we decided to transform the walk-in closet in our bedroom into a tiny nursery. Fancy, huh?

    Closet Turned Nursery

    Walk In Closet Before

    The closet room is pretty tiny, so there won’t be a ton of space, but we are working with what we’ve got. So far, we’ve been able to move things around and relocate our clothing/shoes/etc. to another closet just outside of our bedroom. It is now time to really get working on converting this into a livable bedroom for our little guy, hopefully before he comes home from the hospital!

    Here’s the mood board I whipped up for inspiration…

    Light | Flooring | Animal Prints | Olive Topiary |Ruler – DIY | Mini Crib | Little Man Pillow | Rug

    I’m excited to get working on this little room and if we are lucky, we will be able to get this pulled together sooner rather than later. Wish us luck!

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