Home Tour: The Before

Welcome to my humble abode… or the digital representation of it. I’m going to give you a little tour. I figure it will help to understand what the house looks like as a whole before I start posting pictures of what I’m changing. So, consider this the official ‘Before’ of everything in the house.

I used floorplanner.com to build the floor plan of the house to scale. I have to say, I really like this program. It has some major limitations (hence the reason I didn’t try to put in all the box windows) but overall I consider it a great tool. I’ve created the home ‘as is’ meaning I only put in furniture we currently own and the flooring matches what is currently in the home.  

 

As you can see, the house is quite large for first home. This fits us though, because we planning on having a larger than normal family. The house is 2450 sq feet, four and a half bedroom and has 5 walk in closets (I know what’s important!). You may be saying, “Wait… four and a half bedrooms? How does that work?” Well, the half bedroom used to be a whole bedroom, but they stole square footage from it to make the hall bathroom bigger.

Shall we take a little tour?

This is the entryway, the flooring is real stone (I don’t know what kind) so we’ll probably leave it. Need to find a way to make the rest of it look a little more modern though:

 This is the formal living room and dining room. The living area is pretty open. The flooring is fairly new white carpet. We don’t plan on replacing the flooring any time soon, but we might have to after the foundation work is done (more on that topic later).  I think the dining room will be gray (if I can convince LJ that color will not look depressing) and I’m still trying to decide on a wall color for the living room. In the future the living room walls will be covered in built-in bookshelves, or at least I want them to be, so that room’s color doesn’t matter as much as the dining room:

This is the Den, viewed from the formal living room. It’s pretty big, but doesn’t have a lot of real wall space. I think it’s going to be an interesting design challenge. Something you can’t see in this picture is a built in desk and folding doors on the wall between it and bedroom 3. Yes, they put doors so you can walk from bedroom 3 into the Den… I think we’re going to wall these off again. One of my first projects will be painting the paneling in this room white.

On to the kitchen, where the garbage disposal and dishwasher don’t work. I’ll probably paint the cabinets white. I’d love to renovate the kitchen completely, but we’ll see if we want to put that kind of money into this house. For now, it will be paint and new cabinet pulls.

Here is our half bath… don’t you LOVE that wallpaper? Me neither… it’s going to be one of the first things to go. This is probably going to be the room I work on first.  It’s small and guests will use it a lot, so I figure that’s a good place to start.

 

Bedroom one will probably start as a study with the futon in it for guests and end up as a kid’s room someday. Not 100% about everything in between. I also need to figure out some paint colors for this room. Oh, and that blue carpet's days are numbered... it's throughout all the bedrooms and it has got.to.go.

The second bedroom is our future nursery. I’m very excited about getting started. I already know what I want to do in this room, it will be one of the rooms I work on sooner rather than later. (The entry to the room is shaped funny so I couldn't get a good picture)

 

Here is our hall bathroom…. Nice shower, huh? The last person who lived in this house was blind, hence the bars all over the place in this bathroom. Unfortunately, the shower has a problem. It currently leaks out the side of the house… not good. So, this is a high priority to fix. After that we’ll have to figure out how to make this a more usable bathroom. There are no cabinets or counter tops to put our stuff on (sink is in the left corner of the first picture, you just can't see it).

  

Next up is the half bedroom, the one they stole square footage from to make the giant shower in the hall bath. This is one of my favorite rooms in the house because it is going to be my studio. I enjoy sewing, painting, scrapbooking, ect and this is going to be a place for me to practice all my hobbies. I never imagined that we’d have a house where I would get my own craft room. We originally were looking at three bedroom homes and there wasn’t going to be a lot of extra room. This is one of the things about this house that has made it worth the 7 month wait. (: 

This is bedroom three, it is the one that connects to the Den. It also has a chandelier… totally normal… I am still trying to figure out how the last home owner used this room.  It is definitely going to undergo a lot of change. We’re not 100% sure what we’re going to do with it. I think it might end up as a home gym for now and a kids room in the future. But we’re definitely going to be closing off the wall to the Den again. Bi-fold doors your days are numbered.

 

Last but not least, the master suite. The room is a good size, just over 200 square feet.  Not sure how I want to paint it yet, but I’m leaning towards dark blue. At the other end of the bed is the entrance to the bathroom and closet, with a built in make-up desk between.  The close is a pretty good size, which I’m super excited about, but the bathroom could use some help.

Here’s the bathroom… it hasn’t been updated since, well, it hasn’t been updated. Originally when we looked at the house, renovating the master bathroom was at the top of our to do list. But, there are so many other issues we have to deal with first that I now think this won’t happen for a year or two. So, we’ll have to find a way to ‘make it work’ until then. Personally, I think we’ll just  end up walking down the hall to the big shower. 

Well, I don’t know if you’re still with me (that was pretty long), but if you are, that’s our house! I love it already. When I look at it I see it in my mind’s eye all painted and fixed up.  Now I just need to start on making this a reality! (: I’ll be blogging about it as I go, so check in every once and a while and see how I’m doing.