Our living room is the main hub of our house. Our entire downstairs is a very open floorplan so in reality our living, dining room and kitchen are all one space. However our actual living space is anchored with our fireplace and TV. Here is a picture of the space when we bought the house (listing picture)
Here is our living room today:
As you can see the space really does look different than the before, however we didn't do that much to change the space. We just added our own furniture, added a mantle to the fireplace and painting the space made the biggest impact.
Living Room Sources:
Couch- Ikea Ektorp Sectional - we love it because it is comfy & you can wash the covers
While going through all my SD memory cards the other day I found a full video tour I took of our Dallas House. I took this footage right as we put our home on the market to move. My intent was to do a series on moving and the process however that was one of the most stressful and packed times in our lives so it just didn't happen. When I found the footage I figured it would still be fun to share. This was our first home and we truly didn't know what we were getting ourselves into when we bought it but it is full of sweet memories and will forever be our first home and for that I am beyond thankful.
So I complied the video tour of our house, which will below for you to watch. In addition I also pulled all of the photos that we used to list our home since they show the entire home. Please note since these are real estate photos they do have an interesting filter on them I would not have choose myself but they still do show a good representation of the home.
Our home was built in the 1950's and you will definitely see a lot of that original charm throughout. That also means there are some quirky things you are not used to seeing in newer homes. All of the houses in our neighborhood were built at this time and had our neighborhood was our favorite part of owning this home. The whole neighborhood was full of huge, beautiful trees and was super green. We absolutely loved long walks through the neighborhood.
On to the inside of our home, starting when you walked in the front door, you came right into the living room, which was also connected to the dining room. View the past tour and post I did of that space here, where I go through the sources for everything in the two rooms. Here is the overall view of the space. As you can see it is one long, narrow space anchored by a huge picture window. The entire home other than the kitchen and bathroom had beautiful original hard wood floors that were in great shape.
Here is the view from the opposite side, you can see the front door in the corner. The best way for us to set up this space was to find an L shaped couch that fit that space that could go up against the window on one side. This allowed us to position the TV on the main open wall. We eventually surrounded the TV with a gallery wall and loved how it pulled it all together.
Within this space was our dining room, with a small door into the kitchen. The door to the kitchen actually featured a pocket door, as it was common to close off the kitchen completely during the time our home was built. See a before and after of the dining space from when we moved in here.
Here is the view of the kitchen from that door. It was actually a very large space but the space just really wasn't maximized like it could of been. If we hadn't moved this is the part of the house where we would have made some changes. As you can see we actually had the original 1950's style flat panel cabinets they had just been painted white and topped with granite by the previous owner. (Note we actually changed the hardware before putting the house on the market, after these pictures were taken and kicked ourselves for not doing that the day we moved in since it made a big difference and was such an easy and inexpensive change)
And here is the opposite view. What you don't see in these pictures but you can see in the video is right next to the fridge was our washer and dryer. Which the previous owner built into the kitchen as a "bar area" with granite top. This was something else we wanted to improve if we had stayed in the home.
We also had a dining nook in the kitchen that was sandwiched in between two sets of glass sliding doors. One lead to the courtyard and the other to the backyard. The third door is to our garage.
Here you can see a peek of where the washer and dryer are next to the fridge.
Moving out one of those doors here is a look at our courtyard patio. You can see the full makeover of that space here. There you can see that we had to replace the broken down fence and we planted grass and filled with new furniture. This was our favorite outdoor space, we spent much more time here than in our backyard. Our pup Benny also loved this space for hanging out.
Also off the kitchen was one of two doors into my office. One of the unique/quirky parts of the house layout was this room which was considered a "pass through room" we are not sure what it was originally used for when the house was built. The layout worked perfectly for an office. However if we had ended up using it as a bedroom we would have closed off the door in the kitchen.
It was actually a very large room, technically a little bigger than our master so there was lots of space. In this photo I have some but not all of my Burn Boutique inventory out to make it the most visually appealing for buyers.
Right outside my office in the hallway was our guest bathroom. You can also see a post on the before and after of this space here.
At the end of the hall was our guest bedroom.
Then at the other end was our master bedroom and bathroom.
And finally a couple pictures of the backyard, it was in need of a little bit of an overhaul out there but still a very nice space with a large deck.
I hope you enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane with me and taking a tour of our very first home. It was full of so many sweet sweet memories and I do get a little emotional thinking about it. We love you first home under the trees!
Since we purchased our home last year we have spent so much time on projects to make this house our home. It has been so much fun and we have loved every minute of it. There is nothing like the excitement of finishing a home project and seeing the end result and loving it. I personally have always loved home decor and decorating but we did try (and succeeded) to buy minimal decor and furniture when we lived in an apartment since we knew we wouldn't be there long term and decor/ furniture tend to be purchased specifically for a space and we didn't want to have to start over. I'm so glad we did that. Now that we own this home and plan to be here for awhile I have had the best time decorating and picking out pieces. That is why I wanted to start a home decor series for the blog along with some videos.
The thing with blogging is you do best blogging what is really going on in your life and right now this has been a big part of ours, so I have been building some content for awhile that I am so excited to share with you all.
Last week I shared our Living Room Gallery Wall project that we just completed. Our living and dining room is actually where I think we have made the most progress. We have really focused on this room because it is where we spend most of our time and also where friends and family are when they come over. We are so happy with what we have done so far, but of course its a never ending project. However I am very excited to share with you a tour of our living room in its current state! Below are both pictures and the full video tour please enjoy!
Sources: Paint: Repose Grey- Sherwin Williams, Couch: IKEA, Dining Set: Nebraska Furniture (we got this very on sale), Head chairs: At Home (no longer online), Dining Light Fixture: Lowes, Entry Table: IKEA, Entry Mirror: Hobby Lobby (couldn't find online but like this square one in same color), Full Length Mirror: Target (I got this for $12.99 on sale score), TV Stand: IKEA
Hope you guys enjoyed this tour! Stay tuned for more home decor posts and videos!!
A couple weeks back we purchased a new TV stand that we had been wanting from IKEA, once we had that all set we knew the next step would be to complete a gallery type wall around it. Fun fact there are very few things hung on our walls and no pictures hanging up to this point. Over the last couple weeks we have been gathering items we wanted to incorporate into the wall including pictures, artwork, and some decor pieces.
We started this all by laying out everything we had. I then traced the outlines of each item on paper (something I once saw on Pinterest, great idea) and played with the layout with the items on the wall before getting the nails involved. A couple tries later we had our desired layout.
(In progress- yes with the Olympics on)
Then we began by placing the nails directly on top of the papers so all that layout work wasn't wasted. Now here is the end result with everything hung up, not to say we wont add more in the future but we are very happy with this start.
Some of the items we included:
TV Stand: IKEA, Morkie sign: Etsy, NM Home sign: Etsy, Marble clock: Target, Wooden Arrow: Amazon, Grey B: Michael's
Other things included are of course our pictures (frames from target, home goods and hobby lobby) and lyrics from our first dance song.
As I mentioned a while back, we moved into our new house in December and have since been trying to tackle one project at a time. While there was nothing major that needed to be renovated for us to comfortably live in our home there is still plenty of small things we wanted to accomplish to make the place "ours", a couple weeks ago I shared the first of those small projects, our coffee bar in the kitchen.
Aside from lots of painting the next project area we took on was the dining space. The previous owners of the home actually didn't use it as a dining room they just used it as an extension of the living room and an office space. When we moved in we were very interested in using it as a "formal dining room" so there were a couple projects to tackle to get it there.
What we did to this room were, first paint. The walls were previously brown, we painted them a light neutral grey, Repose Gray by Sherwin Williams . We actually used this color throughout a large portion of our house and we love it. Second we installed blinds in the window, for some reason there weren't any when we moved in and that window looked directly into the neighbors home. Third we installed a new chandelier style light fixture in the center and then brought in a brand new dining set.
The light and table expressed the look we were going for in our home and really pulled the room together. We are thrilled with both. Here are the before and after pictures in three phases: first the online pictures from how the previous owners had it, second mid paint, third the end product. I hope you enjoy
