our house

Sweet, sweet summertime. I’m so happy this new season is upon us. We’re up here in the Pacific Northwest where summer doesn’t officially start until the kids get out of school mid-June, but we are just about mentally there. My kids (four of them ages… Continue Reading…house tour / summer edition

We have no plan to redo our bathroom any time soon, but now that the rest of our main floor is looking all fancy with the new floors and white walls, I’m just itching to inject a little style into our master bathroom. And by… Continue Reading…If I were to redo our bathroom, it would look like this

The house a few doors down from us is for sale. It is a duplicate of ours (don’t you just love how builders do that?!) and looks the same as it did when it was built 8 1/2 year ago. As I was walking by,… Continue Reading…our house: then + now

Over the past month and a half, we’ve done a bit of a house remodel. For years we’ve been itching to tear out the carpet downstairs and replace it with hardwoods. We finally took the big step and finished the work right before thanksgiving. To… Continue Reading…our house refresh (new floors + white walls)

We have new floors in our house. We’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the right time and finally made it happen. Things have gone smoothly and fairly quickly and we’re now ready to clean out all the dust, move our furniture back in and get ready for hosting Thanksgiving.  I’ll take photos to show you the finished spaces (it looks so good!) once we have everything put back together, but for now let’s talk about the process of replacing our floors.

To recap, we had blonde maple in our entry (see it here), front bathroom and kitchen. The rest was a taupy/gray carpet (we still have it upstairs) in terrible condition from the past 8 years of kids and dog and entertaining and living. It was time for it to go. We ordered a million hardwood flooring samples, narrowed it down to our top picks and after a few days of staring at them, made our choice.

We ordered from Build Direct and the process was super easy. I measured, the customer service guys helped us figure out what trim pieces and overage we needed and it was official: our floors were on their way! Delivery day was pretty exciting … except when the handtruck couldn’t get the pallet up the driveway so Ryan and I had to carry each box one-by-one into the house. Let’s just say it was good exercise (ps. there were two of those pallets).

The second I had the chance, I tore that first box open to see our new floors.

We went with the gray-brown (here is the exact floor) and are very happy with the choice. Yes, we knew going into it that dark floors are a pain to maintain, but the matte finish and dirty brown color will hopefully do a good job of camouflaging dirt. Ask us in a few months if we’re still in love.

With the wood delivered, it was time to rip out the downstairs floors.Continue Reading…hardwood floors – the delivery, the demo, the install

Our house is a disaster. And I couldn’t be more excited about it.

We’ve been waiting years to do a few big projects to our house and finally took the plunge. The floors were ripped up last week, the walls needed a fresh coat of paint and the new floors will be installed this week. In the meantime, we’re living in a construction zone with all of our furniture moved out and no stove to cook on (which just means eating out or at friends’ houses and I’m not complaining about that!).

I posted about our flooring options and it was helpful to run through all of the choices and hear what you had to say. We made our final selection, placed the order and have let them acclimate in the house for the past few weeks (sneak peeks coming!).  Well, once we pulled up all the carpet and existing hardwoods downstairs in preparation for the floor install, we decided it was the right time to paint the walls. Normally I’m the painter. I really don’t mind it and do a decent job. But the places that needed new paint the most – the stairway, ceilings, hallways and tall walls in the living room – were not areas I was excited about working on. Besides the difficulty factor, it would also take us weeks, and we just don’t have time with kids and soccer and work and the holidays coming up.

So we hired painters. I’ll tell you what, I may never go back to painting myself again. They do such amazing work and they are quick. Yay for nice people who paint houses for a living!

The only problem is that it costs money. And when you’re paying a bunch of money to have nearly every wall in your house painted, you really, really want to make sure you pick the right color. There are a million bigger issues out there than choosing paint colors, I am well aware. I felt ridiculous going back and forth, painting swatches, staring at five whites that looked exactly the same and yet I also didn’t want to waste money on a color that we didn’t love.

We knew we wanted white. I’ve been craving clean, fresh, light, bright. One peek at my living area pinterest board and you’ll instantly see what my eye is drawn to. We moved into our home 8 years ago and the walls and ceilings were all the same khaki-ish color. It’s a fine color, but started feeling dark – especially during our dreary Pacific Northwest winters when the sun doesn’t show up much. So white was the obvious choice.Continue Reading…our process for picking white paint

Did you enjoy the week of fantastic home tours? Thoroughly inspired to bring a little fall into your home? We had dinner with my sister this weekend and she said she was inspired to finally take down her 4th of july stuff and replace it with leaves, pumpkins and cozy textures. Her house always looks great and I’m excited to see what she has done with it now.

So let’s talk about some of the items seen in the second half of our house tour (first half, click here. And for sources, here.) Most of the furniture and accessories are not new which means they are not always still available for purchase, but I’ll share links where applicable.Continue Reading…sources for hall, living, kitchen + extras

Welcome to the second half of our fall house tour. We started last week with the front of the house: the entry, small bath, office, dining room and piano nook and today we’ll keep making our way through the main living areas.

If you’re coming from DesignPostInteriors, welcome! A little about me: I love neutrals. Get ready for a house tour void of color, but full of texture. Also, you might not be able to tell from the photos, but we have four kids and a dog and things don’t always look so fluffed and tidy. I try, but in real life you’ll probably see remote control helicopters and lego ships on the coffee table and art supplies covering the kitchen table, random shoes littering the floor and dog toys everywhere you look. I like things picked up, but we also do life here and sometimes that looks a little messy. I’m guessing you can relate.  I love how our house looks in the photos and I do my best to keep things nice around here, but really what we’re going for is a home that is welcoming and grace-filled and warm.

Okay, so let’s start the tour!Continue Reading…fall house tour: living, hall & kitchen

The first half of the fall tour was fun, right? I loved pulling my house together and giving it a fall look (if you missed the tour, you can see it here). There were many questions about sources for items shown and I’m all about sharing!

Not that you are going to go out and purchase everything you see here, but hopefully it helps show what can be done without spending tons and tons on furniture and accessories.  For the fall tour, I mainly shopped my house – rearranging furniture, moving around accessories, pulling out a few fall decorations I keep stored. Like I said on the house tour, I recently quieted the house and striped it of all of it’s ‘stuff’. It was the best thing for me! I actually had a semi-difficult time putting things back out because it was just so nice to have clean surfaces, bookshelves, walls. But it was time to put things back together and I like the more edited version of our house this time around. I’m sure things will change (as they always seem to do around here), but for now, this arrangement suits us.Continue Reading…sources for entry, office, bath & dining room

Fall is my favorite. Truly it is. So naturally, I like a cozy decorated-for-fall home. This year, I am just coming off of quieting the house and it felt really good. When putting accessories back in to each room, I was really selective and picky – nothing made it back that is not practical, pretty or meaningful.

It was a mad dash to get the house photo-ready, but I made it (just barely!).

I’m so pleased to be joining an insanely-talented group of bloggers on the Finding Fall Home Tour. You can start at the beginning here and I’ll link below to the next stop. If you are coming from Rhoda’s lovely tour, welcome!

Today I’d love to show you the front of our house (the entry, half bath, my office and the dining room). Next week, we’ll continue the tour with the living room and kitchen (I’ll give you a few sneak peeks of those rooms today because I’m terrible at waiting). As you will see from the photos, I’m slightly addicted to neutrals and try to keep things interesting by adding a ton of texture. Pattern, sheen, metal, varying wood tones – all of these elements are the base of how I love to decorate.

Shall we begin?! Welcome to our home …Continue Reading…fall house tour

I couldn’t take it any longer.

There was just too much stuff cluttering up the visual space in our home. I’m in a weird spot in my emotional life – deeply craving light and calm, direction and needing a deep exhale – and it has translated into this crazy lady pulling off and packing up every accessory just to let the house (and me) breathe a little.

My friend Myquellyn calls it Quieting The House.  By removing all of the stuff (the accessories, pillows, picture frames, cute things!) it reduces visual distractions, clutter and loudness that I just need gone right now. I’m an accessory lover, but sometimes it gets out of control and quieting the house becomes necessary to help figure out what I like, what is just there for the sake of being there, what works, what doesn’t and why I insist on putting so many pillows on the couch.

So this past weekend, I shushed the house. Mostly just the living room and entry/hallways. The kitchen is next.Continue Reading…quieting the house

When we tore apart our perfectly fine, but utterly boring kitchen, one thing we knew we wanted were open shelves. We love the classic, casual, slightly industrial, slightly country look of shelves and it remains one of our favorite parts of our kitchen. There are… Continue Reading…open shelves in the kitchen

Welcome! I’m happy you stopped by! Today I’m joining up with Gina from The Shabby Creek Cottage and her Summer Tour of Homes. Over the last few days I have transitioned our home’s decor to be a bit more summery. What this basically means is… Continue Reading…summer house tour

I’ve been searching for the perfect chair for my desk for quite a while. I had a list of criteria – style, comfort, no arms and most importantly height – which made finding the right chair super difficult. I narrowed it down to these choices… Continue Reading…a new (semi diy) office chair