As promised, I’m giving you all a good look at who I am this week, in celebration of my first blogiversary. I feel that a person’s home really says a lot about who they are. We bought this, our first house, 3 years ago and I truly love it. Built in the 1870s, its pretty old by US standards and has had a long life. We even have the original deed, handwritten and sold for just $1300.

I love that the house feels warm and cozy, that the windows are original complete with “melting” glass and wooden panes and the slats between the original heart pine floors give you a good look down into the basement. Most of all, I love its secrets, wondering about the other families who may have lived here and thinking about what the original house looked like. We have discovered many layers of plaster and wall paper (when doing a small upgrade in our bedroom) and a hidden staircase leading no where which I think used to lead from the kitchen up to the master bedroom.

The quirky things I don’t love, are zero closet space, no central A/C, the fact that when doing any renovation large or small you can plan for big surprises and the weirdest layout for a bathroom, ever. An old house has endless projects and ours is no exception.

I’ll post any pictures I have from when we first moved into the house to what it looks like now. Most of the things we have done are purely cosmetic, really making it our own. We have hopes of doing more permanent renovations, including an entire bathroom overall, some serious kitchen upgrades, revamping the scary basement and many less fun projects like a new roof, new furnace and maybe, someday new windows. (The average home today has about 12 windows, give or take. Ours has 22 and I’m sure they would have to be custom built, that’s A LOT of money.)

Decorating our home has become a really fun hobby of mine. I truly enjoy making the house look good and learning to do new DIY things whenever I can. I’m always getting new ideas, just ask Eric, every time I saw, “I’ve been thinking” or “So I have this idea” he cringes! But I think secretly, most of the ideas we end up using turn out pretty well and he is happy in the end, well at least I hope so!

And without further ado, welcome to my home!

Exterior Front

This is from the real estate website when we purchased the house. (Which explains the blurriness.) We have done nothing to the outside yet, at all.

Mudroom

BEFORE

PROGRESS

Kitchen

BEFORE (Again from real estate flyer)

This is the day we moved in.

PROGRESS

Dining Room

BEFORE

PROGRESS

Front Room

BEFORE (Real Estate Flyer)

AFTER

Living Room

BEFORE

AFTER

Master Bedroom

BEFORE

AFTER

Sleeping Porch

BEFORE

AFTER

Office/Guest Room

BEFORE
(It was very pink.)

AFTER

Guest Room # 2

I have no before pictures, this room is still the color it was when we moved in, but I was able to find bedding to match so we’ve only filled it with furniture, not redecorated completely.

And there you have it! There are 3 rooms that are not pictured. Both bathrooms, the main bathroom has been untouched since we moved in and has such a weird layout that I couldn’t shoot it correctly and it looked even worse and the powder room was just plain too small to get a decent shot of. The other unpictuured room is the 4th “bedroom” or what we call the spare room. It is essentially the hallway to our room from the stairs and currently is filled with junk. My shoes are without a home and stuffed in boxes along a wall, our old dresser is along another wall. A “leftover” desk sits in the corner that we are saving for our children someday and it is boring white. I didn’t take a picture of it because I’m vain and didn’t want you to see my messy room. This is a cooking blog, not a home decor blog!

I hope you enjoyed my house tour. It’s always a work in progress and I can’t wait for some of the fun things we have planned for this Summer; don’t worry, I’ll take lots of pictures and tell you all about them!