Eight years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. It's a fairly classic 1960s-style ranch, though the floor plan is a bit more open than many ranch-style homes of that era. The house has fantastic bones, though the lovely couple that lived there had decorating tastes that were very counter to mine!
The good: the house's bones
- An open floorplan with the dining room and living room separated by a stone half-wall/planter. Not so sure about the planter part, but we do like the stone wall, which coordinates with the...
- Stone fireplace that had never been used.
- Hardwood floors throughout. Except for the kitchen and the master bedroom (and bathrooms), the house has gorgeous golden hardwood floors. They were in remarkable condition when we moved in.
- A beautiful three-season porch with slate floors.
The bad: the former owners loved pink and peach
- Pink carpet in the bedroom.
- Coordinating custom curtains in a hot pink, medium pink and white striped moire.
- Peach custom curtains in the living room and dining room
- Guest bedroom with very high quality wallpaper (sigh,wallpaper), but it's white with peach stripes!
- Peach curtains in that same guest bedroom
- A bathroom with bubblegum pink tiling & a shower stall with a mermaid frosted on the door (very detailed, down to a nipple in silohuette)
- Another bathroom with better tile, but a pink tub and toilet. The glass shower doors had swans and reed on them, again, frosted. No nipples, though!
- Third bedroom with wooden paneling for all four walls & curtains in a very dated tan and black basket weave pattern
The ugly (the kitchen - we started redoing it right when we closed!)
- Bright mint green cabinets in the kitchen
- Coordinating kitchen wall paper with golden tulips & mint green leaves
As you can see, our house had a lot of great points, but also a lot of things to - how shall I put this? - make our own. This blog is about the process of making the house our own. We're not the handiest couple, though, so although we don't quite ride the home improvement short bus, we should possibly have helmets. Ha ha. We certainly haven't done as much on the house as we would have liked to by now, but we're changing that. I'll post about the changes we've made already, what we've learned NOT to do, plans for future home improvements, ideas and inspiration for room design, and hopefully the process of updating our lovely house into a home.
No comments:
Post a Comment