playing house : )

So...the months of hiatus from this blog is inexcusable, but my excuse is we bought a house! It's our first home, and really, we took everything into consideration for our precious baby June. She's solely responsible for this decision--it's a nice quiet house in a cul de sac, and a huge-mongous backyard for her and her little friends to run around in! Not to mention great schools...she's not even talking yet and her future is already set!

It all sounds great, right?! Well, this house was pretty trashed by the previous owner, and then someone bought it for the sole purpose of flipping it to make a huge profit. Poor us, we now are dealing with major renovations such as gutting the kitchen. But it's coming along! Oh, and these are not the initial photos of the house. We had popcorn ceiling already removed and recessed lights put in...so it looks a lot nicer. :)

The paint colors literally took me months to decide, and it tormented me: I kept waking up in the middle of the night and would change the colors in my mind. But it's all turning out so well, and i can't wait to post the before/after photos soon! I'm psyched (well, other than the fact that I've taken the rest of the year off of work to deal with contractors..did i tell you how much i hate dealing with them?) about actually decorating and making this home ours, for the first time in our lives.

Stay tuned for progress photos!
Entry way area, shot from the living room. those banisters must be repainted...should the tile entry stay?

Dining Room: LOVE, LOVE these french doors...too bad we don't have the key to the lock, which has to be replaced...but here, i'm already playing with the right accent wall color to make a silver tree stump dining table base I bought from z gallerie pop (promise I'll have a pic of it soon...it was an impulse buy and I'm anxious to get it into the space...)!

Living room view: the corner is where the baby Grand my dad bought me when I was a kid will sit...i HAVE to figure out a way to do built-in window seating...i've always dreamed of having that...hope this color works...

Family Room shot...thought about doing yellow paint, but decided it was too much.

this USED to be a bar sink...


but my brilliant hubby suggested knocking it down and converting into a pantry, since we have none.

See the swatches of tester colors on the left wall! This was the biggest challenge for some reason. Probably b/c I kind of wish this fireplace didn't exist.

Ta-da!! The "butt-ugly" kitchen. Sorry if you like it...but I personally think it's too busy and makes the already small kitchen even smaller. Plus, everyone who's seen it has said it's the worst job of cabinet installation they've ever seen. We've decided to gut this...stay tuned for IP photos!

Here's our Craigslist gem, Paul, who came to buy the cabinets off of us and did an amazing job demo-ing the kitchen. We felt like we should've paid him for the great job!

Then, contractor came and finished the demo, plus replaced the drywall...

The laundry room, looking into the family room. In the picture the hardwood flooring looks fine, but in actuality there's water damage and sun bleached spots. We're ripping that out too...(are we crazy?)

The downstairs guest room/sewing room/office: I put my dress form in there to figure out the right shade of blue for the walls...the recessed lighting makes a big difference!

follow me UPSTAIRS now...
Baby June's future room. aka our guest room right now...

Oops, this was too quick of a reveal! You can already see our painter Brenden working hard in June's current nursery! I decided to change the color from her nursery in our old house just for a fresh beginning. I'm LOVING the color. (Silver Sage from Restoration Hardware) So much so that we're using it in the living room downstairs.

now the master bedroom--again, didn't post the before...but we LOVE this blue-gray color. Hubby tells me to go with my natural inclination for a color and then take it up a notch in boldness. He was right. I almost settled for a paler version of this color.


And that's all for now! I've been following several blogs for inspiration along the way...so I can't take all the credit for this home makeover. But it's fun (very stressful), and it's coming together!