Homey home home

Remember dioramas from elementary school? Being able to peer into someone's creation and see what it looked like from above or even through the little door cut out of the shoe box? That was the best.

Kind of like dioramas is being able to get a peek of someone's home that you know online. I love this. I've read your stories and your thoughts, but what does your home look like; your enclave.

So this is about my home.

It was built in 1923 and T and I bought it in June of 2004 just after our one year anniversary.

The couple we bought it from had lived in it for over 30 years and raised their children in it. The man was a pastor at a church nearby and the house used to be the parsonage. When he retired, the church allowed them to buy it. They sold it to us because they wanted a one story home closer to their children. They are delightful and it was like buying a house from our grandparents.

Our neighborhood is old and the streets are not cut on a typical city grid, rather they run diagonally with really wide intersections and some wonky one way streets. It used to be a golf course in the early 1900s and when they started building homes on it in the 1920s, the city cut the lots and the roads as outlined by the previous golf fairways.

T and I probably looked at over a hundred homes before finding this one. He loved it right away, but I was not convinced. It was on the upper end of our budget and had some cosmetic things that we wanted to do right away like remove wallpaper and rip out carpet and paint and replace every single light fixture. But we loved the cherry moldings and original glass doorknobs and that we wouldn't have to move if we had children.

Plaster walls have been a pain in my can and sometimes I dream of a newly built home without Issues, but our house is solid and it has history and I love that I can die here with T burying me in the backyard if I so wish. (Although, let's be honest, he'll probably croak first.)

Here's what the inside looks like:

When you first walk in the front door we have a small entryway room that T trashed the ceiling of seven years ago ("Let me just see how the ceiling is hung so we can plan accordingly...") and has yet to put together and holy hell when it gets done, I'm sure I'll crow about it here.

After that little room, is the main entryway and to the right is our living room and the left our dining room.

The living room is long, with the sun porch/playroom right off of it. Some days I have dreams of tossing the Little People to the curb and putting in wicker furniture for reading and having cocktails. Keeping the hope alive as it were.

Large ominous square is the armoir with
the tv and whatnot inside.

We use the dining room when my family comes over and kids like to play hide and seek underneath it. The table can expand to sit 12 people and was a gift from my parents. When originally looking for a house, I didn't think I would like having a formal dining room, but I do. Before we had kids we would often have people--mostly T's bachelor friends--over for dinner and I liked having a place to host them and a reason to bust out our china.

The doorway into the dining leads into the kitchen. 

The kitchen was and is the recipient of much of my Home Ire. The walls were cream, there was a FLORAL BORDER, oak cabinets, standard faucet, tan tile backsplash with a grody tan grout, tan countertops and appliances and then...gray ceramic floor tile.  What the fresh hell, Morris and Alice (the previous owners)?

The border was removed, the walls painted white, appliances have died and been replaced with white ones (only the fridge hangs on by the skin of its teeth but its death is imminent, I feel), I painted the backsplash...but still the countertops and cabinets taunt me. Bastards.

But the windows are huge and the ceilings are tall and I love the little eat in nook that we use almost 100% of the time. Morris mildly redeemed himself with that.

On the right, there is our back entryway to the outside plus small mudroom with shoe cubbies and hooks for coats and my numerous totes and purses (it photographed too dark, so it is being skipped on the home tour...), the hall closet where we keep things like papertowel, Swiffers, and the large cases of Oberon T buys at Costco, a door to the garage and then a half bath. Oh, and the little hallway leads back into the living room.

When the kids are feeling cagey in January, we have them take off their socks and tell them to run a few laps from playroom to living room to dining room to kitchen and back again. It helps.

The basement door is on the left and also skipped on the home tour because of two things: 1) spiders and 2) spiders. I only go into the basement to do laundry and keep my eyes and hands to myself. The spiders and I have an agreement, but they also don't know that T has plans for going mexican street justice on them soon, so their days are numbered.

The little bathroom:

Heading upstairs.

We have four bedrooms and a full bathroom upstairs. Would it be nice to have more than one full bathroom? Sometimes. But now that we don't have a guest room, it's less of an issue. Growing up, we only had one full bathroom and made do so I don't sweat it a great deal of the time. 

View from the stairs looking down.

That door goes out on the flat roof of our
garage.

And then looking up.

Ezra's bedroom is the first one on the right, then the office/ugly room, then the bathroom, then our bedroom, then Iris' room. We have a third story walk up attic that I have big, big dreams for. 

Ezra's room looking in.

We had a lot of work done to Ezra's room before he was born. The wallpaper removal lady returned (she had been there to remove wallpaper in the stairway, the kitchen and both bathrooms) and was unpleased to discover that not only were there three layers of wallpaper, but that one of the layers had been partially plastered over. 

Dude.

She toiled away and then we called our 74 year old plaster guy who is straight off the boat from the Netherlands and is skilllllled. As a result, Ezra has the best walls and ceiling in the house and they were a freakin' dream to paint. So smooth! So uncracked!

Then the floor guy returned and sanded and polished the floors.

Before we moved in, T and a friend ripped out all of the carpet and tack strips in the house to get to the original floors and we had everything sanded and polished. We skipped two of the four bedrooms because of cha-chinging costs, so we did it before Ezra was born. The office/ugly room still has its slightly hoopty floors.

T then installed the crown molding and I painted. We made the room gender neutral since we chose not to find out his gender ahead of time.

Next to Ezra's room is the office/ugly room.

It houses the computer, the kids easel, iron and ironing board, extra dining room chairs and table leaves, T's staging area for packing and whatnot, old paperwork, Play-Doh supplies, miscellaneous books and other assorted whatnot.

I try to keep it from being too much of an eyesore and I hate clutter, but it ain't cute and, well, I think that's its lot in life.

The full bath is next. The glass shower doors are a pain, but I like being able to look outside. And I like the original tile that goes up the wall.

Next to the bathroom is our bedroom.

We decided to paint it red because I really wanted a red room in our house. Red is a serious undertaking and not to be scoffed at. I like the windows and the smallish people that tend to occupy my bed more often than I do.

Iris' room is next to our room.

We didn't really need to do much to Iris' room after she was born or before she came home. The floors had been finished and we left the walls the blue color, so really just mostly wall decor and furniture and window treatments.

The framed prints are from a calendar of vintage travel posters that my dad expertly cut out and then I traveled around to three area Targets cleaning them out of the black floating frames that they are mounted in.

Like Ezra's room and his framed picture book covers, I didn't want their rooms to be too nursery like and have at least some of it be able to grow with them.

That green bin is quite literally a
bucket of stuffed cats.
God love her.

So yeah. That's our house. 

The heating and cooling bills are astronomical and our roof needs to be replaced soon, but we love it. I love that I brought all of our children here after they were born and that T and I have made it what it is to us.