We’ve officially passed the nine-month mark of living in the house we built last year. After months of waiting and dreaming about moving in, I still have to pinch myself that we’re actually living here. We love the house but especially love the neighborhood and the convenience to our kids’ schools and activities, that has made life a dream.
A scene from “A Day in my Life” post last fall, we bike around here all the time in the summer!
I try not to always be consumed by an endless home to-do list (though let’s be honest, is any home ever really done?) and like to take time every once in a while to look back on what we’ve accomplished. There are still many, many, to-dos on the list, especially since to get our lake lot we wound up with a builder home that offered us very little customization. I’ll link all the building posts at the bottom if you want to start at the beginning as to why we moved and what we built.
Most of the updates we’ve made so far have been decorating. It takes time to get settled in, add curtains and blinds, and make your old furniture work in a new space. Since we moved from a more traditional home to a more craftsman style home that took some editing. Not to mention, with a builder home we moved into a sea of cream-colored rooms, so putting our own spin on things here was a priority.
Today I thought I’d recap the progress we’ve made since moving in last summer and tie together all the posts I have written about this house in one place for reference. You can always see all our home tours here, we’ve had quite a few homes in our nine years of blogging!
Our entryway is still evolving, we have a very long narrow hallway that leads from the front to the back of our house. My office and dining room are off of it then the hall leads to our kitchen/breakfast/family room. A few months after moving in, I moved the bench you see here to the mudroom and added this look for less console to the entry. It is one of those spaces that gets styled for each season (for blog purposes!) so here it is in it’s “Fall” look.
I love the floorplan of this home, it works so well for our family. The office is quiet and private in the front of the house and the family room and kitchen are basically one space that flows together in the back. It has very little wasted space and tons of storage, so it was exactly what we wanted for this stage of our life with three busy teen boys and one ‘tween’ daughter.
The front room is where I work. I added a chandelier in here and took the decor from my former office and softened it a bit for the workspace in this house. This is not just my home office, but also where I keep all our household paperwork, files, bills etc. so it’s nice to have everything together in one place. It is also nice to be able to close the doors and leave it all behind at the end of the day!
Next up along the hallway is our dining room; originally I hadn’t wanted a formal dining room in this house but now I am glad we have it. When we entertain it is often a large group so having two tables for seating makes life so much easier. We have work to do in here still, but hopefully the construction of the wall we need to enlarge will happen soon and then everything will fall in place, you can read more about it here.
As far as our kitchen goes, we definitely have plans to change things a bit in here at some point. It’s been great to live here before we make permanent decisions, so I am glad we didn’t jump right into things. I don’t have a timeframe when we’ll start on all this but at some point, we hope to make some upgrades in here. I showed the plans in this photo below from one of our first posts about the house. We also plan to add more cabinets in the breakfast room (where the hutch is) for more kitchen storage.
My favorite makeover in this house is definitely our mudroom, which got a fun overhaul last month with this black and white floral mural and a quick trim project. Just seeing the space peeking through into our kitchen makes me smile!
Moving to our upstairs, our master bedroom got new bedding and custom roman shades as soon as we moved in, I made this space top priority for once instead of decorating everything else first then getting around to our room! I really love our room though I am still on the hunt for the right chandelier, also I still need to add curtains in here to soften the space, that’s high on the to-do list.
My kids’ rooms also got new decor. My daughter has strong opinions about her decor and actually helped design her new room (which she’s already talking about changing, I suppose it is just the pre-teen attention span!), I think it’s the perfect happy space for her tween years. I don’t plan on caving in on her requests to switch it up just yet.
I really love how my younger son’s room turned out. Though the shiplap wallpaper was a bit of a debacle due to different shades on the rolls, I think the room came out great overall. It will stay appropriate for him throughout his teen years.
My oldest son’s room really hasn’t had as much love as the others, but his time at home before college is winding down and he assures me he is happy with it how it is. I plan to show off parts of it off soon, including his desk and study area, where, as a high school junior, he spends most of his time. I’ll post about it if I can ever get it cleaned up enough to show you all 🙂
We also have an upstairs loft which is currently the next decorating project, so that will be on the blog at the end of the month. That’s a fun space to design since it serves as my girls hang out area, with my daughter’s help we plan to get creative.
So, what’s next on the list here is what I mentioned above–the loft area. Also, now that the weather has turned we have quite a bit of landscaping to deal with since we started with almost nothing. I am dreaming about hydrangea hedges and rows of peonies and such, so hopefully we’ll get that started this spring. I am feeling like that is becoming top priority so I’ll be sure to share it once we’ve made some progress.
To catch up on our building process last year you can read these posts:
So We’ve Moved and We’re Building a New Home
All About Our New Home {Lot and Floorplan}
XO,
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Everything is looking so pretty. Love your new home.