House Tour

Eradicating the neon green…

Working for my family company I occasionally have the opportunity to work from home, so I knew one of the first things I wanted to get set up and going at my house was a peaceful, clean workspace. When I started graduate school (I got an MBA a few years ago) my parents gave me a nice Pottery Barn desk as incentive for me to study hard. It has been a few years, but they still sell the desk here. I love this desk! I had wanted it for a long time and was pleased to have such a great place to organize my addiction to school supplies. I’ve now had it for almost 5 years and it is still going strong! (PB recommends an acrylic cover to protect the top… but I decided to spend the money on it and besides a few tiny nicks, the top still looks pretty darn good!)

When I moved in to this house the previous owners had used this room as a nursery for their young daughter. And they had chosen a lovely shade of highlighter green. Since that’s not really high on my list of favorite colors, it HAD to go. I went with a nice soothing gray color that would nicely complement the white desk. It is so amazing how much a new coat of paint can change a space!

(sorry for the terrible iphone pics)

The other piece of furniture I wanted to include in this space was an antique oak bed that came from my grandmother’s basement. This isn’t my official guest room but I have a lot of family that come in and out of Dallas, so it has been nice to have a single bed in addition to the double bed in the guest room.

Over the bed seemed like the perfect place to display my camera collection. I bought these brackets and shelves (in white) from The Container Store and hung them along with a few pictures that I rescued from my grandmother’s basement. They were taken by a relative in the early days of photography. The woman on the bench is my great great grandmother. I love the way that the black cameras and white shelves look against the gray wall.

The last piece of this room were the curtains. I have two of these windows and I’m never sure how you properly hang curtains? Do you need them on all three windows? None of them? Well, I finally settled on hanging short rods over the two outer windows and leaving the center window uncovered.

Mostly this is because I originally bought the curtains for the kitchen downstairs but the gray clashed with the blue-ish walls and didn’t achieve the look I was going for. But since I had kept them past the return date… I brought them upstairs and they look FANTASTIC against those gray walls. Happy mistake!

I love the way this room turned out!

Mi Casa

I bought this house two years ago when I was single and tired of paying rent which was higher than a monthly mortgage payment. So I settled into a house I could afford in the ‘burbs of Dallas. Having grown up in a suburb, I’m right at home here in the land of subdivisions and HOAs. It also helped that my twin brother had just returned to Dallas and would be living about 10 minutes away from my new house. Which means… FREE labor!! That is gold to a single girl in her first house.

I had just finished a weekend of house hunting and was about to set off for a trip with my brothers when my Realtor said she had one more for me to look at which had just come on the market. When we went to look at it and I fell in love: a two story pinkish brick home with plenty of room for change, but nothing major that NEEDED to happen… other than paint. I had no need for a neon green nursery (see below… eek!). I swear it doesn’t look quite so looming in person, its just what happens when you take it from the bottom of my somewhat steep driveway.

I got the house for a little under asking and proceeded to go through the annoying process of securing my first home loan… in a market where all the lenders were a bit gun-shy after the housing crisis.

Here is a little sneak peek into what are working with… mind you these are the photos of my first walk through of the house meaning: not my furniture.

This was the living room when I purchased it… mostly nothing has changed aside from my furniture instead of theirs.

This is the kitchen… stay tuned for how we tiled a backsplash and see what it looks like a little bluer.

This was the first room to change. I’m not a big burnt orange fan and the two toned walls were getting to me, and as it is the very FIRST place you walk into, I needed it to have a little less orange going on.

This is the master bedroom (remember… NOT my furniture!) and this was my lesson numero uno on how furniture placement makes a huge difference in the size of a room.

This was room number two to be painted (if it was anything but a guest room/office it would have CATAPULTED to the top of that list… but alas until I got around to it, I could shut the door and pretend that it wasn’t my Digger Phelps room)