Welcome To Our New Home! Unpack A Box Or Two, Will Ya?

Target offered to sponsor a post about our new house, to which I was like, YES, obviously. Because I will basically take what they pay me and give it right back to them when I buy stuff for the house, it’s a win-win. So, I present to you a peek at our new house with thanks to Target.

I’ve been itching to do a sort of new-home-tour for y’all, but we are literally stepping over boxes nearly everywhere we turn.  So this is a mishmash of pics from before we moved in,  and some iPhone pics.

The rundown is it’s a 5 bedroom home, giving each kid their own room with space for a guest room, which is a nice luxury here since we typically have overnight visitors about once a month.

LoLo finally gets his own room! Rejoice! Can’t wait to decorate it in honor of his favorite thing of all- doggies! (That’s not an actual gold dog. It’s a life-size gold dog statue, in case you’re as confused as my kids were.)

I mentioned yesterday that Lowell is VERY all over the place in here, and it’s super easy to lose him. He is very good at the stairs, actually. And I don’t even really mind him going up and down them if I’m in the vicinity.

He’s adorable, going down them on his belly backwards.

But we’ve still been on the hunt for good baby gates for when we need to have the peace of mind of no babies on the stairs.

Upstairs, there is also a playroom/gameroom right beside a media room. The media room will become my studio/craft room – basically a 2nd office for me to do lots of creative things I’ve dreamed up. Because 1. we don’t need an entire room dedicated to watching TV in this house and 2. because having a place to put all my craft stuff will most likely improve my marriage.

There is an office downstairs with lovely built-ins that Scott and I will share.

We have a formal dining space, but since we have no use for anything formal in our lives, and I definitely don’t want another table to keep clean, it’s going to be a piano/living room, thanks to the piano we picked up for super cheap and refinished a bit. (We’ll tune it when the kids move beyond the banging-on-the-keys stage, I guess.)

It’s been Scott’s dream to have a piano for our kids since before we had them, but we never had the space until now.

The kitchen is perfect, as far as storage space and appliances. We do have to remedy the refrigerator situation, though. Our current refrigerator sticks out too far AND the handle on the door can swing right through that glass panel of the pantry door. We have a board there to stop it now, but obviously that’s a temporary fix.

The laundry room is right off the kitchen, and not something we have to walk through to get to the garage, so it’s a much more functional space for us now.

And across from that? OMG, you guys. A pass-through butlers pantry (which is literally the dumbest name ever because THERE WAS NO BUTLER THAT CAME WITH THIS HOUSE) that we’ve turned into a coffee/wine bar.

But lo! There is more room for wine! Because I get my very own wine pantry/nook/grotto kind of thing? And never in my life have I had more than a few bottles of wine in my house at one time but CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

I’m in love with the living room. That fireplace is what sold me on the house. I mean, the wine closet was a start, but when I saw the fireplace, I was like, WINNER.

The bones of this house are absolutely perfect for us. There’s a very spacious garage with room for Scott’s tools and a workshop. It stretches out in front of our house, giving us a huge driveway for the kids to play in. The yard is tremendous. There is a built in mudroom area right next to the garage. Swoon!

This place is seriously every, single thing  we’ve ever wanted, and I’m so happy that all the other times we thought about moving didn’t work out because this is what happened when we waited.

Now for the fun. You know we can’t stay away from the DIY. The great thing about this place is the hard stuff is done and to our liking. Floors? Yeah, they’re good.

The cabinetry, the bathrooms…

All lovely.

The finishes of the home are a lot more warm/brown/red than our previous home. But as we’ve started to repaint, replacing the beige/tan on all the walls with Behr’s Wheat Bread (a lovely warm gray), it’s brightening up and feeling more and more like “us.”

Oak mantle, be gone. #chalkpaint

A photo posted by Jill Krause (@babyrabies) on Nov 11, 2014 at 7:37pm PST

I painted the oak mantle with white chalk paint the other day, and I’m in love with how it’s transformed the already amazing fireplace.

Those dark 2 story drapes we inherited probably cost a fortune, but they’re just not my style. I’m hopping to make some out of white denim to replace them soon. Yup. White. Because I can easily hand wash/bleach spots out of them without taking them down.

We aren’t in love with the frilly light fixtures, and we’ll slowly replace them, with the formal room’s giant chandelier taking priority because we can’t afford to keep hitting our heads on it.

Also a priority is childproofing. Right before we moved in, we took the whole family to Target, looking for childproofing stuff and anything else we need.

For your viewing pleasure, this is EXACTLY what we look like when we shop at Target as a family. Every. Time.

It horrifies me when people tell me they spotted us at Target and didn’t come say hi. I can only imagine the scene they witnessed.

Maybe it’s a good thing Target didn’t know this about us before they sponsored this post.

Anyway, welcome to our new home! We were pretty sad to leave the old one, but we are thrilled with where we’ve landed, and we can’t wait to put our personal stamp on things here.

For the longest time, I used to worry that Scott and I didn’t have any hobbies we enjoyed together that had nothing to do with our children. But I’ve come to realize that designing and DIY home projects fill that niche for us because even after moving into a perfectly perfect home, we still can’t wait to bust out the tools and the paint brushes.

I’m looking forward to sharing the transformation with y’all!