A House Tour, An Ending, A Beginning

When we bought this house, I dreamed that when we were finished with the minor renovations we had planned that I’d share it here… a house tour is what I think the lifestyle bloggers call it.

So come. Let’s go on a house tour. I have some other things to discuss with you, too.

Pssst… this rug? Totally washable. As in, throw it in your washing machine washable. Lorena Canals sent it to me. 

I really didn’t think it would come together because we were selling after only 3 years living here. I certainly never imagined we’d be selling it so we could move into an RV.

And yet, here we are. Life is bananas.

Light fixture from this place at Canton’s First Monday Trade Days.

We launched HappyLoudLife.com officially a couple weeks ago. I hope you’ll check it out! I’m super proud of it. Pretty obsessed with it, actually.

We’re moving our family story over there. It’s our new digital home.

You’ve probably noticed I’ve shared less and less of my kids here. I’ve definitely shared far fewer photos and stories of Kendall (9) and Leyna (6.5) here, and on Facebook and Instagram.

You probably think I only have 2 littles based on a glance at the @BabyRabies Instagram alone.

That’s by design and out of necessity. As the babies grow, those stories are less and less mine to tell and those pictures are fewer, harder to capture, and I like to keep them a little closer to my heart.

Also, we’re going through a bit of a transition here on Baby Rabies…

I can’t keep blogging about babies forever. Wallace is 9 months old. He’ll be 5 before I know it. And yet, I love what I have built here, and I have a vision for what it can evolve into.

So as our family transitions over to telling our personal story on Happy Loud Life, I hope to bring other stories to Baby Rabies. I hope to grow this place- with a little help.

Oh, quick pause to say how super proud I am of this wall hanging we threw together right before we put the house on the market. That wall has been bare since we moved in. I was trying to find the right thing to put there. Then realized I just needed something, anything.

So I got a scrap piece of fabric out of my overstuffed craft room, and Scott built this frame for it out of wood we reclaimed out of our own garden at our last house.

And those lights? $32 outdoor sconces from Home Depot. 

Anyway, what were we talking about?

Oh… yes. Big changes for Baby Rabies.

I mean, I don’t know… not huge changes. I’ll still be writing here and blogging about my littles. Wallace and Lowell’s stories have a way to go on here before they’ve graduated this place.

And I don’t know exactly what it will become over here, but I do know this: I want it to keep it’s heart. I want it to be funny and uplifting. I want it to be honest and real. I want it to be self-deprecating and also full of self-love. I want it to always, always be trying to be better, but…

not afraid to call itself a hot mess, you know?

I’ve felt creatively constipated over here for a few months because I’m trying to untangle what goes where. I think the best thing for me to do just keep on writing and sharing, and trusting that it’s all going to settle into something… actually 2 somethings that are pretty awesome.

I need for this dang house to sell, though. We are between two worlds right now. And while we balance here, I’ve been juggling a few other things that are kinda big deals.

I’m realizing the lighting in a lot of these pictures is bleh… this is a stream of consciousness post, if you haven’t picked up on that already.

This media room used to be my office/studio, but I guess it’s not easy to sell a house with a windowless room stuffed full of craft supplies and a lingerie blanket. 

Those pillows are strategically placed to cover the bright red craft paint smeared on the couch.

That rug was an online return to my local Target, and it’s the softest thing I’ve ever felt on my feet. I think it was originally like $500. I got it for 1/5 that. I hate that it took staging our house to sell for me to get really nice rugs!

That’s a massive projector screen that Scott built to stage the room as a media room and not as a room that once stored 57 open and spilling bottles of acrylic paint.

I already did a tour of Lowell’s room back when it was still a room with a crib. Here you can see his platform bed with “mighty machine covers” from the Company Store, but it looks like they don’t sell this anymore!

I never did get to do a reveal of Leyna’s room on here, but you’ve all seen her heart wall.

And no, we’re not painting over it. If the people who end up buying want to paint it, they can knock themselves out. Hopefully, Scott won’t feel the sting when we’re miles away.

Kendall’s room hasn’t changed much since I blogged about it shortly after we moved in. It was the first room we finished in the house.

I had pretty big plans for this guestroom, too. I thought I’d fill it with fluffy throw pillows and hotel toiletries. But it’s simplicity worked well for us. That 4Sleep mattress has wooed 3 guests into buying their very own.

Our master bedroom still looks the same as it did when I shared it before Wallace was born. The master/nursery nook combo has worked really well for us.

We did finally get around to painting over the last bit of khaki in the house this summer when we finished the master bathroom.

And then there’s the “chill out area” that we started working on last year when we removed all the rose bushes from a fancy little rose garden outside our kitchen window.

I thought it would be a better use of the space to put artificial turf down, throw a solar shade up, and fence it off.

The idea was that we’d have an always dog-poop-free, shaded area of the yard for the kids to hang out.

It’s been a great little spot to take Wallace to get some fresh air.

The back porch stretches on, the yard is huge. I got to hang a little baby swing out there. I always wanted to do that, but we never had a spot for one at our last house when the other 3 were little enough.

I’m certain a family will come along and fall in love with this place. There is a lot to love about it.

It’s almost midnight, and I need to wrap up my random thoughts and this house tour.

In a way, this feels like showing you out the door of our house and showing our story out the door of this blog. This isn’t the place for me to be sharing home decor ideas anymore. This isn’t the place for me to blog about where we’ll live next.

So, again, I’ll extend the invitation to please follow us over at HappyLoudLife.com. We’re @Happy.Loud.Life on Instagram and Facebook.com/HappyLoudLife, as well. It’s not that I’m not going to share this part of our lives anymore! We’re just going to share all this at a place that makes a little more sense now- a place that gives us room to grow.

And it’s not that Baby Rabies is going away! It’s just… evolving.