My husband and I have been renting for the last few years and this year finally were ready to buy our first home. Hooray! Now this is a very exciting time in our lives, but home ownership comes with different priorities than a rental. Since I am an Interior Designer my focus for the house is, well, a showcase of my work. A place for me to experiment and do "crazy" things throughout the home and make it reflect us and our lifestyle. We are young, outgoing, social and are up for trying new things! So our house should and is going to reflect that. My husband, well he is an engineer, so you can see how we balance each others ideas when deciding what order to do things in the house are. We are both problem solvers and we love that. So solving our homes problems is what we are going to do.
Now to give you a little background on the home, its a one-story brick, built in 1958, three bedroom, 1 &1/2 bath, two-car garage. Nice little yard for our dog and our future herb garden(already planted some spinach and kale). Now think of the 1950's, its one of my favorite as far as architecture, our house is still mostly traditional looking from the street, but we have lots of plans to make it more modern and well reflect is without changing the architecture too much. I want everything we do to be a surprise, so when we complete a project that is when I will show you before and afters, for now use your imagination! :) Starting from the curb, brick front is always a great place to start and ours is a mix of orange and light grey brick, almost like a white wash in some areas, currently the garage doors, shutters and siding are a light blue, typical of the 50's for sure. That will be change when we get new garage doors, we are looking at doing a fresh light/medium grey (Sherwin Williams - 7044 Amazing Gray) and doing the door and window trim a fresh white (Sherwin Williams - 7004 Snowbound). These color changes will make a huge difference in the homes curb appeal. To finish off the front we will do our new 50's inspired front door in bold turquoise (Sherwin Williams - 6951 Cote D' Azur), large stainless steel house numbers, a new vintage modern entry light and we currently have round columns, we will convert these to square ones finished in white.
Something kind of like this!
Now that you are excited to come inside, let's talk about our plans for the first room you see, the living room. The first we are going to do its paint the walls (Sherwin Williams - 6471 Hazel) This color is in our drapes we selected from IKEA(yes we have to keep costs low in some areas in order to be able to splurge in others) I loved the pattern so that's why we went with them. Now another surface that has to be addressed in the flooring, we are going to do solid tiger striped bamboo throughout the entire home minus the bathrooms. Now the floors and walls have been addressed in the living room, the layout is ideal for tv watching and leaves a good flow path to the dining and kitchen areas, as well as the hall to the bedrooms. There is a small coat closet that is preventing a more open floor plan and we plan to take that out so we have a 8' opening between the dining and living areas, this will make it ideal for entertaining and overall open feeling throughout the house. After that, furniture and accessories will come in, our style is what i would call, vintage modern rustic industrial. A mouthful I know, but we love natural woods, industrial pipe, clean lines, with a touch of history(vintage). Moving on to the dining area, oh the 50's full of colors we may not select today, but currently the floor is a medallion, gold colored vinyl tile, not our favorite but that will be replaced with the bamboo flooring. Now sometime between the 50's and now the dining area got some wood paneling installed(which is currently painted yellow). Sorry for those of you who love it but it has got to go! It will be replaced by new drywall and fresh paint (most likely Sherwin Williams - 7065 Argos), we have turquoise chevron drapery panels that will go on the sliding doors out to the patio. And a bold gray and turquoise area rug will sit under our new dining table, which we are going to make out of reclaimed wood with a metal and wood double pedestal base. As far chairs, we will be using clear acrylic chairs so the beauty of the table is seen and not blocked by chairs. We have a 50's walnut sideboard that will act as our bar area for entertaining and wall shelves above for bottles and glasses. A new chandelier will go above the table, we love urban chandy and previously had a chandelier made by them, but we moved and are in need of a different size. Moving into the kitchen, for those of you who know me, I take pride in making a kitchen as efficient as possible, no need for a giant kitchen, you just need the right layout and fittings for your cabinets. A black wood grain cabinet finish will be used and fitted with modern chrome handles, the counter will be a light gray Cesar stone(similar to silestone but more monochromatic colors. As for a sink, we cook A LOT, so the kitchen is very important, but back the sink, now most people would go with a stainless steel sink but we wanted to do a black granite composite single basin sink. This allows us to clean big pots and we have had double basin sinks and they don't seem to work for us. For the faucet, we are going to use a professional kitchen faucet, this will make it easy to clean, wash, and look great while doing it.
Like this!
Moving on to the private spaces, the hall bath is pretty in pink tiles right now but we will soon change that to some grey, more modern tiles with stark white and black accents. A 5' vanity will be great with a large mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink with plenty of storage. new lighting and a new tile tub surround all the way to the ceiling. The other bathroom needs a little more attention, currently it is a half bath attached to the master bedroom. Back in the 50's this was common for some reason, but lucky for us we have space in the closet to make another full bathroom. Yay! We will have a frame-less shower with the flooring the same throughout, a trough sink so two people can get ready at the same time. We are going to do hex floor tiles(a little vintage for the new bath) and simple subway tiles. A few shower cubbies done in an accent tile and a rain shower-head. Going to be a great open bathroom perfect for two people to use. Since the master bathroom is taking the closet, we will be adding a wall-to-wall floor to ceiling built-in wardrobe on one wall of the room, with all the interior fittings we need to make it as efficient as possible. The guest bedroom will be crisp, clean and inviting for our guests, that will be a big surprise for everyone! Now I have to have a home office, this is my creative space. A place were I ponder ideas for my upcoming projects and dream of new innovative ways to design. So this too will be a creative, unique surprise, and it will definitely be awesome!
So those are the plans! There will be more to come as we complete these projects! Stay tuned and I hope you are inspired to work on finishing your home!
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