The Holidays

We were lucky enough to move into the house the week before Thanksgiving. Spending our holidays in our new home gave us a lot to be grateful for. Plus, any excuse to decorate is a wonderful thing in my book. 

Thanksgiving Dinner

My snowman "Mike", he greets all the guests....haha...so cute!

Since all of our trees our fake I decided to buy real wreaths to put throughout the house. Gotta love that smell :-)

Living Room Decor

Dining Room Decor

Advent Tree/Wreath

Den Decor

Little Christmas things we've collected over the years....now even more room to fill :-)

As our good friends would say....."Stephanie, you should probably get some more Christmas trees."

Bring in the furniture!

Moving from an 1100 sq/ft apartment to a 2500 sq/ft house presents a small complication....FURNITURE!! If you are anything like me, and I know some of you are, it was absolutely imperative that the house be fully furnished when we moved in. I accepted the challenge as my personal mission (Rob didn't really put up a fight). Fortunately, I knew we were blessed with friends and family who stockpiled furniture for us in anticipation that we would some day actually go through with this crazy idea. With my mother-in-law (decorating partner in crime) down to help, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. Here are a few shots.

Front Entry

Living Room

My TV...when Rob's watching hours and hours of soccer :-)

Winged console behind couch, this gives you extra light without having to put your couch right up against the wall.

Love the lamps we found at the local consignment shop.

Every home should have a reading area :-)

Dining Room 

Finally have a place to listen to our records. Fun to put on something old at dinner time and have a cocktail or two :-)

Rob's humidor

My mother in law found this at a consignment shop in Wisconsin, 19th century German hutch with ivory detail...BEAUTIFUL!!

Den/Family Room

Built ins on both sides of fireplace.

We ran cords through the attic to mount the TV...it gave us so much free space. You should have seen how long this took the boys to figure out...haha.

Guest Room

Old oil paintings and pictures give this room an old time feel. We also decided to angle the bed to give the room more depth. 

Guest room.

I love mixing patterns in bedding. And the cute little red lamps really add character.

Rob's music room is upstairs but we hung some of his guitars in this room. I love the look.

The old library card catalog is one of my favorite pieces of furniture in the house. 

I promised Rob that I would find him a "manly" bed...and thanks to our local consignment shop I delivered on the promise.

You can never have too many pillows.

At the end of the week we had so much left over we could furnish another room or two. Which is great because I can switch stuff throughout the year. Everyone needs a hobby :-)

It was meant to be...

When we first started our house search Rob and I had a long list of things that we deemed "mandatory", for example:
-It has to be an old house.....I know this sounds strange but Rob and I have always shared an infinity for houses with character and solid structures. We hate cul-de-sacs and pop up construction (not that we don't have plenty of friends who adore their new homes).
-It has to be two stories.....only old people live in ranch houses right?
-It has to have a garage.....we refuse to scrape off the two inches of snow that may fall on our cars throughout the winter.
-Not a lot of trees....I hate raking
-Gas stove......the only way to cook.
-A porch or deck.....with our weather, being outside is crucial.

Here is what we ended up with out of that list:
-An old house...our beautiful home was built in 1961.

It's not as bad as you think. After spending over 2 months working our poor realtor to death and visiting at least 30 houses in the very small area we were willing to search, we had reached the end of our rope. On a last ditch effort we headed out one last time. Our house was the first in the bunch that day that we looked at. Rob and I walked around silent, looking at the little character flaws and sizing up the lot. We left with nothing to say and spent the next hour or so at 3 other places. On our way home Rob broke the silence with, "I didn't mind that first house...it felt good", I responded with, "I think I really like it...". We put in our offer two days later....and we were out bid...we had lost the house. We packed up, headed out to California for vacation, and told ourselves that we had lived in apartments the past six years and another year would not make a difference. The day we got back from vacation our realtor called and told us the other offer had fallen through and the house, shortly after, returned to us. Moral of the story....if it's meant to be, it will be.

So now:
-We own an old house.
-It is a ranch home but with a walk up attic that holds a bonus room with full bath (Rob's man cave) and a huge walk in attic that will store a million pieces of furniture (which I plan to acquire).
-No garage, but a great shed to store all of our outdoor equipment...and enough land to eventually build a garage if we deem it necessary.
- A ton of trees.....nine have already been cut down but I would not trade the ones left for anything. Raking still sucks.
- An electric stove, and no gas line.....which we remediated by putting in a gas line for our new stove top, and adding two gas starters in our fire places so we don't have to use newspaper to get the fire started.
- No porch or deck, but a beautiful sun room off the den that has sliding glass doors with screens that completely open up.  And the possibility to build a deck off that.

Sun Room

Back yard/Shed

No picture can do this attic justice

Our new stove top