HOUSEography: HOUSE TOUR! (a replay...)

Last week, our house was featured on Remodelaholic. In case you didn't get over there to see it, here is a quick replay for you. Thanks again to Cassity for having HOUSEography over to play! Also, please check out my room-by-room house tour party going on here.

* * *

Our house looked like this when we bought it in 2002.

This is what our house looks like today.

In 2009, we started a major remodel including renovating the existing house and adding a large extension on the rear of our house that would double the size of our living space and solve 95% of the house's problems (at least in our minds at the time). Our main goal in the design was to make the new an old spaces flow seamlessly together, so that people inside the house would have difficulty discerning where the old house ended and the new house begins. We think we succeeded since many of our friends have a hard time remembering what our house looked like before! (Side note for anyone thinking about a major remodel: I wrote a step-by-step blog about our renovation process which you can check out here.)

Let's start the tour! As you enter our house, you come right into the living room (and the family room beyond to the right in this picture).

We were able to add a roof over our front door, but we were not able to easily solve the front entry issue so you enter directly into the living room - still not ideal. Most of our friends use the side door so the lack of a front entry is only a problem a few times per year, but it's still something I would love to fix at some point.

So, we were not using our living room with its standard furniture layout very much after we added our bright and light family room on the back, so we decided to change things up with a round table and four comfy chairs from Rowe. There is no sofa in here and we don't miss it a bit!

The two doors on either side of the fireplace lead to our compact screen porch where we often eat dinner weather permitting.

To the right is our dining room which grew by about 2 feet in the renovation process. This was just enough to adequately fit our vintage dining room set which my parents bought for us as a house warming gift. The chandelier was a Christmas gift from them a few years back.

If you continue through the dining room...

As you can see, although this is a new doorway, it feels old because we replicated the original archway between the dining room and living room.

To the right, we have a small hallway with our coat closet, a bench, and a half bath -

The half bath and closet are in the same area as our original kitchen! Here's a picture - (the window on the right over the sink is now in the new half bathroom).

And this is our kitchen now...

The kitchen is open to our family room where we spend most of our time.

Although we had an architect and a general contractor do the heavy lifting on our addition, my handy hubby has built all of the built-in bookshelves in the entire house, the fireplace mantels, and the stove hood! He also installed the crown molding which is a story unto itself! His current house project is a huge set of built-ins in our basement rec room.

Now we'll head upstairs...

Originally, our stairs ran up the back side of our living room. Although we loved our stairwell, we just could not manage to save it and still have the open, flowing floor plan that we craved.

Our master bedroom is intended to be a calm retreat from the rest of our house... but often it's the center of all of the action while everyone gets ready to go in the morning!

Off the bedroom is our master bathroom -

Our son Alex's nursery is just down the hall. This room was originally our office, but now our desk is his changing table! These were the handy hubby's first foray into built-in bookshelves!

Next up is my daughter Elizabeth's room. Before the renovation, this was our master bedroom but her closet is about 3x as big as ours was when we lived in here! Thankfully, we had the foresight to rebuild the closets in each of the existing three spare bedrooms so hangers would actually fit.

In the basement (or "lower level" if you want to be fancy!) we have a guest bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. I made the upholstered headboard (details here).