lunch break

...big tour of the little house - clara's room

...Yeah, let's get this tour over with, already.

 
Walking down the hallway toward her room.

I think that's a binky under her dresser. At least I hope that's what it is.

We added a pink pouf after this picture was taken. Everyone needs a pink pouf.

Clara's room only has one window, so I wanted to keep it light and airy. Lots of neutrals with pops of color. I love it.

I always wanted a window seat as a kid, so I gave her one.

I think all the sources for this artwork are over on the left. The changing pad cover, rug, and pouf are all from Land of Nod.

A little detail of the tiny wall decal on that frame wall.

I made that mobile. And I don't let anyone look at it closer than three feet away because it looks like a second grader made it.

Her room is peaceful and serene. Which is good, because curly? Well, she's crazy.

...one year ago today

...we packed up the car. Multiple times.

...There was still a bulldozer in the driveway and worker's trucks outside the garage. At least the port-a-pot and the random shower in the woods were gone.

...but we were coming home.

...I can't believe it's been a year. At least all the boxes are unpacked.

...big tour of the little house - charlie man's room

...Charlie loves his room. When he's in charge of the house tour (which he often is), he will insist (pretty abruptly) that the first place you need to go is "Charlie's Room." (Don't tell him I didn't start this tour with his room).

His bed is BIG. He transitioned into it with no problem whatsoever, which means that Clara probably won't transition into a big girl bed until she goes to college.

The wooden toys on Charlie's windowsill and bookshelf are both new to him and family toys. (Given to my brother from my Pop Pop Charlie).

The wall o' art is my favorite thing, hands-down, in the room. I love that Charlie thinks the little boy playing with the trains on the left bottom is him.

(All the artwork is listed over there on the left of my blog).

...big tour of the little house - the potty rooms

...can you tell I have potty training on the mind?

None of the bathrooms are "decorated." Low priority. But the toilets flush and the water runs.

We have a full bathroom on the first floor, right next to my office/guest room.

I love having a full bath on the first floor. It doesn't have any windows so this picture is, well, awful.

And I cropped out the potty seat.

There are two bathrooms on the second floor, one is the kiddos, which is right outside Charlie's room (the plan originally had a door into this bath from his room, which we got rid of).

One of my favorite views in the house is looking down this hallway into their bathroom. It's just pretty. It's hard to get a good shot of the rest of the room, so this is all I have:

Then there is our bathroom. It's big, I won't lie. You could fit five of our bathrooms from Baltimore in it, and that's not an exaggeration. We changed the plan above slightly to make the area around the tub smaller and the shower bigger.

I love it. It is one of my favorite rooms in the whole house.

All of the bathrooms have traditional white subway tile with a light gray grout on the walls. Downstairs the hardwood floors that are on the entire floor go into the bathroom, and then upstairs the floors are a hexagon carrara marble from here. I sourced the heck out of this tile and they gave us an amazing price and the delivery was exceptional.

...big tour of the little house - entrances, exits, stairwells, and laundry

...this is going to be the most drawn out house tour in history. And today's part of the tour is pretty boring, covering entrances, exits, stairwells, and laundry (which, lets face it, is probably the most lived-in room).

Our front door is YELLOW. I'm not sure this picture does it justice. We knew we wanted a bright front door, I wanted aqua and Ken wanted yellow. He wasn't getting much when it was coming to this house building business, so I gave him the front door. This is probably a better depiction of the actual color:

I think the color was called daffodil. And that's just what it is. And I love it.

We have a two story foyer, which I don't usually like, but changing that would have meant losing a ton of natural light on both floors of our house. And now that we have it, I love how it keeps the house feeling open, even upstairs. I can yell down to Ken to bring something up for bedtime and he can't use the excuse of saying he didn't hear me.

(The light fixture is a lot cleaner now. It's a knock-off of this one at Pottery Barn and was half the price at overstock.com, but now I can't find it. We also have the same one in the stairwell. I just noticed that the front door is open in this picture. Hope someone closed it).

This is the foyer...I think I've shared this before. I didn't really know what I'd do here and it's ended up being one of my favorite spots in the whole house.

Frames are from anthropologie and paper source. Nest is from here via Carron. Mirror is from terrain via my momma.

Coming in the front door, right in front of you is the great room. If you turn to the right, you head toward the kitchen. Turn to the left and you head toward the mudroom/my office/bathroom/stairs.

This is that wall:

The plates were gifts from Ken's grandparents that have the kid's names, times of birth, etc. on them. They are amazing. Mirror is from here. Clock was a present from Ken (yeah, he checks pinterest, good man that he is) from here.

When we were building our house, I sent our cabinet guy this picture and said I wanted this for our mudroom, but in white (and I wanted baskets where there were shelves for shoes):

And we came pretty close (bad picture. I really need a magazine photographer to come out. Know any that are free?):

It is always that clean.

Two things I love about the mudroom. First is the floor. It doesn't show anything. I'm not sure if I've ever washed it:

The second is my little pinboard/key holder thingamajig:

Postcards, invitations, birth announcements. Love.

When you walk out the mudroom, the stairs are right there. I think these are called switchback stairs? Don't quote me on that. We decided not to do a runner and instead painted the risers. Our kids are both really good on stairs, wear gripper socks, and as one friend pointed out, since they are switchback, they won't fall as far. Oye.

The basket is for laundry that accumulates during the day. My kids accumulate a lot of laundry.

As soon as you get to the top of the stairs, right in front of you is a pocket door to the laundry room.

And look, here's a shot of actual, live laundering happening! The counter is from IKEA and some day I hope to stain it a little darker. Probably after the kids go to college. The bar to hold clothes was a nice idea but really nothing ever goes up there and someday I'll extend the cabinets over that way too.

I LOVE having our laundry upstairs. After having it in the basement of our last house, I definitely appreciate not having to climb two flights of stairs with eight days worth of laundry.

...and I'm not kidding you, due to a crazy schedule, it has taken me the better part of a week to get this post ready. Now I need to go get some laundry done.

...it's a party

My mom has not been well. It's been hard to muster the holiday spirit over the last few weeks. To feel merry without feeling phony. But I have two kids, one who is totally enamored with the guy with the white beard and all he encompasses and the other who calls him dada and screams.

Ken tries not to take it personally.

We also have a lot of new friends, who we wanted to meet each other. And we have old friends we wanted to have out to our new house.

So we decided to throw a party. Well, I should say I decided to throw a party and Ken was like, "OK," and then was forced to act as the personal assistant for a very demanding boss (me) the week before. I didn't see him roll his eyes once. What a guy.

(Idea for the easiest Christmas craft ever from poppytalk)

There were friends we have known for 15 years, friends from our time in Oklahoma, friends from Baltimore, and our newest friends, all together. Everyone has children age three and under, and there were three pregnant ladies, so there was lots of talk of labor, epidurals, and potty training. You just can't get away from it. It's where we are now. Fast forward 15 years and I imagine it will be talk of tuition and the inevitable empty nest. I just hope it's the same group of friends.

And these two little peanuts had quite the evening with their godmothers.

...big tour of the little house - where the magic happens

...my office, naturally. ;)

In the spirit of we didn't want to have any rooms that weren't used on a daily basis, our guest room is also doubling as my office/scrapbook room.

It is perfect.

It's tucked away at the back of the house, so when I am working from home and a sitter is here with the kids, they kind of forget that I'm here. And it's awesome to sit at my desk and watch them run across the backyard.

Like every bedroom, it also has a huge walk-in closet where I keep a lot of my scrapbook stuff (I had extra shelves installed) and I also keep my printer in there.

Map from here. Gray pillows are IKEA. Coral are West Elm. Ikat one from here. And you can just pretend there's a pretty upholstered headboard behind the bed.

Fake plant from IKEA. I pretty much hate fake plants, but man this looks so real I've almost accidentally watered it a few times. Picture of my grandmother in the back, topiary that my mom painted, and wood block from Carron.

It was hard to get a good picture of my desk because there's really not a time in the day when the light isn't pouring in. I had to get a big monitor for one of my new jobs, but it's nice because I can just push it back when I'm scrapbooking.

My desk is vintage Pottery Barn. Most of our furniture is vintage Pottery Barn, because we bought it back when we were young and could actually spend money on things like furniture. Baskets are from IKEA. I keep old Studio Calico boxes under my desk for layout storage until they get filed in albums. And you can imagine some pretty window treatments, too.

Kind of like pinterest, but on my wall:

I have no idea where that clippy thing is from but it's awesome. Rolodex from here. Cart is vintage Pottery Barn too (it has baskets on it that hold my paper and the drawers hold things like stamp pads and thread).

And...that is where the magic happens. :)

...big tour of the little house

...coming to you in segments. Starting from the beginning.

Our Broadmoor house was built in 1945. When we started talking about moving, the only thing that got seven-months-pregnant me excited was new construction. No random holes in the floor of the basement filled with sand (sure, it might be where the sump pump once was...or where they put the bad children), no metal shower stalls, no wondering about the electric behind your walls.

We found a town we liked.

We found a lot we liked.

Itty-bitty-widdle baby Charlie is standing about 75 yards in front of where our porch is now.

And then it was time to find a house. We quickly learned that building up was less expensive than building out. I have always loved cape cods, but a lot of the modern cape plans have master bedrooms on the first floor. Which not only makes the house wide, but I also liked the idea of having our bedroom upstairs where the kids would be.

We didn't want a big house. We wanted a house that we would use every room, every day. We wanted an open living area with few walls. We knew we didn't need any formal spaces and that we needed lots of closets since we have a high water table and a basement wasn't an option.

I looked at approximately 3,289 plans. No joke. I still remember the night I was sitting at our kitchen table on Broadmoor and found this:

Look familiar?

You might notice that we flipped the plan. Having the garage on the left worked better for our driveway and, if you must know, our septic system.

We made more changes to the plan - most notably closing off the "dining room" to make a playroom for the kids (which will probably be Ken's office in the future when the kids move up to the bonus room, which is now Ken's office). We added a mudroom off the garage. We made a lot of those doors pocket doors. We bumped out the whole back of the house by two feet and added a screen porch off the eating area.

And we got to this:

Getting closer. We added windows, made the shower big. Huge, in fact. Moved the mudroom door. But the biggest thing was the change to the kitchen. The more I thought about it, the more I didn't like the layout of the kitchen. There was no window. I loved my window in my Broadmoor kitchen. And my beloved farmhouse sink would be totally hidden from view. And there was something about it that felt closed off. So we came up with this (what I call a modified-galley kitchen):

It was time to build a house.

...sandy

...So there was a hurricane. Did you hear?

It started raining on Saturday.

We filled the bathtub, I washed clothes as they got dirty, anticipating days without use of my washing machine. Oh, the horror.

And then we waited. Sunday passed and it rained. Monday passed and it rained. That night we got both kids to sleep on the first floor. There are some big trees in the big woods and it was getting windy.

And it got windy. Really, really windy. We started hearing thumps. Trees falling. Big trees falling.

But the lights stayed on. Mother Nature must know how much I love doing laundry.

We woke up to a little tree across our driveway (that's our next door neighbor's house).

The first picture at the top is the street outside our neighborhood. It usually has a shoulder. It didn't anymore.

This was a house we looked at when we first started thinking about buying here. And that's a tree on its roof.

These are the roots of that little tree across our driveway. I'd guess it's about nine feet tall.

And here's the other side of the driveway.

Our family's beach house was not so lucky (our house is just off this picture in the bottom right). There was damage, but nothing that can't be fixed. Just one thing my mom didn't need to worry about right now.

A few days after the storm there was the prettiest rainbow over the Chester River on the way to Charlie's school. Mother Nature is moody.

...braving wind and flood to bring you this giveaway

...and hanging on to every last minute that we actually have power.

Sandy's on her way (just arriving, actually), at the Little House.

But, I have long loved the work of Nora Griffin, and even though she's in a far sunnier state than me right now, when she asked if I would do a giveaway for her 12 Tags for Christmas class, I said of course, because I know it will be awesome. Nora's taste is impeccable.

So leave a comment before midnight (eastern time) on Friday, and I'll pick a winner for her class that starts on November 5.

And with that, the lights just flashed, so I am off.

The bathtubs are filled.

And the hair accessories are chosen.

Bring it, Sandy.