Four years ago, we decided to find a house with a bigger backyard. We would have taken our same model just on a bigger lot. We loved our neighborhood and our house, but as our girls got bigger, our yard got smaller. So we started looking. And we kept coming back to the same model. This particular model happened to be on all the corner lots, so they had bigger back yards. This model also had room to expand, giving us the one big room we dreamed of having for our three girls. And then we found our house. A short sale. We went to look at it, more just to see the backyard (13,000 square feet-UNHEARD of in Vegas), and to make sure nothing was broken or messed up in the house. It was a five minute walk through. We put an offer in that day. It was the beginning of October. And then we waited. In December, the bank finally got back to us, and they asked for more money. After two months of requesting the same paperwork over and over, we felt completely comfortable saying no to that request. The home prices were on the rise, but here's the thing, if the prices had gone down, we wouldn't have been able to lower our offer. So we said no, and waited for their response. at the end of February, we found out that we got the house. A month later, we had the keys, and we started knocking down walls over Spring Break. So here is a look at the downstairs.
This is the view from the front door. You can see all the way to the backyard. The second story is all to the right and over the kitchen and living room areas. This part is totally open, so it's super formal. Carpet everywhere.
This pony wall separates two spaces. In the front, you could have a seating area. Up the steps, this space is the "formal" dinning space since the kitchen is on the other side of that wall.
To the right, you have a hall that leads to a tiny closet (you can see the door there), a 3/4 bath, the laundry/mudroom, and the only bedroom downstairs.
This is the view looking from the dinning space to the front door. You can see the door to the mudroom here.
And this is a look from the top of the stairs. You can see the kitchen from up here. We have BIG plans for this space, and this view will be gone when we are done.
This is the kitchen as you walk in from the front. The trim on the door is the same oak as the cabinets. We let the previous owner take all the appliances since we planned on replacing them
Some more shots of the kitchen. There is tile in the kitchen, but when we took it up, we found that half of it wasn't glued on well. We had whole pieces coming up easily as we got closer to the cabinets. The layout here will stay the same, but we will end up with new cabinets and floors here.
From the kitchen you look into the living room. There's a fireplace and an open space for a gigantor TV. We do not have a TV that big, but we'll find a way to fill that space.
This pony wall will get a makeover thanks to my husband's BRILLIANT brain, and some help from a local upholsterer.
Back through this hall is the bathroom...
It's pretty hard to photograph because it's so small, but I gave it a try...
These are some pretty sweet lights for such a small space, don't you think? So this house had a color scheme from the late 90's...purple, green and tan. But then, they bought the house in 2003, so my guess is that it was painted in the beginning and then left that way. In our old house, which we lived in for 9 years, I painted the main living space 3 times. I had a similar tan that you saw in the main living space. A couple of years later, I painted a muted green. A few years after that, we painted a neutral warm white (more the color of the inside of an almond). Hazards of being an interior stylist, I guess.
Next, we have the mudroom/laundry room. By the time we took pictures of this space, we were already working on it.
One side was for the washer and dryer, the other for cabinets...
Again, small space, hard to capture what it really looks like. Our water shut off is right there in the most awkward place that it can be. No room for upper cabinets or anything other than these 11" deep cabinets which were too shallow for my husbands shoes.
This is the other side, the door to the garage. Room here for upper cabinets, but it may look strange with half the wall swallowed up with cabinets.
And this is a look into the room from the garage. With a washer and dryer in here, it is cramped. We decided with the remodel to put the washer and dryer upstairs where all the clothes were.
This is the bedroom downstairs. It was used as a music room with all of the amps and instruments from the previous owner. More carpet, which makes sense for a music room. One side had a wall of closet, the other was open. This was just one big rectangle.
The only thing that was really awkward was this window. It wasn't centered to the space, and that made the layout really hard. You had a doorway in the middle on one side, and a window off center on the other. But in the first year it didn't matter because this was the room we used for storing stuff as we moved in with projects still left to tackle.
So that's a look at the before for the downstairs. Tune in later for the upstairs tour.