Monday, July 12, 2021

Not Just A Mom: Home Tour

This month on the Not Just A Mom blog link up, we're showing house tours. This might be my favourite link up ever because I LOVE a good house tour! In case you don't know this about me, I am super nosy/interested in almost everything, so when it comes time to give a house tour, I am showing you a lot of details. Because if you were here in person, I would show you all the nooks and crannies -- as well as point out all the interesting features of the house :) So enjoy!

This is the front of our house. We do have a front door but it basically only gets used by delivery people and people who don't know us very well. Everyone else walks down the driveway to the back door. In winter, we don't even clear our front steps off all the time.

This is our back door/main entrance to our house. The garage (where we never park our car) is to the left and you can see Dave picking mushrooms in the back yard.

You enter our house into the back entry/playroom, although it is gradually becoming less and less of a room where the kids play. They each have a desk and a space to play games or do puzzles or make crafts. Some schoolwork happened here this past spring, especially for Rachel.

This is looking from the far side of the playroom towards the back door. I love all the big windows in this room. You can see our shoe racks, our coat rack, and the table with storage areas for hats, mitts, and scarves in the winter or sun hats and baseball gloves in the summer. We use that back table a lot for our library book bag, to put school backpacks on, and as a gathering spot when we're coming or going!
 
Also, the playroom/back entry is an addition onto the original back of the house so that is why one wall is brick.
From the playroom you enter into a very small hallway and you can go straight down the stairs to the basement, to the right into the kitchen, or to the left into the office and living room. We'll go right into the kitchen.

I will take a moment here to say that one interesting thing about our house is that on the main floor and in the basement, you can walk a complete circle of that floor. All the rooms connect to at least one other room or a thru-way of some sort. We don't have any regular "hallway space" to speak of. The one above is our longest hallway at about six feet!
Our kitchen is somewhat small and, if there are more than two of us in here, we trip all over each other. Plus, we have no range hood or fan, nor do we have a dishwasher. However, we have a lot of cupboard space, and Dave loves our pot rack (in the upper right in the picture on the right). I love the long narrow cupboard beside the pot rack because that is where my mug collection is!

If you were standing in front of the fridge (in the left hand photo of the kitchen), you would be blocking the door to the dining room. Our dining room is pretty basic. We currently have a puzzle set up on the dining room table because it was a hard one (it took Dave, Rachel, and I almost 24 hours to do it) so we're keeping it together for awhile. Basically we eat all our meals in the dining room, and when it's not Covid, we like hosting friends and family here. The table can expand to take up the whole room and we've had as many as twelve people eating a meal here :)

From the playroom, if we were to turn left to get to the office, this is what you would see. There is a desk and a set of shelves for Dave, the orange couch, and my space. In the picture on the right you can see my desk, my cubbies, and my plastic organizer which holds all our office supplies. That little desk is where most of the blog has been written! Also, we have a window from the office looking into the playroom because of the addition I mentioned above :) Who else do you know who has a window in their house?!?! It's a very unique feature!

To the right of the left office picture is the door to the living room. Also, I should explain that none of these are actual "doors" -- they're more arches like the ones pictured below. Our living room has my favourite reading chair, our travel wall, the piano, and more. If we're watching a family movie or attending church, we tend to set the laptop up on the piano bench and sit on the couch. We had a big TV to use as a monitor for the laptop but it doesn't work anymore so we're back to the laptop screen.

If you were to come in our front door, this is where you would be. There is a very small entrance and then the living room to the right, the dining room to the left, and upstairs in front of you. However, before we go upstairs, we're going back to the "hallway" between the kitchen, office, and playroom and heading downstairs.
 
At the bottom of the stairs is our old change table which we call our pantry as it holds all the extra canned and dry goods. To the left of the stairwell is a big open space/guestroom. The kids play Lego down here or random games. This is also where I do my walk at home videos in the winter. Dave sometimes plays guitar down here. When I worked from home, I would sometimes work down here. To the left of the bed are some storage areas and a toilet -- not a bathroom, just a random toilet without doors which really close or a closed in wall, in one case! It's not an ideal situation but at least we have a second toilet in our house.
 
If you were to turn right at the bottom of the stairs, you would enter the laundry room which is also where the laundry sink is, where the winter jackets are stored, where the tools are stored, and where the downstairs freezer is. You can also see our water heater to the right of this picture. Our basement is very open concept! Hahaha!!! Let's go back upstairs now.

We'll head up the stairs you saw in the picture from the front door. At the top of the stairs is our bathroom. It's very small.

Oddly, when the house was built, there was a porch off the bathroom. (It may not have been a bathroom at that point since our house was built in 1942.) When the playroom addition was built, that porch was taken down. So you can walk into our bathroom and exit through another door onto our roof. Dave basically only does that when he needs to adjust a pipe up there. Otherwise that door is locked and blocked. (You can see a picture of the back of our house in this post here. Scroll down to the bottom picture for the best view.)

To the left of the stairs is our bedroom. Our bedroom is huge with a walk-in closet and a lot of space. Good thing too because Dave has been working at the foot of our bed since March 2020. I can't wait until he can go back to the actual office again.

To the right of the bathroom is Rachel's room. She has the smallest room in the house so it's pretty crowded. Her dresser is to the right in the picture on the left.

Then if you are facing Rachel's room, and do a 90 degree turn, you will be facing the door to Sam's room. Sam and Rachel's rooms share a wall. Sam's room is a little roomier because he has huge drawers built into the roof slope. Thus, he doesn't have to fit a dresser in his room. His room is also the most colourful room in the house because he chose to paint it red, green, and blue!

One thing we have started dreaming about is a little renovation. We'd love to redo our kitchen (a range hood and a dishwasher would be amazing!), add a proper second bathroom, make our actual bathroom a little bigger, and think about how to increase some of the space in our house. Now that we've all been living on top of each other for almost a year and a half, we're realizing that we're starting to outgrow our space a bit.

Anyways, we need Covid to end, we need to consult an architect (probably), and we need to do some more dreaming about it. It won't happen any time soon but maybe in the next few years, I'll get to give an updated house tour :) Until then, we love our little house and it's a really great place to live. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments and I'll try to answer them.

And now I'm off to read the other home tours in the link up. You can check them out at the blogs below.

18 comments:

  1. Love all of the little creative touches in your home - the playroom/classroom with the drawings, and your kids' rooms. I'm sure you aren't the only one realizing they need more space after being at home for the last 16 (!) months.

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    1. Yes, I think a lot of renovations are in the works!!!

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  2. Love all the colors and how cozy it is!

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  3. I love all the details and how you made your house a home. I am snoopy inside others homes too

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    1. I'm glad I'm not the only snoopy one!!!

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  4. I love the glimpses of everyone's homes. Its where the heart is!

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  5. Thank you for sharing your home with us today! I love the tile in your bathroom. I love all the character in your home, especially the archways.

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    1. There are definite benefits to having an older house and all the character is definitely one of those benefits!

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  6. Love that tile floor in your bathroom and love the story about the porch just outside of it- so unique!

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    1. I love our bathroom tile. And we have French taps too! It's such a unique space, just a little small :)

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  7. I love seeing inside other people's homes too! I think it's really neat that you have some unusual features like the door in the bathroom that goes nowhere now and the window overlooking the playroom.

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    1. I do really love some of the unusual features of our house. It makes it really unique!

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  8. This was so fun! Funny you mentioned the window inside your house because my aunt used to have one and we would always climb through the window from room-to-room and thought it was hilarious. I loved all the detail you put into this because I really could visualize the layout!

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  9. I always love seeing your home!! And I love seeing the word RENOVATIONS! How fun to dream! :) Thanks for letting us snoop!

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  10. I love how open your laundry room is. Our laundry room is my least favorite room because of the smallness of it and how is configured. It's my dream to one day build a new laundry room and just make the old laundry room a storage/utility area.

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  11. I love all the color in your house. I’d say take your time thinking out renovations. I had a hard time finding what I wanted in a Pinterest or online picture so it took a few revisions with the architect but I am so glad I stuck with my vision. I love the built in/unique things in you house, like the drawers in your son’s room and the cabinet in the kitchen. And that interior window - so fun!! Thanks for sharing!

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  12. LOVE house tours and LOVE your house! Tell me about the pictures framing the door in the playroom; they all look cohesive so maybe various kids drawings of your house? The arches in your house are beautiful; I've always wanted arched doorways because they give the house so much personality.

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Thank you for being interested in my life as I blog it and for leaving a comment. Comments make me happier than reading a good book and drinking a cold Coke. Almost :)