House Tour

If you’re on my email list, then you know that we are homeowners again!

Funny story: We actually bought the first house we saw! When we saw the house, I liked it a lot but we were new to the area and didn’t have anything to compare it to. We spent months looking at dozens of houses after this one. The house had multiple sales fall through and was back on the market when we decided to put an offer in.

House shopping was really difficult this time around.

With our first house, we lived in a tiny town and had a tiny budget. We literally bought the only house we could afford. We didn’t worry much about the neighborhood because there weren’t really bad parts of town.

This time, we moved to a much bigger city for Austin’s work and had a hard time narrowing down our ideal location. There are multiple school districts here, some way better than others. There are super unsafe areas to live in. And of course the good areas with good schools are crazy expensive.

We don’t have kids yet, but the school districts around here have a lot to do with a home values and resale possibilities, so it’s something we had to keep in mind.

The three most important factors for our new home were:

• Price: The bank told us we could spend way more than what made sense to us. We set our own budget and stuck to it.
• Neighborhood: Safety is super important, especially for me because I walk Mozzie at least once a day. I didn’t want to be somewhere where I didn’t feel comfortable going out.
• Floor Plan: An open floor plan was really important to us because it affects how we use our space and how we feel in it. We’re just open floor plan people.

So besides it being fun, here’s why I wanted to post a tour of our new house: We’ve got plans to do some major organizing as well as making some money saving updates.

I thought posting a house tour would be a good way to have a “before” so I’ve got something to compare the “after” to once we make some of these changes.

I snagged this exterior pic from the listing since everything is pretty brown and soggy outside this time of year. I’m looking forward to seeing the house look more like this!

It’s a mid-century modern ranch with a walkout basement under half of it.

I love these living room windows! We’re still deciding how to cover them (for privacy) without ruining the look of them. I’m leaning towards some energy efficient honeycomb shades since the windows are pretty old.

One of the most difficult features to find was an open floor plan.

Most of the houses in the better neighborhoods we could afford were older and didn’t have an open layout. This was one of the few that did, plus it had the nicest kitchen we saw.

That backsplash with those counters is not a great look. I’ll change that out eventually, but I’m super excited to have so much counter space and storage.

I haven’t cooked much in our apartment but I think I’ll enjoy spending a lot of time in this kitchen.

Super yellow…

There are three bedrooms. The pics are pretty rough because it was getting dark out and there aren’t any lights in the bedrooms, so sorry about that.

The picture below is the bedroom that’s going to be ours. I’m planning on painting it a lighter color to make it look a bit bigger.

The bedroom closets are all super tiny, so I’m on the lookout for ways to organize our clothes.

There’s a half-bath in the basement, which I prefer to describe as “rustic” 🙂 I think Austin has some big plans to make a full, much nicer bathroom in its place.

There’s also a big finished room in the basement.

We’re planning on turning this into a versatile area that can be used as an office for me, a place for guests to stay, and just a general hang-out area.

So that’s our new house!

We’ve got a ton of small-ish projects that we plan to tackle as we save up the money for them.

I’ll be posting about some of the ways we get our stuff organized and when we do things that will save us money in the long run.

Related Posts:

The 1 Thing Missing from Your Home

Decluttering: How to Get Your Spouse on Board

7 Home Organization Solutions

⇒ Hit me with your organization or decorating ideas! 🙂