Today’s 2Peas Blog Challenge was to blog about your current home. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? Although there are certainly a few things I would love to change, there’s nothing that I hate about my home and lots that I love. I love the location. We’re on a dead end street, old homes (most built in the 1930’s) with lots of old trees and a fair amount of privacy. We have diverse and lovely neighbors. All the houses are significantly different—no track feel here. Our yard is on two levels with stone walls and steps. A little out of control but it has lots of possibility if we only had the time and the money!
We have pegged, random width hardwood floors through the whole house, a huge stone fireplace with built-in wooden bookcases with cupboards on the bottom on both sides of the fireplace and wood panels around the bottom of our living room walls. It’s an elegant but cozy room. The double-width door to the dining room makes the space feel bigger than it is. I’d love to to add French doors in the dining room that would lead out to the patio. It would add a lot of light to the downstairs which we could use.
The kitchen is a narrow-galley style kitchen with an eating area at the front of the house. We’ve updated most of the appliances, and I can live with the cupboards. I’d like more space, but I have enough. Here I’d like to bump out the wall near the eating area and add a bay window and floor to ceiling shelves. I could use the extra storage and the eating area would seem a lot larger with not much of an addition.
We have an elegant stairway from the front hall to the upstairs—wooden banisters and a large landing in the middle. You can lean over the banister upstairs and see the hallway downstairs. Our bedrooms are generally small and the closet space is awful. There’s no affordable way to alter any of this, however, so we make do. I took over the smallest bedroom when the kids moved out and have a small, but efficient studio/study. I love having my own space and being surrounded with all my scrapbook goodies. It’s also the place where I do schoolwork every night.
I wish we had had a finished basement or a family room when the kids were growing up. The house did not lend itself to entertaining teenagers—no pool table, not much privacy, no big screen TV, so it wasn’t a hang-out place and I wish it had been. Our basement is AWFUL—dirty, disorganized—lots of storage space but all added at different times before we bought the house with little sense of coordination. It functions as a storage space and a pretty crummy laundry area but my husband does the laundry and has his “desk” downstairs (so there is never any pressure to pick up!) so I don’t have to spend much time there except at Christmas when I’m wrapping gifts.
My daughter once described our house as the “perfect house on an idyllic street” and I would have to agree that it comes close. I haven’t any desire to move except on rare days when I think it would be really nice to have a bigger area to scrap!
