Well I said that I'd let you see inside my home and nows your opportunity. We recently put our house up for sale and ended up selling it a few days later. This is our current home now, but won't be for much longer so take the opportunity to check it out. I know you want to.
Some areas are looking a little sparse because we put away any non-essential ornaments and all of our personal touches, for house staging purposes.
You'll notice that it has a lot less character and charm than the House we lived in in France during our three year expat. Its actually pretty boring in comparison.
This house is a basic two story, semi-detached home that's really just a cookie cutter mold for countless houses on our street and in the general area of our town.
All of the homes built within a certain time frame essentially have the same sort of look to them, at least that is the case where I live. Anyway, let's take a quick tour starting with the main floor.
The living room is pretty small and has an odd layout. Its big enough for two couches and a tv, though we rarely watch tv in the room.
I've always found the layout of the room to be a little awkward and hard to arrange, furniture-wise.
The small wall in the center with the open space on each side makes for a somewhat awkward furniture layout. There's also the crown molding in the room, which I hate. I've hated it since the begining. The previous owners installed it and I find the type that they chose to be way to gaudy for the house. It belongs in some old Victorian mansion I think. Then it might look good.
The kitchen is very small for North American standards and I really noticed that when we arrived home. There is no pantry space and very little cupboard space and drawers. Lately we have really been struggling to find places for all of our kitchen utensils, appliances and cooking equipment.
After we bought the house I did a lot of cosmetic stuff to update the look of the place. I painted the walls a light grey and the cabinets the white that you see. I installed the glass tile backslash and we had a professional put in a new laminate countertop. Then my wife and I installed the floors together. They are meant to look like cement tiles but they are really just peel and stick vinyl tiles with grout lines between, helping to hold them in place. Everything was done on a budget of maybe $2000 all in, and it really updated the space in the end. It looks a lot better than it looked like before and was relatively cheap all said and done.
The dining room is pretty standard. There's a table and a light and some artwork on the wall that I created.
Next we will check out the upstairs.
Again, pretty standard. I painted the cabinets, installed the floor with more of that vinyl tile with grout work, installed the laminate countertop myself and put a frame around the mirror. Not much else to say about it.
Two small spaces in the house are the office and den. The office is fairly plain at the moment. We didn't bother putting up our pictures. We knew that we were going to buy a new house at some point in the near future so not everything was hung up on our walls.
The "den" is an open space at the top of our stairs. It could be used as an office as well but we turned it into a reading nook.
There are three bedrooms upstairs but I'll just show you the master and the spare room.
We put away some pictures for staging so its fairly plain. But there you have it.
The spare room is a little smaller but still a decent size. It has a larger window than the master and the best lighting in the house.
The basement is fairly large. It's where we watch tv in the evening. I installed the floors myself, with the help of my dad. They are a vinyl again, made to look like hardwood. I'm paranoid about basements leaking so I put in vinyl that wouldn't get damaged if the basement ever flooded. Luckily that never happened for us.
The basement is one large room that we set up as fours separate spaces. There's a work out section (not shown) and then the reading area above. Lastly, we have the game cabinet spot below.
So that's our current house for you, soon to be our old house and then its on to the next one. It's pretty strange that within a year, we will have lived in three different homes in three different cities in two different countries on two different continents. Thats a lot of change for us in a short period of time. But anyway, maybe one day I'll show you the inside of our new house. Wait and see.
