The gorgeous Tudor home!
(For those of you who have been following our house hunting adventures on this
blog or Jared's facebook page this is the house with the smaller yard.)
We were able to get a signed contract worked out for the house right before my birthday.
It's the best birthday present ever because this house is soooo me! :)
It looks like a house right out of a storybook and who else would be a better choice to live in a storybook home than Princess Aurora (per Sleeping Beauty) and Queen Esther (per the Bible) and ummm... Jared... (per the brother of Jared from the Book of Mormon but then that would be saying that Sean, Jared's brother, really was the one living here and that just wouldn't do. No offense, Sean! We might need to change his name to Arthur so he can be King Arthur (per the round table of Camelot) and then I can call him Artie).
Anyways...
the point is we are excited for our new home to the point that I will now issue a warning.
Warning: The post that now follows contains more pics & details of our potentially new house (hopefully if everything continues to go right) than anyone not going to be living there wants to ever see or know.
So we are going to make this "A Choose Your Own Adventure" post.
At this point you may choose to continue reading the image & detail heavy post or choose to just read the summary below & zip through the pics or just have this point be your ending right now.
If you choose continue reading, just know that at any point you don't like that path, you can always cheat and flip back to make a different choice just like in the books!
Summary
This house is 2,445 sq ft. on a .17 lot with 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 bath, with a formal dining room and study on the first floor along with the living room and gorgeous kitchen. It has an almost finished basement, a mostly unfinished attic and enclosed patio/porch. It's on a pretty street and within walking distance to the elementary school.
Here we go....
Front of house, left (windows of dining room, with walkway and glimpse of driveway)
Front of house, right (windows of the living room and lovely landscaping)
Front of house even more right (enclosed patio)
This house has the requisite red front door.
Jared accuses me of going to showings of houses purely on the fact they have a red door, which is untrue but a red door does go a long way with me.
When you first enter there is a small but pretty entryway w/ closet.
Then you go through a french door to a sort of landing where you have many choices before you of where you can go--the living room, the dining room, the kitchen or up the stairs.
In this Choose Your Own Adventure we will be going right
which leads us to the living room.
(All the furnishings are the seller's stuff. I don't usually take & post many pics of the home with our stuff in it because it never feels "done" to me. I'm always tweaking it: adding pillows, artwork, end tables etc... At least until we are moving again and are selling the house which is when you see pics of our home w/ our stuff.)
I already love the warm buttercup yellow (It seems that this may be another requisite of mine because I believe all the houses we have lived in have had at least one room in a similar shade to this)
The fireplace is great and the big picture windows too.
There are 3 doors to the outside living areas in this one room alone.
If we choose to exit the living room by way of the doors on either side of the fireplace
we enter the very pretty screened-in patio.
If you exit the double doors in the living room or the back patio door
you will come to a rather large opened patio area.
We'll choose to enter back into the house by way of door #4 in this patio area, and we find ourselves in the study (I guess that is the best name for it at least how the sellers use it.)
With having a doorway to the living room on one wall, another door to the outside on a different wall, another wall mostly containing that big beautiful window and then a door to a little hallway on the other wall-- doesn't leave a whole lot of space to work with for furniture etc...
I'm considering making this the dining room, possibly???
Requisite: A room in a warm, calming sage green.
Check.
We now step into a small hallway where there is once again many choices to choose from: the "true" back door, the half bath, the stairs to the basement or the kitchen.
(There are 6 doors that exit this house on the 1st floor. I always hear Genie from Aladdin in my head when thinking about it: "In case of emergency, the exits are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here anywhere!)
We choose to enter the half bath...
and come to a sudden and surprised ending entitled "Death by Plaid."
I actually don't hate it but it is a lot of plaid for such a small space.
The wallpaper might stay but probably not.
Since we don't like this ending, we'll cheat and flip back a few pages and make a different choice...
by entering the kitchen.
Wow! What a better choice this was!
I think this has to be one of the best kitchens I've seen
in any of the houses in our price range.
This is the other side of the bar/island area.
This is by the door we just entered. As we will most likely be entering the house most often from the back door this will be a great "command center" if we can keep it organized or a great "dumping of junk" center if we can't keep it organized.
Requisite: Window over sink area.
Check.
If I'm washing the dishes there better be a window that way nobody and no dish gets hurt.
It's not really a requisite but I just adore built-in window seats!
I just always want to curl up on one and read a book.
This one is so pretty even if being located in the kitchen might not be
the most ideal spot.
There is also built-in desk in the kitchen which you would think would be the more logical place for a "command center" or "dumping ground"
but it is a few more feet away from the back door. And I know human nature, at least this part of it...
the other place is just more conveniently located and so the result would be both places would become a dumping ground if I tried to use the desk as the command center.
FYI- if you have dreams of having a built-in desk area in your kitchen, move to Ohio, the majority of the kitchens we saw had one.
Note: Do you see the little wood square in the wall next to the desk?
That's a laundry chute. Very nice.
I truly adore this kitchen.
Now we enter the dining room.
Not a big fan of the orange and the teal at all.
The valances are in a pattern of orange & teal peacock feathers too.
So we will be painting this room.
I'm not sure what color yet since the requisite ones of yellow and green have already been taken care of.
Any suggestions?
But I do love the original hardwood floor and again all the light from the windows.
With my struggle with
S.A.D and also major depression that is a MAJOR requisite:
lots & lots of natural light.
Check.
If I make the study into the dining room this room may become a family room.
We have now come full circle as we are now on the landing by the front door again.
We will take the last option in this area by now proceeding upstairs in an orderly fashion.
Where we will step out the 7th & final outside door that leads to
a balcony.
I have dreams of a potted flower paradise up here
although Jared says that all the brick, tile etc...
will most likely bake the flowers as if they were in an oven.
(I've told you before about his almost-always-correct-and-oh-so-practical facts bursting many of my beautiful-ethereal-and-yet-often-unrealistic bubbles, haven't I?)
After stepping back inside from the bubble bursting we find ourselves in the nice wide upstairs hallway.
Once again not a big fan of the wallpaper.
(I think wallpaper in general might be against my religion or maybe I'm allergic.
It just so easily & quickly becomes outdated or is just so hard to find the right colors, patterns, space for it to appeal to the taste of more than just one person.)
It will most likely be taken down and possibly replaced with a warm light brown/tan color of paint?
Whadda ya think?
As all hallways are portals of choices- we will enter each of the 3 bedrooms, then the bathroom & then up the stairs to the attic.
Bedroom #1:
This will most likely be Princess Aurora's room.
The dark purple walls of this room although a pretty color are just a little too dark for me.
We will most likely paint this room a different color and replace the old pink carpet.
Bedroom #2:
This will most likely become the "playroom" until it is needed as a bedroom.
The purple paint of this room is quite a bit lighter and will most likely stay but we will probably replace the carpet in this room too.
The Master bedroom:
It has a total of 6 windows in this room- one looks out onto the balcony and it has its original hardwood floor and 3 closets.
The Full Bath
I like the green tile a lot but with the bright yellow walls it makes me think of the Green Bay Packers and not being a Cheese Head will most likely paint the walls a different color. There's quite a bit of built-in storage in this smallish bathroom and a linen closet right outside in the hall.
Behind the last door in the hallway are the stairs to the unfinished attic.
Note once again the laundry chute.
There's some nice space up there that we might finish at some point but it will be good for storage and playing "Bloody Murder" (aka Ghost in the Graveyard or whatever you call your scary version of hide & seek) until that point.
Now in this adventure we are going to take the secret passage to the almost finished basement, like in the game Clue.
(Reality check: There isn't actually a secret passage from the attic to the basement...we just have to retrace our steps back downstairs...but that is nowhere near as fun to write or imagine.)
There are several rooms in the basement that really just need some details added and/or fixed and some carpet and it will be a finished basement.
Here is the biggest room: Possibly a rec room or a family room
Here is the office or maybe a craft room.
Look at those full size windows in the basement!
Hallelujah!
The laundry room is very nice and big.
More of the laundry room that could possibly double as a craft room/area.
There's a section of the basement that isn't finished at all and it contains stuff like the furnace, boiler etc...
But also a tool/work space.
Now we don't have to turn the garage into a work space for Jared.
It can actually be used as a garage meaning a place to put cars.
If we go back upstairs and out the back door and turn around and take a picture
this is what you would see.
If you turn to your left then you'll see pretty much our whole yard.
It wouldn't be so small if it wasn't kind of cut up into two yards by the retaining wall.
Although I do like the stone retaining wall and it probably was added to make the yard more leveled and useful
Here are a couple of spots we are considering for a small garden:
In the corner of the "upper" backyard, off the patio, will probably be where we place a playset.
Like I said previously, it isn't a lot to mow which will be nice but
all the landscaping will probably take quite a bit of work to maintain.
Looking at the 2 car garage from the "upper" yard area.
Sadly, we don't think Jared's big, fat truck will fit in the garage. We'll see.
Do you see they have another patio outside the garage there.
That's 4 sets of patio furniture. They like their patios almost as much as they like their doors.
We will be taking down the flimsy fencing around the "upper" yard.
They have it just to keep their little doggies contained.
Here is a picture of the oh-so-pretty-but-it-better-last-another-20-years-because-the-exorbitant-price-to-repair-or-replace original tile roof.
And we have finally come to the end of our adventure for today where
the Edwards's Family lives...
Happily Ever After.
Thanks for looking!
