I’m going to preface this by telling you that this house is already famous. The listing for the home before we bought it was featured in Retro Renovation, which you can read here, as well as Curbed.com which you can read here. We even found the stripe room as the real estate photo of the month on Swamp lot once.

Needless to say we have a lot to live up to as we slowly renovate this beauty. Our goal is to preserve the integrity of the home’s original architecture, and although many of the wonderful features will eventually need to be removed or replaced, we will always make decisions asking ourselves first what makes sense for the home over. Even though my personal taste leans towards contemporary/eclectic, my favorite design style is always the one that is the most well done.

We may not have after or current photos of all spaces just yet, but we will update as we can, so come back soon!

The Exterior

We really haven’t done much to the exterior of the house yet beyond taking down some large trees that were touching the house, cutting back some bushes/brush that was overgrown, and doing a front porch refresh.

For the front porch refresh we painted the front door a slightly brighter blue color, painted the porch, changed out the house numbers, the door bell, and updated the light fixtures, painted the porch with porch paint & added some accessories & rocking chairs.

We eventually have plans to replace the roof and gutters, remove all of the overgrown bushes and plant an intentional garden bed around the house, remove a few more problem trees that are impacting the house. We’d also like to update the front walk and porch to a nicer finish, and reseed the front yard so that we have grass instead of weeds.

The Foyer

The listing photo from the foyer was actually somewhat misleading colorwise, I’m sure they intentionally toned it down because it was A LOT. But I went ahead and re-edited it to express to you what the real actual color was.

We did the painting (or I should say Matthew did it, since I was pregnant with Grayson at the time) in fall of 2019, and the prep work and painting all the way up the stairs was a huge undertaking! We also removed the green shag runner to find beautiful hardwood floor on the landing (we weren’t as lucky upstairs!) Earlier this year I came back and painted the door a green accent color (I promise it’s actually that color!)

We still would like to add a runner rug to the stairs, and considered painting just the riser white to break up the wood color a bit. We also would like to completely refinish the flagstone floor & update the light fixture.

The “Formal” Front Living Room

The Dining Room

We just finished updating our dining room & you can read all about our final reveal & budget in our blog post here.

Fun Fact: When we first moved into the house and were renovating in the master bedroom, we had our room setup in here and then later it because our guest room when it was still a bit too hot upstairs for guests before we had the AC fixed. We jokingly called it “The Opulent Room” because it always felt ultra fancy using this space as a bedroom.