One of my big blog-related goals for the this year is to have a really nice, updated house tour page for people to visit. The one that’s there now is….not nice or updated. To this end, I have a few things in the works.

Dave is hard at work on a clickable floor plan, and I’m hoping that we’ll be ready to share next week. And then we have nightly geeky, earnest conversations about how to make the navigation clear and easy to follow on the house tour page and what we should include and all that. So any suggestions about things you love (or hate!) in a house tour page are very welcome!

To go along with this fancy new updated house tour, I’m going to go room by room taking new pictures. And, as I do this, I’m planning to CLEAN each room and maybe knock out any tiny projects I’ve been meaning to get around to. But it’s not some deal where I won’t put the rooms up until they’re “finished:” even the completely untouched since we moved in rooms are getting new pictures (to replace the ones I stuck in there from when real estate listing in some cases).

So as I take the new pictures, I figure it’s a good chance to do an updated post about each room. Most of them have never had the full “room reveal” treatment, so it’s a chance to get all the info about sources, diy projects, future plans, etc. in one place…as well as introducing the rooms to readers who are newer to the blog and showing off any little updates that happened without meriting a full post.

That’s my very wordy way of saying, “hey–today I’m going to show you my sunroom!”

I’m starting with the sunroom mostly because I had to take new pics of it anyway when we put the curtains up. Like this one:

 

Then after I took that picture I started changing things again, so the rationale didn’t really make sense anymore. But it’s also a room that’s come together piecemeal and has never had one big post about it, so that makes it kind of a fun place to start, too.

We moved from a much smaller house, so this was one room we had no furniture for when we first moved in, and it sat empty and neglected for a full year. Now we use it constantly, basically as a family room. The computers make their way onto that table pretty frequently. Abe plays with toys in here. The kids do some schoolwork. We read bedtime stories. When people come over, they tend to congregate in here. And pretty much anytime I need to take pictures of someone or something, it happens here because of all the light from those big windows.

The color in here is Benjamin Moore’s Blue Bonnet (I talk more about painting the sunroom here). It’s more green than blue, despite the name. It’s probably my least favorite Benjamin Moore color that we’ve used; I don’t dislike it, but I’m not super in love with it like I usually am when I paint a room. If I had it to do over again, I might just go with straight up white (and I imagine I will have it to do over again someday).

The resin wicker chairs are from Target, via Craigslist, and the leather sofa is a hand me down from my mom. The Moroccan trellis rug is from Rugs USA, and the curtains are Sanela curtains from Ikea.

If you’re playing Spot the Differences between the first and second pictures, you might have noticed the mantel is different now. I’ve been looking at that mantel (we did not choose the…interesting mantel with seashells molded into it, by the way. That came with the house), occasionally trying something new there, but mostly thinking, “it needs something tall!” for months now. So taking new pictures finally prompted me to get it something tall. Namely that blue vase with peacock feathers. And my old standby, stack of books, on the other side. I just got the little elephant for 80 cents the other day at the thrift store, and I kind of love her.

 

I love my fancy lady print so much that I wrote a whole post about her once.

The cabinet is a thrift store find that I refinished, and now we keep a bunch of Abe’s toys in it. I left the Abe Lincoln vignette from Abe’s birthday party on there for now, because we love Abe Lincoln all year round. The painting above it is a nautical print my mom gave me. Eventually I’d love to have a small gallery of old nautical prints on that wall, but finding them is slow going.

 

Looking the other way…..

 

The table and wooden chairs are from Pier One via Craigslist, and the white chairs are from Overstock.com. We made that baby/dog gate there ourselves because we couldn’t find a premade one that would fit the freakishly narrow doorway.

 

We call that dresser the credenza because Dave wanted to call it that. Another thrift store find that I painted. I have a special “never pass up a globe that’s less than $10” rule for garage sales and thrift stores, so my collection keeps growing. As does my collection of vintage souvenir plates. I have several more that I need to get around to hanging up.

And I think that’s just about it….all the sunroom stuff together at last in one long post.

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