Our New House: the Upstairs Edition

It is Thanksgiving weekend and one of the things I am very thankful for this year is our new house. After the upheaval and turmoil of the past year, it is so, so wonderful to be settled in a place that feels so cozy and warm and wonderful, so like home. And I have finally organized some pictures of it, so let's take a little tour, shall we?

Our house is one floor above ground (here's the exterior pictures), and then the basement. It was built in 1917 and the rest of our neighborhood is all of similar age, mostly originally 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom houses with unfinished basements. In the century or so since they were built, people have finished the basements however they see fit, so everybody has their space organized and used differently. All four of us are sleeping in bedrooms in the basement, so our upstairs is now mostly public spaces, if you know what I mean.



See our front door?  It turned out so well.  It is the original front door (HUGE! WIDE! SOLID WOOD AND THUS VERY HEAVY!) but it was a bit sad-looking when we bought the house so we had it taken off and away to be refinished.  The restoration guy who did it was a bit slower than he originally said (although he did do an excellent job) so we lived with our front door opening boarded up with plywood for quite a while.  Classy! I much prefer it this way, with hinges and a doorknob and whatnot. And see that scratchy orange-ish chair?  I STILL haven't gotten that re-upholstered.  Someday, someday...  I love the glass-fronted bookshelves built in around the fireplace; that's a pretty common detail in the bungalows in Salt Lake City.



Aren't the windows pretty?  This is the living room looking into the girls' play room.  The paint color through the living and dining room is Metro Gray by Benjamin Moore.  It is a fabulous gray that reads slightly blue or violet or warm, depending on the light.  My mom has it in her guest bedroom and I just fell in love with it when we stayed with them.  We had the floors refinished before we moved in and had the floor guys use a low-VOC environmentally-friendly finish from this company.  It turned out really beautifully and we are happy so far with it.  And if you turn around here, you will see...



...the dining room.  I loooooove these chairs.  They are these chairs from West Elm and I like that they have no nasty crevices or food-catching upholstery or anything-- very child friendly.  (And, of course, how they look is very, very nice as well.)  The dining table is the NORDEN table from IKEA and is also new.  That white sideboard in the back is built-in.  Awesome, right?  And a little peek into the kitchen, which I am just now realizing I didn't photograph.  Sigh... Another day.



Here's the girls' play room.  This color is a Martha Stewart color from Home Depot, Araucana Teal, and I loooooove it.  All our paint is actually low-VOC paint from Sherwin Williams because that's the low-VOC paint that our painter likes the most, and they did a really great job of matching my colors.  That toy storage below the windows is new and is the TROFAST system from IKEA.  This room does not typically look this neat, in case you were wondering.



This print (which is hanging off-camera to the right in the previous picture) is one of my favorite things I bought for the new house.


Now we come to the two little back bedrooms upstairs, which are really hard to photograph because they are pretty small.  This one (painted Benjamin Moore's Claret Rose) is currently our office.  In another year or so, we are going to move Violet and Grace to bunk beds in here and then our computer desk will join the toys and such in what is now the play room.  (Both rooms are pretty empty right now so there will be plenty of room.)


And lastly here is our guest bedroom, where the beautiful quilt my mom made for us and all our black-and-white photography of Yosemite lives now.  It is all set up and ready for guests so hey! Come visit us!  Well, not if you are a random person on the internet, but if I actually know you in real life, then yes! Come see beautiful Salt Lake City!