Before...

These are photos I took when we did the home inspection last September. On Friday, we get to go to our soon-to-be house to have the flooring estimate people come, and I will have a chance to commune. None of this is our furniture or colors or anything, but you might get an idea of it.



This is the family room ...whose title we haven't settled on. Family room? Living room? Hearth room? We ordered all of the furniture today - very cozy and comfortable with a double reclining sofa. Colors are picked out, including "ginger spice" for the fireplace bricks and "Mark Twain House Gold" for the walls above. And linen white for the trim and baseboard. That's the vision.



See how the family room connects to the kitchen?



Here's the kitchen (looking through to the dining room). More Mark Twain Gold for the walls, (the cabinets will stay white) and I'm going to make a little valance curtain out of this fabric:



It'll be small, and I must confess that I'm only picking this fabric to tie together the gold walls and to match the cherry cookie jar I bought at a yard sale this summer. Is that strange? To plan everything around a yard-sale cookie jar? I don't even know. I like cherries.

(And this, incidentally, is my first foray into trying to figure out how to insert pictures into my blog. Any other time I've done it successfully has been totally accidental. Now I'm trying to do it successfully on purpose. I write this from the Saads living room, where I'm babysitting and CANNOT work their TV. Nathan can work it, but I cannot, and I think it would be mean to wake him up so he can make the Sex and the City DVD work. Instead, I'm using the time on my hands to learn something new. And eat the kids' leftover Easter candy. Worst. Godmother. Ever.)

Anyhoooo....

Here is our front porch. We originally wanted to put farmer railings on, but now I envision people sitting on the little ledge. But the swing will go all the way to the left, and my little bistro set in the middle. See the flagstones? I love flagstones!



Here is the a shot of the parlor, where our old living room furniture and our player piano will go. This will be the last room we paint, because I really like this color.



This will be my office. I'm going to take off the closet doors and put up floral curtains (scrapbook stuff behind that) and my desk (aka my MIL's table) will go right beside the closet. Lisa's fainting couch under the window. Five white bookcases on the opposite wall, plus the futon kind of next to where that blue bureau is now. Yes, it will totally fit! Color choice is still "watermelon slice." It's very...pink.



This is the downstairs bathroom. It will be a color called French Violet, which is a medium purple, and it will have a fairy theme. I'm going to paint fairy quotes on the walls and put copies of some of the pictures from Abby's beloved flower fairy books on the walls.



Here is the entry way/mudroom. It's really a 3-season porch, and we're currently in negotiation about the use of this room. Either way, I want to put a bunch of small pictures of our friends on the wall posts from parties we've had together. I want that energy to bless our house. And I'm going to paint the words to the Irish Blessing above the windows. "May the road rise to meet you, the wind be always at your back. May the sunshine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hands." (The God part...well, that will be whatever God means to the reader. I'm pretty sure my mother will have something to say if I change that part to Universe or Athena or Santa Claus.)



And here is the vision board I made, the one that's been in the downstairs bathroom at the Vacation House. I think it helped to make everything happen. I really do.