The first house I purchased was brand new, direct from the builder. It was a tract home in a growing neighborhood with two-toned walls, modern construction, and that wonderful new house smell. While I got to pick out the lighting, flooring, and paint among other over-priced upgrades (I never did use that Christmas light switch I had requested) there were no walls to move or general improvements to be made other than decor. It wasn’t until after we were married that Whitney informed me how uneventful that little house was. It didn’t take me long to pick up on what she meant.

Her idea of fun was buying a house different from all the others around it that could be personalized to make your own – and get a little dirty doing it, never mind the back breaking work. Since I was anything but handy, our second house was a complete experiment to see if we could transform a run down and neglected shell of a building into one where we could bring home our new baby. We spent countless hours replacing flooring, looking for appliances, commissioning drywall work, working with cabinet builders and picking out colors. By the time we finished, the house was a completely different place. A passion had been born for Whitney while I learned a valuable lesson in self-renovations: don’t do this again.

We only lived in that home for 1.5 years before we moved. We knew we wanted something that could keep us busy, but I wasn’t expecting anything too out of control. You know, just some place that was livable while we made tweaks here and there. When we walked into our house to be and I saw the wheels in Whitney’s head turning, I knew that if this ended up being ours, she would have some mighty big plans. I can’t quite recall if I fully appreciated how much renovation we did before moving in, but we promptly tackled redoing the entire main floor including the kitchen - so much for small fixes. I guess we figured that if we were going to do it anyway, we might as well do it while we had other living arrangements.

Originally, when you came in, you’d notice the stairs are on the right and the living room on the left through an open doorway. We knew that we wanted more of an open floor plan and figured that the wall separating the living room from the stairs was unnecessary. Whitney also knew that with a family room downstairs and a living room just to the right of the stairs, this living space on the left could easily be converted into a dining room. So that’s what we did.

It took some work to tear down the wall, but my family was kind enough to lend a hand, and we had it down in short order.


I was always amazed at what the costs for demolition can run, so if you’ve got the guts to tear apart your newly purchased home, it’s a great way to save a buck or two…assuming you don’t remove something vital to the integrity or safety of the home.


Of course, tearing out a wall leaves the perfect situation for adding some lighting to brighten up the space and run some wires for security.

And just when you start to think the project will never look good again, the drywall experts come and start to reignite the vision.

And then there’s flooring and paint…

We added some crown moulding and baseboards and slapped a coat of white paint on the stair railings.

While furniture helps the space, we’ve really never done anything to spice up this room yet, which is a real tragedy since it’s the first room you seen when you come over to borrow a cup of sugar.

In fact, I’m sure some of our neighbors seriously wonder why in the world we even have a design blog based on this first impression. Well, all that is about to change.

Whitney has been loving her some dark blue and mustard so she’s come up with this mood board to prepare us for our decking out the dining room. There’s a bunch on the menu this go around:

1 – The new rug will have to be larger than the current one which is way too small for the space. It’s got to hold up to having kids join us for dinner parties, but have design element that flows with the room.
2 – The table has got to go. It’s not flowing with this trendy style. Hopefully the sale of this piece will help fund some of the other projects that will cost more than our budget will allow.
3 – Painting this room is necessary, but we’re not too keen on ending a paint color with a rounded corner, so this might get tricky.
4 – Finding the right wall decor to fill in all the blank space is a must.
5 – The new table and chairs need to be light and bright, maybe with a little bit of funky.
6 – We’re using this space to bring in more geometric pattern and brighter colors than we’ve done in other areas of the house. This room is set a little off from the rest of the home, so hopefully it’s the right place to expand our style.
7 – Thank goodness garage sale season is upon us since we’ll have quite a few items we’ll need to keep our eyes open for.
8 – The black buffet table is overdue for a makeover. Maybe it’s finally time to try some ASCP?

We’ll be working on this project over the next little bit, but we’d love to hear what you think of the colors and the plan for the space, you diggin’ it?