The very first room that we worked on in the new house was Wesley's room.  He did amazingly well with the transitions from St. Louis, to his temporary room at my parents' house, and finally to the new house. Even so, it was important to us to get him settled and "home" asap.

Wesley's nursery in St. Louis was one of my favorite rooms, and was one of the must difficult to leave.  It was a small room, but it worked well for our baby, and he slept in it every night starting with the first night home from the hospital.



The above photo is from Wesley's room in St. Louis.  More info can be found here.

We had 2 rooms in the new house to consider for Wesley's room.  One was longer and more narrow, and the other one was more square in shape.  Both had 2 windows (one each a dormer), and good sized closets.  We decided that we liked the long, narrow room for Wesley.  It was closer to our room, plus we thought it would work well with his furniture.  We had also been thinking about painting Wesley's room the same dark blue as his previous nursery, and I thought that this room would work better with the darker color.

My mom was able to remake the curtains to fit the two smaller windows.  We made the curtain rods out of plumbing parts, spray painted black.  We also replaced the metal blinds with simple white wood blinds to help block the light.



Here you can see the dresser.  The door near the crib is the door to the hall.  We are still using cloth diapers, so we hung the wet bag next to the changing pad, and keep the extra diapers in the top drawer.  We hung his animal prints over the dresser.  Now that he's starting talking, he likes to tell us about the bears and the lions :)



The door to the left of the dresser is for the closet.



Continuing the rest of the way around the room, we installed Wesley's bookshelves again, we liked how they worked in his old room.

I finally got around to take a few updated photos of the house a few weeks ago.  We ended up hosting a family Thanksgiving at our house, which helped get us motivated to finish up a few lingering small projects.

This is the family room, and where we spend most of our time.  As I've mentioned previously, we are waiting on doing anything with the red carpet until we decide if we are raising the floor or not.  The blue chairs are to be recovered at some point as well.  I am also still debating on what to hang on the walls.  The walls are painted though, so we've made some progress.



This kitchen looks the same as it did when we moved in, but we have plans for the kitchen that we'll hopefully be able to start working on soon... Next up, the dining room:
 

We've painted the walls in here, and managed to hang up a few things.  Our table really isn't idea for the size of the room, but we're trying to make it work.  It's an odd space that will likely change, but it's working for now.  We'd like to update the light fixture soon though.

The living room received the same paint as the other rooms downstairs.  We're still messing around with the furniture arrangement, we might even add on to the ikea sectional.  We don't use this room as often as the family room, but it's nice to have the extra space.  And it's nice to have a working fireplace!  I have a feeling we'll use this room more as Wesley gets older.












It's an difficult space to photograph, but we decided to paint the half bath a really dark, almost black, gray.  I was hoping the dark color would help get your focus away from the overwhelming amount of "travertine" tile.  At some point I'd like to remove all the tile in this bathroom and start over, but for now, we focused on easy (and inexpensive) updates.  We got a new mirror on craigslist, and I've been shopping around for new lighting.  We'll probably replace the faucet and accessories at some point too.  I framed some vintage postcards from my grandparents to hang on the walls.

A few days after I wrote the last post I came across several other bloggers who had recently used flor carpet tiles in their homes.  I had briefly considered flor tiles, but I had never seen a style that I really liked, as they usually look like individual squares.  But after seeing some photos of the Suit Yourself pattern, I started considering flor tiles again for our family room.  Some of the pro's are that they would be an acceptable "temporary" solution because they could easily be reconfigured and reused as a smaller rug if we decided to do hardwood someday.  The are also more pet/kid friendly in that we could replace a damaged tile or 2 without having to replace everything.  On the negative side, it's not nearly as cushioned as rolled carpet, and the loop pile might be an issue with our dog claws (they tend to snag carpet).  I was able to get some full size samples though, and we've been testing them out:

A few months ago I was given a renovation project at work.  It's a big project, one that has a good amount of public attention and use.  During one of the initial meetings, after walking the existing space and looking at the floor plan for only a few minutes, I was able to confidently state that I thought the client needed to rotate an entire set of restrooms 90* and move them 15' away from their current position.  This opened up the flow of the space and solved some major circulation issues.  It was a big move, it will be an expensive move, but it just seemed to make sense.  The client loved the idea, and we moved forward with it.

A few other views:







I have not taken any new photos since we've moved in, but we have painted the walls a really light gray, and have tried out a few different furniture arrangements.  Right now, we have our large, lounge sofa (it's medium gray in color) under the 3 windows.  We have a larger upholstered chair on the opposite wall, near the step, by the basement door.  Our tv is on the far wall, beside the single window, because that is where all of the outlets and speaker plugs are located (the house came wired for surround sound).  We are still struggling with the arrangement, but the biggest issue is obviously the floor.

Not only is the carpet dark red, it is also seems to be a low quality carpet and despite the dark color, our dogs have already managed to find ways to stain it.  It also shows all of the pet fur and never looks clean, even right after we vacuum.  We've gone back and forth and think that we've identified all of our options:

1.  Replace the carpet with hardwood floor to match the existing hardwood floor:  This was our initial thought, and we actually already got some quotes on it.  Since this is in the addition, we do not have hardwood under the carpet, so we'd need to start with new hardwood.

2.  Raise the floor to be the same level as the rest of the house, and then add hardwood:  This is where it gets complicated.  I'm not sure why the previous owner decided to make this a step down from the rest of the house, but the line between the kitchen and the family room is just odd.  It makes furniture placement limited, and really breaks up the space.  We've already had a guest trip over the unexpected step.  It's also awkward to step up into the office. We have not gotten a quote on raising the floor, but it wouldn't be cheap, and it makes the hardwood installation even more difficult as well since it will be against the existing floor.  If price was no issue, and it could be done without complications, this would be my first choice.

With 1 and 2 - we'd need to buy an area rug.  Those of you with larger spaces know how expensive big area rugs can be, and those of you with pets know how hard pets can be on rugs...

3.  Replace the carpet with new carpet:  We would probably be looking at this as a "temporary" solution.  Ideally we'd really like hardwood throughout the first floor.  But, given our current budget and the fact that we have a toddler playing on the floor, we're also considering just updating to a more neutral carpet for now, and then maybe doing the hardwood in a few years.  With this, we'd try to find a carpet that could be bound into an area rug at a later point, to help offset some of the cost of a "temporary" solution.  It should be noted that we have started looking at carpets and haven't found one that we like yet.

Help.

The adjacent office (the doorway with the step up that you can see above, it has a sliding door) does have hardwood under the carpet, so once we decide what we're doing on the family room, we're planning to remove the office carpet and refinish the floors underneath.  Or maybe we'll be lucky and they'll be in great shape, ha...  For some reason we just cannot make a decision on the family room floor, and I really feel like it's causing a road block in my mind, preventing us from making decisions on other things.  If you all have any thoughts, please share...

And if you know of the perfect flush mount light fixture for my hallway, please pass that along as well :)

As you can see from the photos, our new house is very different from our old house.  We now have much shorter ceilings, and more windows.  We have a little more square footage, but a layout that is broken up.  Our basement is much smaller, but we have a lot more closets and cabinets.  The original features and "character" in this house is much more subtle.  Not to mention that this house has an addition that is only 10-15 years old and includes some odd design decisions that were very specific to the previous owners' taste and lifestyle.

This house is in way better condition that our previous house was when we first bought it.  Even though the style is not our preference, it technically doesn't "need" anything done right away.  But of course we already have a wish list of things we'd like to change...

When we moved in to our stl house, we spent the first few weeks removing wallpaper and carpet, making repairs, and patching walls.  We jumped right in to painting and replacing light fixtures.  We lived out of boxes and ate microwave meals for the first 6 months.  We were ok with that though because we felt like we were making progress, and enjoyed working on our home.  Over time, we slowly unpacked the boxes.  We acquired more furniture and started to fill the rooms.  And eventually, 5 years later, we were settled in our home.

This time, we started with our furniture.  Some of what worked in our old house just doesn't work in this house.  The dining table is probably too big.  The seating arrangement in the family room is odd.  We need some kind of bookshelf in the office before we can unpack books.  I miss the built-in hutch. All of the windows, while great for natural light, make it difficult to arrange furniture in the rooms.  I'm sure that Mike wants to be done with the "lets just see how this sofa looks over there" game.  I know that this will all get figured out over time, but it's a little chaotic right now.

As for house projects, we've been able to focus on a few things, but it's been a much slower process this time around.  This house doesn't have the same sense of urgency because it is very livable as-is.  We also weren't trying to work on the house with a 15 month old the last time, so there's that...  nap times are precious moments :)

One of the first things we did when we bought the house was to start thinking about the flooring.  The house has hardwood throughout, except for the dark red carpet in the family room and office, and the lavender carpet in the master bedroom.  Not only are the colors horrible, the quality of the carpet is surprisingly bad.  We've already had some issues with staining, and the pet fur just sticks to the carpet, making it difficult to clean.  Mike and I decided that we were ok with keeping carpet in the bedroom since it's so expensive to install hardwood.  Wesley helped me shop for new carpet.

 
Installation seemed easy enough and they were even able to work around our bed, which was nice.  Mike sent me the above photo during the installation process.  Did I mention that we got a new bed when we moved in?  From our roof insurance repair in stl, we needed to replace our guest room bed so we decided to put that money towards upgrading our bed to a king instead.  Although it's a little bit too wide for the windows, we are so happy we decided to upgrade.

We finally found the right color though and have been slowly working our way through the downstairs.