The New and Soon to be Improved Chisholm Casa

It's been a loooonnng time since I've posted anything, and I have a good excuse! This whole living with my parents/apart from Brian/not having our own house and space/trying to sell our house/buy a new house/etc... thing has been a little distracting and made me very unfocused to say the least. But I realized today that we'll be moving into our new house in a matter of weeks and I'll probably be even more scatter-brained once we're there, at least for a while. So I got together all of the before pics of our new house to show you, and hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll post a couple of batches of "during" pics, and then ultimately the !!!we're moved in!!! celebration "after" pics.

The funny thing about this house is that the first time we looked at it we were dead set on buying another house, so I wasn't too fond of this one, and didn't pay close attention to it. Then later when the other house didn't work out this one came back on our radar and we ended up buying it before I even saw it in person again. Needless to say, there was a little nervousness--and a LOT of questions on my part ("Was this the one with the leaky roof and the weird door to nowhere?" "No?, OK good.") but I trust Brian completely, and when he gave me his seal of approval I was all in! And now that improvements are under-way I think this house is THE PERFECT ONE for us!

Without further ado....Our new casa...(minus pics of the exterior, we don't have any yet)...



The carport door(on the left) opens into the kitchen, this will probably be the door we use the most. The house came with beeeautiful avocado appliances, brown vinyl tile, and chipped white painted cabinets in the kitchen. Niiiice!

The door on the right leads to the backyard, and the tiny sliver of a doorway you can see behind the open carport door leads to the laundry room.


The other side of the kitchen. Loooove the fun "drive-thru" window looking into the living room! The doorway to the right is into the dining room, that we call the front room, and the one straight ahead is to the living room. That island/peninsula/desk extension gave me hives as soon as I saw it! It has to GO! :)
I really love the space in the kitchen, and can't wait to use it without that hideous desk sticking out into the middle of it! It feels very homey to me, and it has good flow with the laundry room on one side and the living room on the other and access the to front room too. I also really like the exterior doors in here, I have been imagining the kids running in and out through here as I cook and watch them out of the window over the sink.


Laundry room. Avocado and Harvest gold live on! Or at least they will for a little bit longer!




Blog friends, meet hideous thirty-year-old lime green carpet. Carpet, meet friends. Don't you love it? Don't you want some? I know you're jealous. It's ok. :)
Yeah this stuff covers about 80% of the floors in the house. Another case of love and first sight for sure.
Oh yeah, that's the living room. I love how big it is--lots of potential--great fireplace, french doors, and nice big windows. The back part of the room past the beam thing in the middle was an addition, and I'm so glad it's there, it makes this room!


Another view of the living room. The door straight ahead goes the the hallway and there is a doorway leading the the foyer just the the right of the hall door.


The view from the living room into the kitchen. The "drive thru" again and the other end of the weird desk thing.


The front room. I think they used itas the dining room, but it's a HUGE room, something like 23X12, so we'll probably use it differently. This is the view when you're standing in the kitchen right next to the desk.


The other end of the front room opens into the foyer, so it's the first room you see when you come in the front door. Lots of room! I can't go on without commenting on the curtains in here. I mean I thought the avocado/harvest gold combo was bad, but this lime green/dusty pink takes the cake for sure!


The smallish foyer. One of the oddities of this house is that the door on the front of the house is a double door, so you expect a big foyer, but when you get inside you realize that one side is a faux door and you get this entrance. I was a little confused the first time we walked through here. But I really like the double doors on the outside, and I'm glad we're not wasting too much square footage on a foyer we probably wouldn't use, so it's win-win.


The hall/kids bathroom is on the left side of the hall. It's small, but actually bigger than the one in our last house with much more counter space and storage.


The first bedroom on the right with lovely linoleum and scalloped roller shades.


The second, and last, bedroom on the right with the ever-present lime green carpet and another roller shade.


And finally the master bedroom, carpet again, odd and ugly window treatments. Niiice! It does have a large-for-this-era walkin closet and a master bath, but I don't have pics of those yet. It gets a fair amount of light though it doesn't have the nice big windows that the front of the house has and I think there will be enough roon for our king bed. We'll see! :)

So that's our house--or it was our house--it has undergone several changes since these were taken a month and a half ago. Sadly, most of the rooms actually looked better stripped down and torn apart. I'll make a very big effort to have some "during" pics posted soon so you can see the vast improvement concrete, bare windows and stud walls are on 70's decor! I know you can't wait!