Today is the big day! We close on the new house!

While the house isn't ours quite yet, I have been doing a lot of planning and plotting on what improvements I want to do first. Since we haven't sold our current home yet, we're going to have to start small- mostly whatever we can do with paint and elbow grease. The one exception is the kids' rooms. Since we didn't give them much say in the moving thing- we decided we were moving, and they're along for the ride, after all- we've decided that their rooms will be done before anything else.

With that in mind, I've already started working on their rooms, even though we haven't even moved in. Both kids have loft beds. The boy got his handed down from an older cousin. The girl's loft bed is a custom design I drew up and hubby built. We both have many hours of blood and sweat into that bed. But, the girl is not 4 anymore (that's how old she was when we built it), and the boy's bed always smelled like funky teenager bedroom, so we decided that we would paint the loft beds. The boy wanted his bed bright red. While I respect his choice of bright red (because that's a great color!), painting a bed is a one time thing and red really limits what colors you can paint walls, what color flooring you use- it's just limiting. I tried to convince him to go with a nice brown, or a masculine grey, or even glossy black. He was set on red. Finally we compromised, and he selected a great red-brown color, Sherwin Williams Polished Mahogany.

The girl decided that she really wanted her loft bed to be pink. I shouldn't be surprised- she's a very girly girl, after all. She wanted a bright, bold pink, but following the same rules I gave the boy, I tried to convince her toward white (which the bed is currently painted, just a new fresh coat) or a soft grey. We, too, compromised and she selected Sherwin Williams Fancy Pink. It's a very pale pink - almost white- so that works for me, and she is very happy, too.

As soon as the boy's bed is done, I'll get started on the girl's.

Can't wait to get into the house and actually get started on it, but for now at least I feel like I'm making progress toward our dream home!

So we bought our dream house

Well, sort of. We bought a house in a great neighborhood, with great bones and a great layout. The problem is that it was built in 1990, the family moved in, and other than adding things to make the home uglier, they have done NO improvements on the house.

They did put laminate flooring in the kitchen- the cheapest, ugliest laminate flooring available, which they then wet mopped to within an inch of it's life.

They also added plaster grapes to the wall in the dining room and faux finished over them.

The great news is that this is an excellent opportunity for me to show, step by step, how I can use my interior design knowledge to transform a home from awful to awesome! We don't close on the house til next week, but we've already started the improvements- it got a new roof on Monday. We replaced the very old black shingles with Certainteed Landmark architectural shingles in Weathered Wood. Weathered Wood is a great shingle color because it has browns, grays, greens, and blues in it and works with most any siding. I can't wait to get moved in and make this house amazing!