It’s been well over a year since I’ve written anything here but I’ve decided it’s time to revisit this little blog of mine. I’ll get into my long break from blogging eventually, but for now I just wanted pop in with an update.

2015 has been a pretty big year over here. I earned my MA in interior design in May and we closed on a house the next morning. The boy and I got married in late June and moved out of his parents’ basement (where we lived for about a year) into the new house after our honeymoon. If you even remotely follow me on Instagram you know that we adopted our goofy walker coonhound, Fred, in July. I got to spend a few weeks at home with Fred before starting a new job in August working for a residential design+build firm in Alexandria. It’s been a wonderfully busy year: graduate degree, new house, wedding, honeymoon, new dog, new job. I really don’t know how I got this lucky but life is good and I am grateful for it.

For today’s post I thought I’d give you a quick “before” tour of the new house. The place is modest at barely over 1,000 square feet so the tour is a pretty quick one. The front yard has a little landscaping and I’d like to do a big overhaul of it eventually but for now it’s low on our list of priorities. This picture was taken after we let the grass grow a little too high during the final wedding countdown weeks…whoops.

The kitchen isn’t original but it’s definitely old…like, doesn’t have a dishwasher old. Many of the houses in the neighborhood have been renovated to add a half or three-quarter bath on the first level and we plan to do the same at some point. We’re hoping that kitchen and laundry/utility/storage area will get a complete overhaul sometime next year.

The second floor has two decent-sized bedrooms and one tiny bedroom. One of the things that sold us was that the upstairs is configured for three bedrooms while many of the other houses in our price range/target locations had two upstairs and one in the basement. We realized that if we plan to stay here for 5-7 years, three bedrooms on the same floor would allow us to have two kids without a newborn and toddler having to share a room. Not that kids are anywhere in the immediate future, we were just thinking about farther down the road.

We are currently using the tiny bedroom for an office (aka storage area) and the second extra bedroom as a guest room/second TV watching room.

The second floor also has the only bathroom, complete with the original black and white tile and an intriguing skylight that opens and serves as the only vent in the space.

Our back yard isn’t huge but it’s large enough for a patio and some gardening space. The fence is new and this photo was taken when we began taking down our deck, but I’ll discuss that more in a later post.

It’s safe to say that we are loving this little life we’ve built for ourselves so far and we’re looking forward to what the future holds…especially a new kitchen.I mentioned buying the house because of the three-bedroom setup and kids down the road earlier. That was really the hardest part of house hunting for us, finding a house in our price range that felt like it suited our lifestyle now and our lifestyle 5-7 years down the road. I think we managed to do it. Although the house is definitely small, it’s configured to work for us for just long enough. I really love our neighborhood and know the house is a great investment. We are a $10-$15 Uber ride to all our favorite nightlife spots and can get to some fun neighborhoods like Old Town, Alexandria in 10 minutes. We can easily walk into Del Ray, a charming neighborhood in Alexandria with a thriving main street, and get dinner or take Fred along to pick up some frozen custard and a puppy pop at our favorite dessert spot. And a Metro station is planned to be built about a mile from our house…fingers crossed, it happens before we move!