Our First House (Bar Nunn, Wyoming)

 (Sorry I missed posting on Monday. It took me several days to take and brighten up these pictures.)

This is the official house tour post where I put all the pictures of our first home in its "finished" glory. 

^^These pictures were taken last fall. We had already trimmed the karl foerster plants to prepare for winter, but everything else was looking pretty good. I'm so proud of all the work Jared did to get our yard looking nice! He insisted on doing all the landscaping himself. He even mowed the lawn with a push mower (the only kind we could afford when we moved in) and planted and watered the back lawn BY HAND for 3 years. Slow clap. 

^^And here she is at the end of winter, sold.

^^When you first walk through our front door, this entryway setup is on the left.

^^And the living area is on the right. Jared made the coffee table out of a free pallet and some cheap hairpin legs when we were 100% broke before moving in. The couches are probably 30 years old and hand-me-downs from my Uncle Delwyn and Aunt Becky. They've stayed in pretty good shape, but are old enough that the support is disintegrating and our backs hurt after sitting on them. We've never had to buy a couch in our 8 years of marriage, but we're excited to leave these couches behind when we move and buy something new for our next place, wherever that will be. The tv table is an old record table I scored for $20 at our local thrift store. 

Our place definitely isn't usually this clean. We packed away a lot of clutter into our crawl space and garage before staging our home to sell. Anything that we knew we wouldn't need during the next two months got packed away. That said, our place feels so nice now that it's more minimal! We spent our first two years here feeling like our space wasn't complete and we needed to get more decor. Then without even realizing it, sometime in our 3rd year we crossed that line and reached the point of too much. So now we're paring down and can hopefully maintain the balance more quickly next time. I think the key is to get stuff up on your walls quickly, and then have lots of pretty baskets (I got most of mine at the thrift store) for holding necessary clutter. And then frequently editing down and getting rid of things you don't need. The chest in the above picture holds our board games. Usually some of these picture frames hold family pictures, but our realtor recommended we replace them with artsy prints for the showing.  

^^I love these barstools so much! They have big seats, a nice thick gray cushion (hides stains), and I love that the wood wraps around the back so I don't worry much about Jack falling out. I love to sit at the bar to get work done on my computer or have a snack. I really hope I can find a place for the stools in our next space, but I have a feeling we won't be living anywhere with a a bar this high. I'll let you know if they end up on KSL at some point so you can snag them if you want. They're so good. They might still be available on Wayfair but I don't remember what they're called. 

^^Our kitchen! It has been a luxury to cook in this spacious, new kitchen. The counters are formica, not stone, but I don't even care. We're probably going to have to take a kitchen downgrade wherever we live next (whyyyyyy Utah housing market, why?) so I'm really trying to make the most of having ample cabinet space and counter space for preparing food. I've enjoyed learning to cook lots of new things here (german food, cast-iron skillet meals, fancy lemonades...). Full disclosure, there's usually a big basket containing mail and miscellaneous odds and ends in that back right corner. 

^^The dining space. This is our $40 table and chairs set we scored at a yard sale in Utah the month after we got married. I'm looking forward to a table upgrade at some point in the future, but a couch upgrade is more urgent and this still does the job fine. Jared's mom and my mom both helped me reupholster the thrifted midcentury chairs on the ends. Jared thought they were hideous at first, but now Studio Mcgee is selling a very similar chair for over $1,000 a piece and suddenly they don't seem quite so bad. 

Changing out the lighting in our dining room and kitchen made a world of difference in modernizing the space, as did adding those VERY cheap oversized prints on the dining wall. I got the frames from walmart (in the posters section). They're super plastic but they were only like $5 a piece. Then I learned how to cut the photo mats myself (add that to my resume) and printed out some pictures that I've taken from various places we've lived/visited. I think a low-pile rug would look great under the table, but we're still in a low-budget stage of life and a rug probably would've gotten gross during Jack's highchair/baby-food-hurling stage anyway. 

^^Take a left after you walk into the house and you find Jack's room. We've loved having these acrylic book ledges on the wall, but next time I'll do wider/deeper ledges to hold more books. Most of his books are in his closet. 

^^Thrifted everything! Man I love our thrift store. We really didn't have any budget at all for new furniture during our first two years here, so that place saved us. The dresser was a yard sale find that was painted all gray, and I just sanded down the top and spraypainted the hardware. 

^^And this amazing little table and chairs were I believe a facebook marketplace find by my mother-in-law? Might've even been free, and I think they're actually Pottery Barn! Definitely the best quality piece of furniture in our house haha. She drove them down to us when they came to visit last summer. Hopefully we'll have a playroom type space in our next house and this will be the centerpiece. It's been a great place for crafts and playing. 

^^Between Jack's room and the office is this cute lil' bathroom. 

(and now we know why home photographers use ultra-wide-angle lenses)

^^And across from Jack's room is an identical room we use as an office/guest room.

^^Jared helped me make this cool black shelf to hang my weavings from, and it doubles as a ledge to put pictures/Jared's paintings on top. We r artsy. 

^^On the other side of the house you walk in from the garage to this little catch-all area next to the laundry room and our master bedroom. You won't find any built-ins or upgrades in our little builder-grade house, but for a first home it's been juuust fine. 

^^These laundry room shelves looked like a dumpster fire of random cleaning products until I staged them up to show our home. It wasn't even that hard. Just had to grab a few baskets around the house to hide stuff in. I probably should've done that ages ago.

^^My favorite room in the house!! Our master bedroom gets lots of natural light and is the last room we consciously finished up, just this last Christmas. Because it was our last room finished, it wasn't filled with quite as many random thrift finds (though the rattan photo baskets and hanging planter are some of my favorite thrift finds ever). My favorite plants are in here because this room gets the most sunshine, and I splurged on new bedding as a Christmas gift to Jared (our old bedspread was a truly horrifying thrifted yellow coverlet from the 70s). Also this is the only room I finished after taking my online interior design class from Casper College last spring. Not that I'm any type of expert, but I know more now and have a wee little bit bigger budget than I did when we first moved in. 

^^These now-cute bathroom shelves also looked like a dumpster fire of random hotel samples and toiletry kits until the night before the photographer came to do our home listing. If we were living here longer, I'd wrap the shelves in natural wood to make them look fancier, but they're good enough as-is. I also read that it's a good idea to buy all new fluffy white bath towels before showing your home. That way you can throw out your old towels and have nice new towels when you move into your next place. I wanted potential homebuyers to feel like they were walking into a spa-like setting in the master bath. Also, I mentioned there were no "upgrades" in this new build, but our builder chose to do a stone shower in the master bathroom and we've loved it! Looks real nice. 

^^I know this just looks like a standard walk-in closet, but I clocked many, mannny hours hiding in this safe haven when Jack was a colicky newborn. It was the only place in the house I could go to not hear the heartbreaking screams when Jared was taking a turn or when we were sleep-training. I'd turn on the bathroom fan and lay on Savvy's bed under the clothes and cry/do my pelvic floor exercises to try and make the childbirth-recovery pain go away until it finally disappeared completely about a year postpartum. That was a rough year. Thank you closet safe haven. Usually it's stuffed with clothes, but we've packed most of them away already. 

(*note: If you haven't had kids yet and want to at some point, don't be discouraged when I mention my awful pregnancy or recovery period. A full 99% of women have a much easier time with pregnancy than I did [darn hyperemesis gravidarum] and I don't know anyone else who took an entire year to recover from the pain of childbirth. Colicky newborns are pretty rare too. It won't be as awful as I make it sound from my weirdly distressing childbearing experience, I can practically guarantee it! And of course, I'm grateful we're able to have kids of our own.)

^^And finally, our backyard! A hundred thousand thanks to Jared and my dad for making my patio/pergola/bistro-light dreams come true. I love this space so, so much. Please bless we can have another fenced yard with cafe lights at our next home, even if it's only half this size. I'm doing my best to soak in these last two months in our little house on the prairie!