First up, the downstairs floor of our house! We'll start with our kitchen. I certainly don't love everything about our kitchen (I haven't loved everything about any of our houses--I think that just goes with the territory when you're constantly moving/living in temporary homes), but there is a lot I really like about it! The wall art above the window reads "There's no place like home." I randomly bought that during my Hallmark days, and the first place we hung it was above our front door of our condo in VA. It has since hung in each of our homes. I love this little sign. While "home" will always be GA to us, home is really wherever we're together. Moving around is not for the faint of heart, but we work hard to make each place we live our home.
My favorite part of the kitchen is the window above the sink. It overlooks our pool & has a great view of the mountains. I also really love our big island in the center of the kitchen! It's easy for the island to turn into a dumping ground for papers/junk, but I try to always keep it cleaned off b/c this is where I do most of my kitchen-y stuff--prepping meals, filling/emptying lunchboxes, etc. And I just feel much better when I see a clear counter!! The other thing I love about our kitchen is all of the storage space! We have more drawers/cabinet space than we have kitchen stuff, which is a nice problem to have!
We have a little desk nook area in our kitchen, which is located directly behind our kitchen table. We use it as our family's "command center." I like having it in the kitchen b/c it's the heart of the house, so it's utilized often!
Remember all the extra storage space I mentioned in our kitchen? Because of this, we were able to utilize the four drawers to the right of the dishwasher (pictured below) to store all of the girls' art/writing materials. This was one of the best things we ever did with our kitchen! The four drawers are located right next to our kitchen table, so the girls can easily grab whatever supplies they want to work with and go straight to the table to get started.
Speaking of our kitchen table, this is the same kitchen table & chairs that my parents had when I was growing up. I spent many a nights sitting at this very table doing my homework & eating family dinners. When Derek & I got married, we moved into a small two bedroom condo in Northern VA. My parents generously passed the table on to us, and we ate our first meals as husband & wife at this table. Now, we have 3 children sitting around it! It saddens me to think that when Brady outgrows his little red chair (pictured above) and needs to upgrade to a legit chair, our family will have outgrown this table. This table has served our family well.
As you can see from the picture above, the kitchen area opens up into what we use as our playroom. It's technically the living room of the house, but it worked better for us to use this as our playroom. I love to be able to watch the girls play in the playroom while I'm in the kitchen.
In the picture above, you can see the door to our walk-in pantry off to the right. Below is a picture of the inside of our pantry.
Below is a picture of the very front of our house as it looks from the kitchen. Those two doors in the center are our front doors. And that's Derek in the picture hard at work on his puzzle. ;) This space of our house is kind of weird. When you come in the front door, there is a ledge (which you can see behind Derek)--why is that ledge there?! What purpose does it serve?! I'll never know. The front doors are technically supposed to open up into a very large dining room. We do have our dining table shoved in back there, but we use the rest of the space as our living room (since the actual living room is our playroom).
I love our little gallery wall. Derek put it above our couch in San Antonio, but we had to tweak it to work in this space. I love everything about it--the family pictures, the portrait we used as our "guest book" from our wedding, the antlers from Derek's first buck, the fleur de lis as a nod to our time in Biloxi. The gallery wall was one of the very first things we got finished when we moved in to this house, and having it up instantly made the house feel so much more like home!
Below is a picture of another really weird space in our house. It's a random little nook area at the bottom of our stairs. At first we had no clue what to do with this space!! Since it's at the bottom of the stairs & smack in the middle of our garage door & front door (the two doors we use when we're exiting the house), we decided to make it the home of our keys, bags, etc. It's worked perfectly for us.
Below is a picture of our living room. Above the couch, there is a print of the Ocean Springs bridge. We absolutely it!! The Carrolls gave this to us as a parting gift when we left Biloxi. Derek worked with Matt at the hospital, and they were pregnant with their first daughter when I was pregnant with Shelby. We took birthing class together & then we did Kindermusik together with our babies.
The bottom two shelves of the two bookcases are where we keep some of the girls' books. We also keep a small basket of their library books in between the two couches. They spend a lot of time reading on the couches.
In the picture below, you can see our some of our sand displayed on top of the bookshelf. We did a sand ceremony at our wedding, and then we started collecting sand each time we visited a new beach. It's a fun & unique (not to mention cheap!) souvenir. The door at the bottom of the stairs is our coat closet.
Below is a picture of our teeny tiny guest room. This is affectionately referred to as the Georgia Room. Derek's dad & step-mom gifted us the UGA print above the bed, and we have our diplomas framed on the opposite wall.
A quick peek at our laundry room below...the paintings are all ones I did at paint parties. They're nice momentos of our time in MS & TX. My very favorite part of this laundry room is the sink!!!
We've had every type of laundry room you can imagine so far--we've had a little laundry "closet" with a stackable washer & dryer (VA), we've had a luxuriously spacious laundry room with a sink and ample storage space (MS), we've had a laundry room that you had to walk through to get to the garage (TX)--the worst one!!!! So while this laundry room certainly isn't the laundry room of my dreams, I'm super thankful for it!!! It has plenty of storage (cabinets above the dryer & cabinets below the sink), a sink!!!! (a must-have when dealing with stains on kids' clothes), and we don't have to walk through it to get to the garage--hooray!
And lastly, this collage frame is hanging on the wall on the way to our garage. It's mostly older pictures, but I love them all. I love having newer pictures framed of our family & friends, but I love having older ones displayed too to remind us of our favorite people & memories.
I think I took pictures everything on the first floor of our house with the exception of the coat closet & the bathroom. ;) Hope you enjoyed getting a little peek inside our home! I'll be back next week with Part 2 of the tour--the bedrooms upstairs!
Happy Friday, Everyone!! Hope you have the best weekend!!
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