Happy Birthday, Here's a House

Happy birthday, Sean, and happy house closing to us!

Today we close on our new house, and we couldn't be happier! It's been quite an adventure living in a corporate apartment, with less space than we've ever had while living together. We can't wait to be in our own new space, and especially to cook in our wonderful new kitchen!

I took some photos on our walk through with our real estate agent today, so I will share some of those tomorrow along with some of our plans for making this great house our own. Stay tuned for some DIY and design fun in the coming months!

Thinking of Color

These last few weeks, I have been haunting the paint aisles of Home Depot and Guiry's (a local Colorado paint & art store). I have paint cards spread across the coffee table of our apartment, driving Sean a little batty.

I'm working on developing a cohesive color palette for the whole house. This was simple in our old condo, with under 1000 square feet to work with. Now, with roughly 3000 square feet of two story house, it is a bit more challenging! There are so many different spaces to think about -- four bedrooms, four bathrooms, an office, an open kitchen/family room, a separate dining room, a living room, an entryway, a laundry room...and they need to flow together.

Because of my desire for a cohesive palette, I'm finding myself drawn to paler colors with a gray undertone, rather than the brighter saturated colors I craved in college after living in the dorms. Of course, deep accents are still something I love; I'm not the sort of person who is drawn to those all white homes.

And so, I present to you our conceptual color palette for the new home:

Of course, not all of these colors will be on walls. Many of the deeper tones will be accents of some sort. And some of these colors may change as we get into the house and discover that they don't look the same as they did laid out on the apartment coffee table. I know for sure they look different on the computer screen than they do in real life! That's part of the fun of color though, and I can't wait to start decorating the new place and making it ours!