Our New Home: A Peak Inside

The day is finally here! I’ve been so excited to share our moving news with you all for months now. We listed our current home on the market back in January and thankfully it sold quite quickly in a matter of a few days. We immediately knew which house we would be making an offer on.

My husband and I are always browsing Zillow and other real estate sites for fun and earlier this fall we started actively popping into open houses. Being antique lovers narrows down our search field significantly and when we see something we like we know it right away. When our future home appeared on the market I could hardly contain my excitement and I immediately sent the photos to my husband.

We have always wanted to live in the quaint historic part of New Canaan known as Silvermine and would admire this specific property each time we drove by. I’ll be completely honest, we weren’t initially thrilled with all of the interior photos of the home and saw it could use a bit of updates. We still wanted to tour the property as it’s curb appeal and location are exactly what we were looking for.

The first time I saw the property I was impressed by many aspects of the home, but honestly was not blown away. We had to do a lot of work to our current home and if we were going to pull the trigger and move again we wanted a more turn-key home. There is an 1980s addition to our future home including an in-law suite above the garage that absolutely needs some loving.

When I first saw this and I was turned off at the idea of a significant project and unsure how we would use the space. But after sleeping on it, my creative juices kicked into gear. Taking the mentality that this would be our forever home, we pictured our family’s changing needs for many years to come. Over time when our currently young children are older, we plan to make the in-law suite into our master bedroom suite. This will give them and us the bedroom space we’re lacking in our current home. In the interim, our new home has a recently remodeled smaller master bedroom/bath (closer to the children) that can house my husband and I until we’re ready to make the in-law suite renovations.

Above you see our new family room and the most historic part of the home. It’s a converted barn from the 1800s with tall ceilings, exposed beams, and natural light galore. It’s so open and I can’t can’t get over this massive fireplace. We’re already envisioning many cozy winters here. One of my biggest complaints about our current home is the fact that there is only one fireplace in the formal living room and we rarely use that space. Our previous home in Bedford had a fireplace in the main family room where we spent the majority of our time and we missed that aspect in the winters, so we’re excited to regain that.

I won’t be getting into the design plans and details of each room on this blog post as it will be a project developing over time. There will absolutely much more information to come your way.

We won’t actually be moving into this home until the end of April. We’re taking the next couple weeks to prep the home with painting, cleaning, etc, prior to occupying. Spoiler alert: there will be a lot of white. What’s that you say? Coming from this color lover? But yes, we want a fresh clean slate and want to be confident in our colors selections and wallpapers for this forever home.

In the slideshow above you see our dining room looking into sunroom/living room and stairway to upstairs bedrooms. I’m already scheming some new dining chairs, mantle decor, and buffet ideas.

Here you find a peak into our kitchen, breakfast nook, bookcase hallway to the outdoor patio, playroom, and sunroom. The majority of the home stretches out along the first floor and upstairs are our bedrooms, which I’ll share in future posts.
I’ve been taking a lot of measurements, plotting, and brainstorming and I’m anxious to get our furniture moved in. It’s always a process figuring which pieces will go where and how to make them all work in the space. I’m hoping to keep the bulk of our furniture items and come up with creative ways to incorporate them into the design plan for the rooms of our new house. I already foresee a few pieces that will need to be reupholstered, painted, etc.

Let’s take a moment to touch on the reality of the current situation, which is we’re moving during a pandemic. We began and planned this process before we knew how Covid-19 would be impacting our country this spring. We’re all dealing with unprecedented circumstances at the moment and our family has had to accept this reality. As I mentioned earlier, we’re not actually moving in until the end of the month. We’re using this time to bring over as much as we can on our own to decrease expose to the virus, but there are obviously large furniture items that will require movers. Not only will the virus impact our physical move, but also slow the design process. We’re trying to look on the bright side, and appreciate that taking our time with our forever home is the necessary approach regardless.

Follow along as we prep, plan, update, and decorate. I plan to take you guys along with me in this journey and hope it can help with any home decor needs of yours including budget friendly shopping and DIYs ideas post pandemic, transitioning from one home to the next, choosing paint colors and wallpapers, and on and on. So let’s get to it!