Featured: Apartment Therapy (Squeal!)

It’s a radical honor to have been featured on Apartment Therapy for the third time yesterday night. If you’re stopping by Merrypad by way of the Apartment Therapy House Tour, welcome. If you were really on my doorstep, I’d be offering you some coffee and apologizing about that furry dog that’s sniffing your butt and/or snuggling your thigh. He’s really quite sweet, but sorry about your clean pants.

Emily and Cody

Jason Loper’s invitation to be a featured house tour threw me for a loop. The pictures in my before + after section were a little outdated, and I knew Apartment Therapy really deserved my best and most current batch. The “old ones” posted weren’t outrageously out of date, but not fully representative of what my house was really looking like in the Winter of 2012, 2-years and 8-months after it became mine. Things change fast around here when I’m creating new art, reorganizing book shelves, installing new lights, and building new end tables on any given day, further evidenced by the fact that in these photos, the office still didn’t have baseboard trim (done!) and the jewelry hook wasn’t above my bedroom dresser (done!)

It was a nice opportunity to clean stuff up and take a whole new set of photos to document the progress. Most time the house isn’t as clean and bright as the photos you saw in the tour (and can see again further below in this post). In fact, on any given day, I’m working buried in a slew of papers on the dining room table, or like one day earlier this week, lounging sickly, enjoying a cup of hot green tea, and working my way through a box of tissue like it’s going to give me a promotion. And it seems like there’s always a bag of unopened dog food just inside the door, because that’s where I promptly drop all 37 lbs. of it when I bring it in from the car because the basement storage bin is too far away (weakling).

But in a perfect world on a perfect day when I’ve meticulously planned a room-by-room photo shoot, picked up all of my socks, and poofied the pillows, the house looks something more like the photos shown here, and it makes me damn happy.

The whole house redesign hasn’t been a quick one; I think it was Emily Henderson I heard saying recently that every room should have layers of interest, layers of decor, like layers on an onion (that’s not an exact quote, BTW, I don’t have that episode of Secrets from a Stylist DVR’ed any longer), and in that vein I still feel like there are many more layers that’ll be added to each room of the house. It’ll be a gradual transition that ebbs and flows with changing and evolving design tastes (and as money grows on my money tree). It’ll probably evolve for the rest of my life, or for however long I take up residence here, but that’s how I like my houses to be: in a constant state of betterment. I think it’s pretty good as-is now, better than when I bought it at least, but that’s just me.

And as a side-note, I have the most difficult time ever picking out things like paint colors, and adhering to a specific design style, because I like it all. All of it. Well, almost all of it. There are days I think of opening up walls and painting everything white and making it a Scandinavian abode. Other days I think of taking everything even darker, like, by adding more shiplap walls, yes I’m serious. But for us, right here right now, it’s great. And I guess it’s just icing on the cake that most people we encounter and who read through projects on Merrypad have responded so nicely to what I’ve done. For that, thanks yo.

Here’s a peek at 8 of my favorites from my recent shoot. These pictures (and 44 others) can also be seen in the updated before + after section of the site.

Living Room, photos for Apartment Therapy

Dining Room, photos for Apartment Therapy

Kitchen, photos for Apartment Therapy

Stairwell and entryway, photos for Apartment Therapy

Primary bedroom, photos for Apartment Therapy

Home Office, photos for Apartment Therapy