If you’ve been following me on instagram you’ll know that at the beginning of the year we purchased a historic home we lovingly call The Banister House (after it’s standout banister-photos of which I’ll show at a later time). It’s been a long time coming for us as we’ve been housesitting for in-laws for the past year and a half, and renting and constantly moving from state to state prior to that. So having a place to really call home (hopefully for more than 2 years?) has been priceless for our family. And we LOVE it. Like love it. I don’t like to admit sometimes that i’m so influenced by my immediate surroundings but I am. A lot. I know we are all are and that is why good design is so important for moral, but I know that I’m extra sensitive to it. And really we all need a place to call OURS, right? I know it’s also been so good for the moral our kids to have a place that they know is theirs too.

The house has incredible bones. Over the Christmas break we painted and plastered up a few walls (after knocking down 70’s paneling, closets, tearing off moldy wallpaper, and much more). We got to work on the upstairs rooms first as well as the dining room so that we had places to live. I’m in love with the tall arched ceilings and the tall baseboards.

We’ve since settled in a bit while still working on the downstairs rooms.

It’s been nice for the kids to have a space to spread out and play (oh and do boys ever make their beds?).

  

Jon and I are in the room just across the way from the kids.

I’ve had to put my office (which is already so messy! eep! Works waits for no home renovator right? ;)) in our room for now as we try and figure out how to plaster our crumbling walls downstairs.

For the dining room downstairs we had to remove old 70’s wood paneling and shag carpet. I painted one of the walls with black chalk board paint. This room is fun because it’s actually part of the very first original house witch was just cabin. The front 2 story victorian portion of the home was added years later. The old kitchen is now the bathroom and the patio is now the kitchen.

This last photos shows a bit of what we’re up against with our downstairs rooms (which consists of our living room, dining room, kitchen, bathroom and my office). You can see that when trying to tear off the old wallpaper the plaster walls just started to crumble down (a few more before’s here). There is no lath – just adobe brick – so we’re trying to get in a plaster expert to see what our options are. It’s a bit of a longer road ahead of us for these rooms than I had hoped but I’m excited to get it taken care of and done right. We also have a big bathroom remodel in our future which will be exciting. 😉

Stay tuned as I continue to share more before and afters of our Banister House progress! (and please if you have any tips for historic home owners we’d love to hear them!).