Hooked on House Tours Blog Party

Julia over at Hooked on Houses is hosting a tour blog party. It's raining here today, so I was thinking, "Well, today wouldn't be a good day to take pics." Then, I was looking through previous posts on Hooked on Houses where she mentioned fuzzy MLS photos, and I thought, "I can use the very good photos Deidre took for our MLS listing for the tour!" Well, I just looked at the first photo that I saved from the listing and they are tiny. So, now I'll have to scour my computer finding photos of our house to share. Oh, well.

I found this cool picture of my sil Judy at our first meal in our new home on New Year's Eve 2005. My favorite food is boiled blue crabs and my in-laws drove up here with an ice chest full from S. Louisiana to help us move. Aren't they so nice? :-) In this photo, you can see what our dining room looked like when we moved in. The top of the dining room walls and the entire foyer had this hideous red and green magnolia wallpaper. Uck!

Here's the front of our house. I always say, "We live in the big white box with the circle driveway." It's just a big rectangle. We have added some pretty potted Mums since this photo was taken. The door is also now painted blue.


Here's what it looks like as you're walking through the blue front door into the foyer. This was actually taken a year ago so I had my fall welcome sign up on the door. I haven't done any fall decorating this year. Too busy working and loving on the new grandbaby! You can just see the edge of our "family picture wall" in this photo.

Here's the rest of the wall.

This shot peaks around the corner of the foyer and catches the stairs (which had carpet on them when we moved in) and the edge of the dining room.
Now, even though I KNOW I've taken shots around the house to blog about, I can't seem to find any on my computer. So, I'll have to take some new ones. I probably could have taken some new ones, uploaded them, and be done with this post by now instead of scouring my computer for old ones! :=0

Here's the dining room now. It looks so plain with no artwork on the wall. But, it looks so much better than that hideous wallpaper. We added white bead board paneling to the bottom of the walls. I love that look.

Here are two shots of our kitchen. I had to get the first one in to show the finished laminate wood flooring that Michael installed. SO much better than the cracking ceramic! I sooo want to paint the bottom cabinets white, but since we had just redone the kitchen in our rent house before moving here, I haven't wanted to tackle cabinets again. Now, before long, hopefully the house will belong to someone else and they can paint them whatever color they want OR leave them just as they are!

Off the foyer is the downstairs bedroom. It used to be our oldest daughter's. Now that she's not living here any longer, we are staging this room as a possible 2nd master bedroom in order to sell our home. The quilt on the bed was given to me by my grandmother. Her sister made it.

Here's the living room. You can see what is currently my personal office area at the far end of this room. We only use 1/2 of the large room as an actual living room. I love the red and yellow color combo and I've recently decided that I would love to add some blue and white accents in the form of toile drapes and some blue and white china. Maybe in my next house?

At the top of the stairs is the library/family office. What drew me to this house in the beginning were these built-in bookcases. Since we are a homeschooling family, we have LOTS of books. Of course, we are nearing the end of that journey, but I bet we'll still have a lot of books, just 'cause I love them so much!! Enlarge this to see the funny Zelda calendar photo hanging near the desk. It's Zelda with a milk carton with a hole cut in it for her face. The caption says, "Missing You!"

Here's Laikyn's very cute bathroom. When we move into a new house, she and I will most likely share a bathroom and I can't wait to call this shower curtain partly mine! ;-)

Here's one of my favorite rooms in the house, the laundry room. Not because I love to do laundry, but just because the room is so fun.

Here are two shots of the master bedroom. In order to more effectively stage the house for selling, I recently moved all my craft stuff out of the room and moved the dresser into the room. The dresser was in our very large closet (pictured below); now the craft stuff is in there instead. Makes it look more like a bedroom.

That's the tour. I sure hope I win the prize after all this work. I HATE the way Blogger handles photos. That's about the only negative over Typepad, but it's not worth $5. a month to have easier photo insertion.

Head on over to Julia's place and check out the rest of her blog, too.