Scenes of Settling In

These are not glamorous scenes by any means but here are some happenings around the house as we were getting settled in...

Setting up Aaron's tools.  Aaron informed me that once you have your own house and your own garage, you need to start acquiring many, many "man tools." ha.  Eleanor was happy to help.

Eleanor playing amidst moving chaos.  She was super flexible through the whole moving in experience, which we were grateful for.

Morning breakfast on our too small table.  I love the light that streams into this room in the morning, it makes me happy every day.  

Eleanor's room!  We plopped everything in here like so on Day 1 and it stayed like this pretty much til mid-January.  We just barely painted it white and now we need to work on hanging things and making it feel cozy.  But those bay windows make this my favorite room in the whole house :)

And here's our pretty mantel before we decided to put the tv above the fireplace.  I really resisted putting the tv above our mantel but in the end agreed that the room just functioned better with it there.  So I took these pictures at night just before we made the big swap so I could remember what it was like to be able to put pretty things on our fireplace. 

And here the tv is in all it's glory.  Now we just need to mount it.

One December night while Aaron was gone I decided to do a quick gallery wall just to see how I liked it. We hadn't yet painted the living room so it felt like a fun opportunity to make a bunch of nail holes without feeling any long term commitment.  If I didn't like it, I could just spackle all the holes when we painted.  Anyways, I was pretty sick and should have been in bed but I thought, "What the heck, I'll just do this real fast.  It should only take 30 minutes."  Three hours later...

And here we have the great paint debate of 2015.  I tried so many whites and grays it was crazy.  We settled on bright white walls though and I'm so glad we did. 

Our dining table finally came in November! And we getting tons of use out of it.  I love that it's larger and Eleanor can spread out as many of her paintings as her heart desires.  I also love that it can seat 8 people if we want.  We've been living with a 4-person table for far too long. 

And here's Eleanor trying out the leather chair as I ask myself, "Is this the one??" We've been looking for a new reading chair for our bedroom.  This one sold before I could come back for it but we ended up finding something else at an antique store.

Our very first step into a home improvement project.  Our house came with some very "awesome" sheet mirrors on three walls (the entryway, the front room and the master bedroom).  I wanted them gone asap so after being in the house for a week I convinced Aaron to take down the mirror in our master bedroom...  

 Once they were down, we realized this would be a bigger project than we thought.  So we sanded down the black glue dots and painted the wall white, but are still debating what we want to do.  The walls aren't textured so we are tempted to do some fun treatment on the wall like white shiplap.  Like so...

But it gets tricky with the angles of our wall.  I've also been tempted to do cement tile...

But then we start asking, "Should we build a hearth?" and other crazy questions like that that are beyond us. Anyways, for now it sits as a clean, white slate and we shall see when we fix it up.

In other topics, here's an escapee making a run for it...

Not pictured is Aaron's hard work in the backyard.  Sprucing up a backyard is no joke and it didn't help that we were out of town almost every weekend for the first three months.  But he's been out there every Saturday he can and I'm grateful for it.

And that's been our settling in process.  Painting really did us in so we are happy to step back from home improvement for a bit.  We are in a good spot for now and will just enjoy having a newborn baby for a while before we try to tear down any more mirrors or paint any more walls.