House tour

I've been meaning to do a house tour of our beloved South Orange home for a while now. Honestly, I kept waiting for the cleaning lady to come. She canceled on me this week (boo!) so I'm throwing caution to the winds and publishing pictures of some very messy rooms. I thought I'd taken pictures before our handyman did some work, but they seem to have flown off into the ether. I'm sure my children have nothing to do with that.

I'll do an exterior tour when it's light outside and there's not four feet of snow.

Here's our front door, looking from the front hall. Pretty carved door with beveled glass.

Entryway, filled by an overloaded coat tree and a "shabby chic" waterfall dresser. And of course, Darth Maul and Darth Vader, our gerbils.

The stairs. They are what made me fall in love with this house. They are where all of our kids learned how to climb stairs, where they have time-outs, where I can holler up three flights of stairs, and where we hang our Christmas stockings.

Straight shot off the front hall is the kitchen. Over 6 years, we've worked with the newish cabinets, bought new stainless appliances, replaced the awful tile countertop with granite, painted the Harvest Gold walls robin's egg blue, replaced the cheapo sink with an undermount, pull-out faucet and disposal and ripped out a useless breakfast bar and replaced it with a gateleg table. I also splurged on ceramic knobs from Anthropology, but I love looking at them every day.

A couple years ago, we ripped out the wall and door that separated the kitchen from the butler's pantry, an empty 6 ft by 13 ft closet which had become "the place we throw all our crap" once we moved in. We added more cabinets to match the ones in the kitchen, moved a radiator, and repurposed the before-mentioned useless breakfast bar to a desk, with a small piece of granite to match the kitchen. We also added a half-bath, which was a lifesaver, since up until then we only had one bathroom! Potty-training became much easier. Well, slightly easier. The half-bath has a pocket door to match those in the LR and DR.

And yes, that is a STOP sign that says POOP on the door. I wonder if our stager will keep that?

Okay, going back to the front hall. Directly off of that is the living room, with a pocket door separating the hall from the room.

And there are more pocket doors (two) that lead into the dining room.

Now, the living room was the coral color of the front hall, but it has been deemed too weird. So now it is tan. We also had lots and lots of bookshelves and a record player and comics in there, and that's all the crap that you see in the dining room.

The dining room has lovely windows, those pocket doors back to the living room, and a great swinging door that leads into the butler's pantry.

Hey, let's go upstairs! But first, let me put a couple of kids to bed.