A Little Bit of Paint Always Helps

Here is an updated photo of the outside of the house.  We painted the shutters and door black and removed the awning over the front porch (and again when I say we, I mean Andrew).  The small awning over the upstairs window will also be removed.  We are discussing what color we may paint the brick foundation.  I vote for charcoal, but Andrew is not sold on it (yet).

Who gets the biggest room in the house?

I do!  The biggest room in this house is actually going to be my new art studio.  And it will have a sink!  Confession time...I don't have a sink now and sometimes I don't wash my brushes - I just leave them in water which is a huge no-no for an artist.  The studio isn't quite done, but here are some progress pictures.

With everything ripped out.

New sheet rock.

Ceiling almost finished.  We opted for spray foam insulation (You'll see it in photos that will be posted later) and canned lights.  We'll put in some full spectrum lights in when I start using the space.  

Almost there.  Ceiling has been painted, we've used a metallic off white paint for all of the downstairs room.  It's now ready for the vinyl flooring we picked to match the hardwoods that run throughout the rest of the downstairs.

Homemade Blueprints

Since we don't have any blueprints of the house, I decided to draw up a general floor plan of the upstairs and downstairs.   I didn't have any graph paper and it is not to scale, but here it is anyway...

There are three downstairs bedrooms, but we will use the front bedroom as Andrew's office, and the back bedroom will be my art studio.  ( I am grateful to have a husband who is so supportive and generous!!)    The dotted line between the Kitchen and the main Living area was a wall, but we decided to rip it out to make the house feel more open.   The entrance to the downstairs bathroom will probably be moved. We are still hashing out ideas over the overall bathroom design.

The upstairs has a lot of potential storage space between the walls and the pitch of the roof line.  This will come in handy since we don't have much closet space anywhere in the house.  The main upstairs area will probably have bookshelves and a sitting area.  We also have plans to install Murphy beds in this area for when we have guests since we will only be using two rooms as actual bedrooms.  Murphy beds were a feature in a lot of bungalows and are great space savers.