House Tour!

I've been wanting to put up this post for such a long time, but it's been so hard to decide when our house was finally "done." Even after a year, I'm still tweaking things all the time -- adding new pieces to the walls, finding little accents pieces, and even moving furniture around -- but at some point, it becomes time to silence the it could be a tiny bit better voice, and just say: This is it. This is how I decorated our house, and I'm quite proud of how it turned out.

Another thing I'm quite proud of: it was done for very little money. Putting down the down payment on this house essentially drained our savings, but that wasn't all -- from the second we saw this place, we knew that it needed a pool. So, literally within weeks of moving in, we had a pool company bring the idea in my head to life (I basically slowed them a Pinterest photo and asked them to adapt it to our backyard) and we'd signed a contract to have them put it in.

One little wrinkle.  We'd hoped to put the cost of the pool into our mortgage so that we wouldn't have to pay the whole cost in cash, but our very conservative bank told us 'not a chance' when we brought it up. So, weeks after closing on a very expensive house, we suddenly had to get our hands on quite a bit of extra money to put in the pool.

Here's where I'd like to say that we robbed a bank or won the lottery, but instead... we saved. We basically took our disposable income down to zero the summer that we moved into our house, putting off buying new clothes, taking trips and many, many other luxuries, so that we could put as much of our paychecks into our savings account (and then, immediately after, into the hands of the pool company) as we possibly could. And we did it -- it wasn't easy, but by the time the final payment came due, we'd saved more than enough. I'm actually quite proud of that, because I know that if we'd financed it, we never would have paid it off this quickly, and it likely would still be hanging over our heads a year later.

But, to make a long story short, because we were saving so carefully for the pool, our budget for decorating was very, very low. And yet, we were moving from a small two-bedroom apartment into a four-bedroom house, with things I'd never even dreamed of when we lived in New York (a dining room! a tv room! an office that isn't one of the bedrooms!). Basically, we were moving a New York couple's amount of stuff into a Texas-sized house... eek.

We were able to buy a bunch of furniture from the prior owner of the house, which was terrific -- it took care of some of the huge empty spaces without me having to go out and buy new couches and tables and chairs. And some of it wasn't exactly my style -- maybe I would have chosen differently if I'd picked them out myself -- but I found that with the right accent pieces and placement, I actually liked them a lot.

And basically everything else... is from the internet. Ebay, Gilt, RueLaLa, Overstock.com, and a bunch of others -- I scoured and scoured, and when I found something I loved, I snapped it up. The result is definitely a little eclectic, but they're pieces that I truly love and are totally unique to us.  If I had to do it over tomorrow, I'd do it exactly the same way.

So I'm excited to share these snaps with you guys -- after a little over a year in this house, it really feels like home (I'm only showing the downstairs in this post, because upstairs is still very much a work in progress... but hopefully later this fall or winter, I will!). Chad and I both feel very, very lucky to have found a place we love so much, and it's exciting to think of the many more years that are in store for us here!

{in the middle of our living room, a Banksy print from iCanvasArt}

{our downstairs office -- the rug and chair are from Gilt, the pillows are from Gilt and Tommy Hilfiger x Surf Shack}

{unpublished prints of the Rolling Stones that I found on ebay}

{a copper pot that was one of our wedding presents and print from 20x200.com on our downstairs bar}

{the kitchen, with my beloved union jack stools from Overstock}

{a new print from Z Gallerie that used to be in my office, and more ebay prints of John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix}

{our kitchen workstation with a flying pig that was a gift from my in-laws}

{a pop art print I found on Gilt}

{an Ophelia print from RedBubble, which is my favorite place to shop for art on the whole internet}

{old couches are a comfy place to sit in the tv room}

{the newest addition: from Gilt this spring}