We recently shared our good news:  We’re building soon.  Yay!  We’re in the planning stages as we want to have as many of our materials chosen pre-build so the process can go as quickly as possible.

Before we start, we wanted give you guys a little history of our house so you know what is going through our heads when making design decisions.  We love history and we love the history of our neighborhood and could bore you to tears, but we’ll make it snappy (yeah, right, do we make anything snappy?).

Here’s our beauty in 2005 (yikes):

Here she is the day we closed in September of 2012:

Here she was in September of 2013:

Our house is a “baby” compared to the homes near ours.  Many of the homes that surround ours are turn of the century.  As far as we know, ours was built in 1957.  This has already, and will continue to, influence some of our design decisions.

The style of our home is a Foursquare Home.  Foursquare homes were popular between 1890 and 1930.  Our particular style of Foursquare Home is called a “Workingman’s Foursquare”.  The main difference is that it is only one story- much less expensive to build and maintain.

Here’s a typical Foursquare Home courtesy of This Old House:

This is the most similar floor plan that I’ve been able to find, but ours is significantly smaller (750 sq.) feet and the rooms have completely different uses (bedrooms/kitchen on left, living/bath on right).  We also don’t have some of the luxuries listed below- like the pantry.  The “ample” closet space is spot on, however.  Hah!

What we love about this style can be summed up in one word:  Simplicity.  We love the clean lines and no-frills design.  Simple, classic design will serve as the base for our home.  This includes some industrial elements.

But…

We’ve got to have some fun!

Check out this wallpaper we found between layers of sheet-rock in our walls:

Y’ALL.  My kindred spirit lived in this house before us.  I can only imagine how much fun was had in our home when this wallpaper graced the walls.  I plan on honoring the previous owner with pops of bright color, just a tad of 50’s flare, and some teal, of course!

So, here’s the rundown:

Classic elements, clean lines, industrial, woods, teal, pops of color, and a touch of 50’s. 

Any objections?

Have a great weekend!