I’m pretty proud of any changes/improvements we make upon this house. The Vegas house was brand new and really had no personality anyway, so I didn’t feel like we did much to it. This house, though, since it’s so old and so piecemeal, anything we do I feel brings new life and makes it look pretty different.
These rooms were the first we mostly got done; there are still a few things we want to do to them, but for the most part, they’re done; and, especially considering how it looked before we moved in, I think they look pretty good.
I didn’t take any before pictures until after we changed the carpet, but you can kind of see what the carpet looked like in this picture of the cubby (that needs repairing) in Evie’s room:
Hm. Okay, it doesn’t look TOO different in these pictures, but believe me, it is.
Well, anyway, here’s one of the before pictures of Evie’s room:
And here’s a few we took after, looking the same way.

We still want to paint the cubby, closet, and room doors, but for the most part, those are the only plans on that side of the room. Looking the other way, this is what we were dealing with:


Once we painted the walls, ceiling, and trim, it looked like a completely different room (even after we changed just the carpet, everything looked CLEANER). The Charley Harper prints in the white frames were for her room to begin with, but the rest of the art were things we had in the Vegas house that now needed a home. At first I thought it would look too crowded, but I think I like it. I like that she’s surrounded by art that mean something to us, even if they’re silly, simple, and non-original. 🙂


Most of the books on the shorter bookcase (which is one of the custom ones we got) are my old books, or even a couple of my mom’s, and perhaps a couple of my brother’s, and some are James’. My mom kept boxes upon boxes of our old books that we took to Vegas just before we moved and when we got to Boston and we got our bookshelves in, I finally got a chance to go through them. A lot are falling apart, and even more so now that Evie has gotten a hold of them, and they aren’t all favorites, but some have notes written in there to me from my grandparents or aunt Leah and I just couldn’t part with them. Others are books I remember loving as a kid and am hoping Evie will enjoy them, too. And others I scribbled in as a kid and I think that connection with me is kind of nice, too, for Evie to have.
Okay, so the only other thing in this room (and really, the whole house) is to change the light fixtures. I kind of hate all of these flush mounts, though this one is the only one that has the potential of just being cleaned and perhaps painted to survive the purge.
So the sunroom had this ugly blue carpet that covered the hardwood and made opening the doors pretty difficult. (Well, I remember it to be sky blue -but it could be because the walls, as you can see below, are this sky blue.) Also, it was filthy. We understood why there was carpet once winter hit and the floors/room was freezing, but I think it’s worth it that we took it out and restained the wood. I was probably most excited about our plans for this room and it’s probably my favorite. Like all things, we still have some plans, but it’s pretty much done.
There were curtains up -you can see them on the floor -but they were kind of bleh and the rods were those cheapy, simple metal ones, and they didn’t span the wall, they spanned each window, so it looked even worse.


Like Evie’s room, just painting everything made a huge difference. One of the first things we did was replace the fan/light fixture, which may suck in the summer since we don’t have air conditioning, but I love this fixture and I love this room, so I think I’ll hold on to that during moments of possible regret. 🙂

We bought the four Wedgewood plates (those blue things by the door) from a friend of my mom’s and they happen to be of important early moments of the American Revolution: the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s Ride, Battle of Concord, and Valley Forge. How awesome is that?
The other thing we want to do in this room is get a couple of sideboards or something to go against the walls (beneath the windows) on either side of that far door. We have a metal shelf in our kitchen right now that we love, but doesn’t quite fit in the space, so we need to move all the kitchen stuff currently on said metal shelf someplace and we’d like to put them in storage things in this room.
So another thing we did when we got here was replace our bookcases. The ones in Vegas, as previously mentioned, did not survive, and we found a place here that sells handmade, real wood bookcases.
The last real plan for this room is a gorgeous stained glass James’ mom made for him ages ago when he was a kid and she gave it to us when she visited us last April. Our plan is to hang it up in front of that window in the picture above once we get hooks attached.
UPDATE:
Ha -no. The sunroom did NOT have sky blue carpet. I found some pictures of the downstairs that our realtor took for us way back when and this is what it looked like from the previous owners:
Those dark spots you see on the carpet are most likely NOT shadows or carpet that’s been rubbed the wrong way -it’s probably dirt, especially nearest the doors. Ick.