Home Tour: Our Kalamazoo House “Before”

Whew! It’s been pretty quiet around here lately thanks to mine and Sean’s big move from Kentucky to Michigan! For the past two weeks we’ve been unpacking all of our stuff (amazingly we only have 6 small boxes left–one box of food and five boxes of books!). Last week I was in Chicago for a work trip while Sean got a lot of the final pieces put away!

I love checking out home tours of my favorite bloggers, so I thought it would be fun to share some “before” pictures of our house, and hopefully share more along the way as we get settled in. I took all of these with my iPhone before the movers arrived our first day in the house, so they’re not the best quality, but still give you a good idea of our place!

As stressful as the whole process has been, we had such a smooth home-buying process, especially for our first time. My dad mentioned to one of his buddies who lives in Kalamazoo that Sean and I were moving to the area, and it just so happened that he was selling his house. His neighbors wanted to buy his house, and we ended up buying their house! So the previous owners live in the house right behind ours.

We had a bit of drama with financing, but it all ended up working out perfectly–we were even able to move in on Sean’s first day. Normally lenders need 30 days of pay stubs, which is insane to me. How do people move across the country and buy a house? Does everyone just live in an apartment for 30 days until they have enough pay stubs for a mortgage approval?

Luckily our credit union was amazing and said they just needed one pay stub within 30 days of closing!

The crazy thing is: when I originally put “begin saving for a down payment” on my 101 in 1001: Take 2 list back in January, I had no idea I would be buying a house just five months later! Everything really fell into place and we’re so grateful.

This is the view of the house from the street! It’s got a really interesting shape — it’s almost like it’s the side of the house, but it’s on the front.

There are two main levels, plus an unfinished basement and an unfinished attic.

When you walk in the front door, there’s a small entryway with a coat closet and the stairs that go up to the second floor.

From the entryway, you go through the door to the left and you walk into our living room, which has hardwood floors (like most of the house) and a big, functioning (!) fireplace.

On the opposite end of the living room is a really nice sunroom. There’s supposedly more hardwood underneath the carpet, so we’re going to rip that out. The windows are also all painted shut, so Sean is planning on getting all of them cleaned up so they open easily.

Other than that, we’re not really sure what to do with the room. Any suggestions?

Off of the living room is a second big archway that leads to the formal dining room. We’re planning on painting it light grey (we’re not really big fans of brown), but otherwise we don’t have much to do to it!

The dining room leads to the kitchen, which was recently redone. It still has a moderately awkward layout that we’re trying to get used to, because a big kitchen renovation isn’t exactly in our budget. But we’re making it work!

Yes, that tiny door under the light switches is a laundry chute! It’s a two-story laundry shoot, going from the upstairs bathroom and the kitchen into the laundry room in the basement. swoon

Also in the kitchen is the world’s tiniest bathroom. Seriously, your chin is basically resting on the sink when you’re sitting on the toilet.

Beyond the bathroom is the stairwell down to the basement. At the top of the basement stairs is a small pantry and a door out to the side yard.

On the opposite side of the dining room as the kitchen are two beautiful french doors that lead out to a small porch and our backyard. The yard easily sold us on the house!

That deck! Are you kidding me?!

We’re planning to rip out the playhouse and put some landscaping around the deck. We’ll definitely be having backyard barbecues this summer!

That’s it for the first floor! Once you go up the stairs from the front entry…

You get to the upstairs hallway, which has four doors off of it. The first one on the right leads to the upstairs bathroom.

It’s got a pretty sizable storage closet in it (though we need to come up with a good organization system for it), as well as the second laundry chute! Seriously, it makes my life so much easier.

Across from the bathroom is the first bedroom, which we’re going to be using as an office.

At the end of the hall are two more bedrooms: a grey one and a pink and purple one. We’re still undecided as to which one will be the master and which will be the guest bedroom / overflow closet storage area, but for right now our bedroom is set up in the grey room.

Before we set up any furniture or buy anything for the pink and purple room, it has to be painted. Right now we’re planning on the same light grey as the hallway / living room.

And finally, off the grey bedroom is a (steep) staircase up to the attic! At this point we’re going to use it as storage, because finishing it would be a big task — the stairs are just too steep for the attic to be a finished room right now.

So there you have it! Our first home! I’m excited to share updates as we keep updating the space. Thanks for following along!