Tour De Rental

Prepare yourselves folks.  Prepare yourselves for the most exciting tour of a rental home in blog history.  Ok, so maybe just this blog’s history.  And considering we’ve never rented before, there won’t be much compeition so the honor is all this house’s and the unecessary excitement all mine.

I know I went with the nutshell of the story in the last post but just for a little recap, we’re renting because we sold our house, found another, walked away from that other after the inspection, and had no choice but to rent because we had to close on our sold house.  So, here we are, renting for six months in the hopes that we’ll find a house to buy within that time period.  Fingers still tightly spiraled.

Part of me feels like it’s a little weird to post a tour of a home we’re literally just eating and sleeping in (although I did hang a curtain rod so…) but then there’s that bigger part of me that’s a sucker for house tours regardless of the ownership details.  Maybe you’re one of those interested peeps too and if so, here we go:

Why dontcha come on up onto our teeny porch…

…and through the front door and entry way that was too small to allow passage of the largest part of our sectional (currently residing in the garage with a dehumidifier and plastic wrap for company).  :(

The front door has a glass storm door in front of the actual front door and though I’ve never liked storm doors because of their lack of aesthetic appeal, I LOVE having the door open so that the kids can spy on our neighbors () and/or a ton more light can pour in to our already well-lit living room.  However, our neighbors have a storm door that they painted red (who knew they could be painted?!…says the girl who paints everything *insert eye roll*) to match the pretty red door behind it and it looks really good so maybe storm doors and I can be friends after all.  :)  (Have you a painted storm door?  Please spill the details!)

Anyway, the entry opens to the living room:
One of the most colorful I think I might ever put together, me thinks.  Most of the walls in this house are a pretty yellow – not too bright – and it’s kind of fun to live with yellow walls because I don’t think I’d ever paint a room yellow myself.  (Nothing against yellow!  I just have other favorites I’d rather skip to.)  That big window lets in loads of natural light which is something our previous living room majorly lacked so now I feel like I’m seeing all of our living room furniture and rug in a new light…literally.  There’s no fireplace and mantel to mount our tv over (which I love and Anthony does not) so we’re currently using the girls’ dresser, still full of their clothes, as an entertainment center.

Everything hanging on the walls is there because there was a nail there in the first place.  The landlords told us we could paint or hang pictures but we are definitely not spending money on paint since this is muy temporary and there’s no need to decorate too much with stuff on the walls for the same reason.  Basically, I’m restraining myself and it’s killing me softly.

This is our wall ‘o end tables:I love me some symmetry yo.  Currently, we’re on the hunt for some smaller end tables to replace those big, dark wood ones with but right now, they’re still working for us.  I also thought maybe renting for awhile might afford me some time to make slipcovers to cover that awful cranberry those chairs sport but then I realized that my serger and all of my fabric is buried under……the boxes in what could be, our dining room.  Yes, there lies half of our belongings, ready to just be moved to the new house whence we find it.  It’s something I look past every darn day because one of my quirks is the need for everything to have a place.  Well, obviously nothing in on Box Mountain is in it’s rightful place so I’ll just stick to the deep breaths upon passing it. 

One redeeming factor of that box room though is that it also serves as a make-shift office with our desk on the opposite wall.  I have loved having a desk amongst our living areas.  Before, our desk was in our master bedroom so if I wanted to go pay bills or print something out, I always had to wait until after bedtime so the kids wouldn’t follow me and ransack our room.  The desk location is also awesome for homeschooling – I can work with one kid while the other three play in the next room over and I can see their every move.  #likeahelicopter


One room over from the storage/office/would-be-dining room, we have our actual dining room and laundry closet.
It’s right off the kitchen so it actually functions really well as a dining room and there’s a door right out to the back patio so the flow is just fantastic.  We’ve realized with this house and our last, how important a layout is in house design.  This house is about 1480 square feet, slightly smaller than our old house, but it doesn’t feel that small since there’s a nice open flow from room to room.  I do miss having a laundry room but I think I’d miss it a smidge less if this laundry closet had cabinet space, which there is definitely potential for.  Oh the things I’d do in this house if we owned it.  ;)

Sadly, that patio right off the dining room?  We don’t use it.  It’s really just storing our outdoor stuff.
There’s a super cool pergola over the patio with a big tree climbing up and over it and as awesome as it looks, all of the boards are really stressed and bending under the load of that tree.  We’re pretty sure it’s sturdy and isn’t about to fall down but the mama bear in me worries just a smidge and so we’ve avoided being underneath it.

Into the kitchen we go…

It’s probably the star of this house show since it’s fairly new.  The cabinets are really nice and ceiling-height (my fave!) and the granite countertops are nice and thick.  It’s slightly bigger than the kitchen in our old house so it was fun stretching out and having a little more room to store utensils and kitchen parapharnalia when we moved in.  One side of the kitchen has large drawers instead of cabinets which we’ve really grown to love and have always been interested in – that’s one fun thing about renting - you can try different configurations and take mental notes for future kitchen remodels.

There’s also a pull-out garbage cabinet to the bottom left of the sink that is deep enough to store two garbage containers.  We use the front for actual garbage and the back for recycling.  We both have loved that system.  It’s really nice to have the garbage can “hidden” and out of the way. 

I really love having a window over the sink so I miss that but I hoped that hanging some bright art over it might add a little fun.


Down a long hallway off the kitchen, are all of the bedrooms.

Gianna’s room:

Pretty bland and boring and dying to be decked out in little girl decor but, once agian, I’m holding back.

And there’s her closet-with-no-hanging-rods which is just fine because it’s a great place to store the kids’ boxed up toys and decor.  Thankfully her clothes are little and fit right into the the same closet as the other kids’ stuff.
The guest bath/kids bathroom is down the hall too.

Both bathrooms in the house are pretty old and have tile floors that I’m fairly certain are originally to the house.  They’re made up of small square tiles that have me questioning whether I really like the idea of small tile on a bathroom floor as much as I used to think I did.  Let’s just say there’s lots of grout to keep clean and the grout in these bathrooms has gotten pretty dirty over the years.

The three older kids share a room and if I was going to paint any room in the house, theirs would be first in line.

It was definitely painted with a boy in mind in the past with that light blue and those navy curtains and I’d love to go a more gender-neutral route.

It does get an insane amount of light though with big windows on two walls…great during the daytime hours, not so great to promote sleeping in. 

Don’t judge my sad collage skills, I told ya, there’s stuff hanging on nails that were already there.  ;)

Last, we’ve got the yellow master bedroom:

It’s quite possibly the most boring room in the house.  I packed our lamps when I thought we were just going to move into the little gray house and they’re still packed and in which box?  I haven’t the faintest.  I know it’s labeled “master” but there are four boxes labeled that so your guess is as good as mine and I ain’t unpacking just to pack again so we’re making due with one lamp.  The fan and light switch are both on the same switch and the fan seems a little wobbly to be pulling chains from off-and-on, so we just keep the light off and the fan on which makes just having one lamp a little inconvenient during the nighttime hours but this is temporary.  Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself when I realize I packed something I probably shouldn’t have like bedroom lamps.


The master bath is the same yellow as the rest of the house and has that same small tile with a whole lot of darkened grout.The countertop is about 1/8th of the size of our old master bath’s so that’s been fun adjusting to.  ;)  And while I love fun vanity mirrors, I’ve really appreciated the medicine cabinet for storage.  I’ve never researched it (yet) but I’m sure somebody out there’s gotta make medicine cabinets that meld function and design, right?  Kinda sounds like a fun DIY project…hmmm…

And that’s it!  Our temporary home sweet home.  I told you, most exciting rental tour eva, right?  Come back in a few months and I’ll give you a tour of the house we’ll eventually buy that’ll be even more exciting and definitely uglier.  Until then, I’ll be brainstorming and hunting down small DIY projects in this house that I can share here so…

stay tuned…

per the usual.  ;)