Our Summer Home Tour

Our plain, builder grade home started out as a blank slate, but we’ve been working hard to make it our own! Come take our summer home tour to see the progress we’ve made so far!

Hello, hello, friends! I am SO excited to welcome you to our Summer Home Tour today! In recent months, our house has been in a state of transition, with a lot of half-done projects in most of our rooms, so I shared just a few rooms during the Christmas season and skipped spring tours altogether– it has been a while since I really showed you around!

My friend Krista from The Happy Housie was kind enough to gather together an oh-so-talented group of bloggers for the Seasonal Simplicity Summer Tours this week, and I am delighted to be a part of it! If you are joining me from Janet’s house at Shabbyfufu, welcome! I just love her beautiful home!

Our Summer Home Tour

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

If you’re new around here, we built our house with a community builder (It is a Palermo by Ryan Homes.) and moved in in September of 2016. It was a totally blank slate— all white walls, basic trim work, hardly any light fixtures, no window coverings– and we have been working away for almost two years to customize it and make it our own.

We are far from finished at this point, but I felt like we turned a little corner recently, and some of the rooms have finally begun to feel like the cozy, welcoming spaces I had imagined! Come on in and take a peek!

You can see more details of our summer porch in this post.

Shop Our Porch

Today I thought I’d primarily share the rooms our main living area, since that’s the part of the house that has seen the most change over the past few months! Our living room, kitchen, and sunroom are all part of one larger space, and we spend the majority of our time at home there.

Let’s start in the living room!

You may have seen a little sneak peek of this room when I talked about how I decorate the shelves of our entertainment unit a few weeks ago. Of all of the rooms in our house, this one started out feeling the most stark and empty, but it is coming together now!

One of the first projects we did in the living room was to use IKEA’s BESTA system + some custom trim work to create the entertainment unit around the TV. I love that it gives us some storage space, and I can also change out the decor on the shelves for each season.

The board and batten is a more recent addition, and I feel like it totally transformed the look of the space, along with the power of paint! The board and batten is painted Behr Marquee Cameo White, and the gray color above it is Behr Marquee Silver City (my very favorite gray paint color).

I have been wanting to find more spots to hang family pictures around our house, and the area above our love seat ended up being perfect for them.

I especially love the photos of the boys because they capture their little personalities perfectly– Connor is giving his “cool guy” look, and Caleb is being silly, per usual! 🙂

I went with my usual aquas for this summer, but decided to add a few small touches of pink as well. That’s about all I can get away with in my house full of boys, but I am loving the combination!

We have IKEA’s EKTORP sofa, love seat, and chair as our main seating, and I love them. They are slipcovered, so it’s easy to pull off the covers and wash them– I don’t need to worry if the boys get stuff on them! I can also switch out the covers when I’m ready for a change. This set is tan, but I also have white ones that I put on to freshen up the look every once in a while.

aqua pillows- HomeGoods, left cream pillow- Hobby Lobby, right cream pillow- At Home, center floral pillow- this Etsy shop

They’re cozy too! The perfect place to snuggle up and relax. 🙂

tray- At Home, lantern, pitcher

Shop Our Living Room

If you stand at the entertainment unit and look back toward the couch, you can also see into our kitchen…

This summer I decided to add some small-but-bright pops of color to our kitchen, and I think they are exactly what it needed. It’s just enough to break up the white and gray palette and make the room really shine.

rail at end of island

The walls in our kitchen were painted recently too (also Behr’s Silver City), and even though it wasn’t a ton of surface area, I feel like the paint really helped the space look less stark and more inviting.

We spend so much time at our kitchen island! It’s big enough for four stools, so we often eat meals there as a family, and the boys also work on homework, build lego sets, and do art projects at the island. And I use it for meal prep too, of course!

Believe it or not, this is actually the second set of pendant lights we’ve had in our kitchen since we moved in less than two years ago. I liked the first set, but they were a bit too dark and angular for the kitchen, so we moved them to the hallway and put in these clear glass pendants instead. It was the right move for both spaces!

Our little coffee station is still going strong! Donnie loves the coffee, and I like the pop of aqua that the coffee maker adds to the counter, so it’s a win for both of us. 🙂

corner tray- Target, old; pitchers

Donnie brought me these gorgeous pink and white peonies and I just had to incorporate them into our tour! I just love peony season!

Shop Our Kitchen

If you look across the island and past the sink, you can see into the sunroom, one of my favorite rooms in our house!

blinds– we have the Bali Abaca color, curtains, furniture, rug

I gave a full tour of our summer sunroom in this post, but I wanted to give a few peeks of it here as well! This is our little spot where we escape to relax, visit with friends, or just enjoy time as a family.

Shop Our Sunroom

The sunroom is also the best place in the whole house to sit and enjoy the view of the orchard and the farmland and hills across the way, which was one of the reasons we chose this house in the first place!

A little sneak peek of our summer deck decor! I’ll be sharing the whole thing next week, so keep an eye out for that!

Well, my “little tour” ended up involving way more pictures than I expected, but I hope it gave you a glimpse of what we’ve been up to in our main living area these past few months!

Before you head out, be sure to pop around and visit my blog friends’ beautiful homes! Laura from Inspiration for Moms is up next, and you can also catch the rest of the tours via the links below.

Sharing with me today…

Monday

The Happy Housie // Maison de Pax // Shabbyfufu // Just a Girl and Her Blog

Inspiration for Moms // Clean & Scentsible // House of Wood // Summer Adams

Sharing the rest of the week…

Tuesday

Sincerely Marie Designs // House by Hoff // Rambling Renovators
Town and Country Living // Newly Woodwards

Craftberry Bush // On Sutton Place // Designthusiasm // Zevy Joy

Wednesday

Bless’er House // Finding Silver Pennies // Rooms for Rent // Amber Tysl

Deeply Southern Home // Two Twenty One // A Burst of Beautiful // Making it in the Mountains

Thursday

The DIY Mommy // The Turquoise Home // Nina Hendrick // Home Made Lovely

So Much Better with Age // Maison de Cinq // Paint Me Pink
Southern State of Mind // Jenna Kate at Home

Thanks so much for taking the grand tour! Have a wonderful day!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.