The Fifth House - Main Floor Tour

Hello! When last we met here, I posted about designing and building a house that we planned to live in for at least fifteen years and then found out soon after we broke ground that we were actually not going to live in it and had to scale back on the design and build as a result. Things did not end up exactly like that.

We tried to sell the house while it was under construction. I put together a fact sheet and colored some pictures of what would be the completed house. Here are the beautiful colored pictures:

Sadly, no one saw the vision, they only saw this :-(

John and I spent the summer of 2019 trying hard to buy a house in Portland, Maine and praying that our under construction house would sell. We lost out on two houses in Maine in bidding wars and as the summer drew to a close we decided it might be a wee bit insane to pay a lot for a house in Maine while we were also funding our unsold, under construction house. We decided it would be best if I stayed in Michigan with our children and for John to live in an apartment in Portland. We would put our completed house on the market in the spring and hopefully all be together in Maine by July.

I had mixed feelings about moving into the house for such a short time, it seemed almost cruel to live in a scaled back version of the house I had designed. Those feelings did not last for long. As we unpacked and settled in I found myself looking around every day with pure gratitude and joy. We had barely unpacked anything in our rental house because it seemed silly to pack it all up again in a matter of months. When we moved into this house we decided to unpack a lot more (not everything), hang artwork and feel truly at home for the first time since Grosse Pointe.

We moved in to the house in the middle of November 2019 and we all know what happened in March 2020 - it changed our trajectory a bit. We'll save those details for another time though. Now, I will show you around the main floor of our home. Some of the photos are mine and some are listing photos.

Entryway

The entryway led to the dining room on the right and to the library on the left. The table was originally purchased for our Chevy Chase house in 2001.

View to the dining room above.

View to the library.

Peek of the French front doors from the dining room.

The Library

The library is one of the only two rooms where we used color on the walls in the entire house. All other walls were painted the same off-white color and all of the trim was Decorator's White by Benjamin Moore. The furniture in the library is mostly the same as we had in our library in Grosse Pointe.

The library from the entryway door above.

The library from the great room above.

The Great Room

The great room is the only room in the house that had new furniture in it. I had originally planned to use the sofa from our sunroom in Grosse Pointe in this room so that there would be an easy path to the sunroom in this house. The sectional sofa we purchased from Serena & Lily was intended for the family room in the basement. The sofa would have fit perfectly in that room if only it was not too tall to make it down the stairs. A measurement I did not take into account and a mistake I will not make again!

The above picture is taken soon after we moved in. We changed the rug after a month or two because our dog would lie down on it the second he came in from outside all day, every day. The darker, indoor outdoor rug below was a much better option.

The Sunroom

I babysat for a family growing up when I lived in West Hartford, Connecticut that had an amazing house. I still remember every detail about it and draw on it for inspiration to this day. The house had a sunroom off of the living room and ever since then I have been in love with sunrooms.

Here is the sunroom from our house in Holland:

I had great plans for this room! I was planning to reupholster these sofas (that have been in all of our living rooms since the first house) with this photo as inspiration:

Image torn from a magazine years ago.

Alas, decorating the sunroom in this house was not meant to be.

The Kitchen

The kitchen was open to the great room, the dining room, and the mudroom. I wanted to be sure there was wall space for our kitchen desk, a sentimental piece that my dad had bought me as a present, and I wanted a marble island and soapstone counters. These things did not change even though we were not planning to live in the house when those decisions were made.

The Dining Room

The dining room was one of my favorite rooms in the house. I bought the rug on Etsy and it fit in the room perfectly. The table had been under the TV in our sunroom in Grosse Pointe and is another sentimental piece. It was left in the basement of a house my parents bought in West Hartford, Connecticut. It was stripped and taken by my younger brother for his apartment and then when I moved to Salt Lake City, I took it for my living room. John removed a board from it in Grosse Pointe because he thought the table was too wide for our sunroom. I have always saved the board in hopes I could add it back and use the table as a dining room table one day. Finally, the day had come, albeit briefly! (The board is actually not back in it, I still have it though!)

The Mudroom

The mudroom was very narrow and hard to photograph. I loved it! It's the first house we have ever had a mudroom in and having a room leading in and out to the breezeway and garage was heavenly.

Funny aside, we were just watching an episode of Flip or Flop last week and they used this mudroom tile as a backsplash in the kitchen!

That completes the tour of the first floor. I hope you'll come back and see the rest.

Thank you for visiting,

Kerry