An Update on My Life as a Homeowner

Hey there! Hope that you had a fabulous weekend. My weekend was pretty wild (literally – I spent it in the wild!), but more on that later this week.

Since I’ve been a homeowner now for 4 months (whew, where has the time gone?!) and some of you have asked for decor updates, I thought I’d talk today about what life has been like on the house front and show you a few highlights of my place. I’ve certainly been loving life in Southern California since making the decision to move back!

My favorite room in my house is definitely the kitchen, not that this is a surprise to anyone. It’s nice and open with plenty of room, which I can especially appreciate having lived in an apartment with a tiny kitchen in the past.

The house came with wall shelves in the kitchen, which I promptly decorated with my many, many wine glasses. I also have a wine rack and tapestry in another part of the kitchen, and there’s lots of other wine decor around. This room makes the wino in me very happy!

Also in the kitchen is what I like to think of as my Venetian area. My parents gave me the below painting as a house warming gift, and on either side of that sits two canvas prints of pictures I took while in Venice last year. The piano that my hubby gave me for my birthday in August sits pretty in there.

Fun tidbit: We had the piano tuned after we moved it in, and found out that the piano is nearly 100 years old. Pretty neat right? We’ve got a bit of an antique on our hands!

Speaking of canvas prints, I’m kind of obsessed with them. I take a photo that I’ve shot and buy a Groupon or Living Social deal to put it on canvas at a really reasonable price. I also have a San Diego sunset canvas, one of a picture from my trip to Hawaii, and a photo I took during wine harvest season in Livermore Valley last year in my house. They’re so fun!

My living room has a cozy, lovey kind of vibe to it – with blankets and pillows everywhere, and photos of my hubby and me and our loved ones all around. We have a fireplace in there that we’ve yet to test out, and Harley definitely does a lot of hanging out in that room, as you can see below. 

We also have 3 bedrooms – one that serves as the office, one master and one guest room. The office and guest room are not yet anything special and still need some work, and the master is finished but pretty cozy, so I’ll move on to my favorite place to sip a smoothie, drink some wine or listen to some music… the backyard!

After doing much research into finding a patio furniture set, I finally found one last summer that was cute, comfy and didn’t break the bank. I love our canopy area and eat dinner out there often.

This summer I managed to not kill everything before getting lots of herbs, tomatoes, and pretty flowers to enjoy. Every time I saw a new batch of baby heirloom tomatoes pop up I’d get excited, and I love being able to snip off some basil or parsley for a meal.

I was also pleasantly surprised when the overgrown, dead plants that were in the backyard when I moved in started to grow gorgeous roses once they were trimmed and watered. Aren’t they just beautiful?! 

Don’t get the wrong idea, home owning has definitely not just been all roses and sunshine. It’s interesting to find all these “surprises” after you’ve moved in, especially when you only saw the home once before buying it as I did, fully furnished at the time nonetheless. Let’s just say that the owners before us loved to hang up tons of stuff with long, crazy nails, and do things the cheap and lazy way. I’m talking brushing a different color paint on the wall and just leaving it there, and leaving the entertainment center where it is and painting around it. I wish I was joking!

Case in point: They left a nice “shed” – if you can call it that – full of junk for us to clean up along the side of the house. So sweet of them right?

I think we might plant the garden over there next year since it’s a somewhat shaded area and because those are baby lemon and lime trees already planted there (which have started to produce some fruit!). We also have a crazy flourishing orange tree in the front yard, which people in the neighborhood frequently ask if they can pick from.

We also had a crazy ant situation going on when we moved in. I tried every natural and pet-friendly remedy around before finally losing my mind at the many hundreds of ants infesting mostly my kitchen and bedroom, and called an exterminator to come spray around the house. Best.move.ever. We have not seen any ants in the house in the months since, and happily I’m no longer having nightmares about swarms of ants crawling all over me. I’m getting itchy just typing that!

Over the past couple of months I’ve learned that being a pool owner is a bit like being a chemist. You have to keep everything balanced for it all to work right, and that took a bit to get the hang of. Let’s just say that the employees at Leslie’s Pool Supplies know our faces well.

There are definitely a lot of things that I’d like to eventually accomplish with the house, including repainting and updating some things (I’m pushing for new kitchen appliances sometime in the near future!). What’s nice is that the house is very livable as is, so there’s no huge rush. House projects tend to take up a ton of time, and we normally like to go have fun and enjoy SoCal on the weekends, so the improvements have been slow-moving… but eventually we’ll get there. I hope so at least!

Are you a homeowner? What’s your home decor style like? What would your dream house include?