An autumn house tour

Julia at Hooked on Houses is doing a Tour of Homes, and I'm excited to participate. Here's a peek at our house, all dressed for autumn.

First, the front of the house. Our house is pretty good sized, but it's built on a hillside, so from the front it doesn't appear too big. This is one of the things I like about the house.

To the right of the front door is the seating area of my front porch, which I've tried to make into an outdoor living room. To see more of this space, click here.

Now come on in!

Here's the foyer. That's Cocoa the pound puppy pretending that she doesn't care that I'm taking pictures. Straight ahead is the living room; to the right is the dining room. On the left is my husband's study (that I failed to photograph in the daylight), the stairway, and a hall leading to the powder room and the master bedroom.



Here's the living room. I'll try to give you a 360 degree look at it.

This room is the trickiest room I've ever tried to decorate. It has lots of lovely elements. . . I love the fireplace and the built-in entertainment center and the built-in bookcases and all the French windows and doors. . . but all together it's a room with which I've struggled. If looking at the pictures gives you any wonderful ideas about space planning for this room, please share them with me! This really is an old-fashioned living room. We sit here and talk, or read, or watch TV together, or entertain guests. Definitely not a living room just for show, this is a room we live in. In fact, if you were in the room right now and could peek under the coffee table, you'd see my exercise stepper. I pull it out from under the coffee table every day and exercise while watching taped episodes of Designed to Sell. I don't want to sell my house, but watching the show keeps me motivated to cut down on clutter as much as possible.

From this angle you can see into the dining room to the right and into the kitchen straight ahead.

The kitchen is the thing that really sold us on this house. This is a working kitchen, believe me: I cook, my husband cooks, our middle son (an Alton Brown fan) cooks. Unfortunately, we have more cooking types than cleaning types, but oh well. To tell the truth, I've always kinda liked doing dishes. It's a good thing!

And from the kitchen/breakfast area you can make your way out to the screened porch, where we'll end our tour. I love the porch at this time of year--after a summer of keeping the door tightly locked so as to shut out the hot air, we can finally live on our porch again.

I wish you could come over for a cup of coffee or some apple cider. We could look at all my autumn decorations and enjoy this cool weather. Thanks for going on this little virtual tour with me!