Home Sweet [Imperfect] Home

Since I’ve been spending so much more time at home lately, and really enjoying my time home with the baby, I’ve been in a major nest mode! I’ve been doing little projects, like trying to clean out drawers, and have really just fallen back in love with our little house, despite its imperfections!

Throughout my life, I’ve lived in multiple places. I grew up under my parents’ roof with my family, where so many of my favorite memories were made. In college, I lived in the dorm, then in the Chi O house with dozens of friends! After college, I lived in a little flat in Oxford, England for a few months with a childhood friend while we were there for a work program. When I moved back, I got an apartment in Jackson with two of my best friends. From there, I moved into a house with my hubby after we got married!

Our very first house.

It was all ours.

I’d never lived in a place before where I got to call all of the shots (or be one of two who called all of them!)

Even though our house is far from perfect, it’s perfect for us! That’s why I was delighted to be able to share about our place as part of Urban Compass‘s Starter Stories project all about quirks and how you make a house a home.

Like I mentioned… It’s filled with imperfections…

The hot side of our kitchen sink faucet is cold and the cold side is hot. Our back door handle gets jammed all of the time, making it way more difficult to open that door than it should be. Since I painted 75% of our walls myself, it may or may not look like an elementary child did the painting… (I’m definitely not a very skilled painter!) I wish we had a pantry. We need more storage space. Our carpet desperately needs to be replaced. When it rains really hard, there is a little leak in our dining room. Our dogs have completely destroyed portions of our backyard. I never in a million years would’ve picked the brick thats on the exterior of our home.

These are the oddities that make our house ours. And truly, until we get ready to move one day, I’m ok that these things are the way they are!  (Mostly, anyway!) They make our house unique, give it a personality, and actually make me love it even more than I would otherwise (which doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s the truth!)

We have made a few updates, mainly in the kitchen, that also help make our house ours. When we moved in, peachy tan tile had thrown up all over the house… It was in all the bathrooms (on the counters and the floors), and all over the kitchen! Floors, countertops, backsplash, island… It was a peach tile nightmare…

Thankfully we had the opportunity to update the kitchen and I like it so much more now! The bathrooms still have the peach situation going on, but it was completely overwhelming in the kitch, so getting to replace it all in there was a dream come true! We now have brick on the floors, a wood-top island, and new countertops and backsplash. Much more my style!

The great thing about having an imperfect home is that there is always a little project to do (even if it’s something as small as patching and painting a nick in the wall!) which, in my opinion, makes home owning such an adventure!

I think one of my favorite DIY projects was painting the brick mantel white. It used to be the same as the exterior bricks, which Price actually likes. Convincing him to let me paint it was quite a feat! But once he gave me the go-ahead, I got straight to work and have not regretted it since! Even if it does show residual smoke stains from our wood burning fireplace!

I also absolutely love the updates we’ve done to the back of our house. We added a deck with a little pergola thingy so we could string lights up, and we added a TV. When the temperature is nice outside, we live on that deck! We have coffee out there, eat dinner out there, watch movies, have parties, have friends over to sit around the fire pit… It’s been one of the best investments we’ve made into this home!

Now that you know all about what’s weird about our house, why I love it, and a few things we’ve done to make it a little more “ours”, I want to know what your favorite quirks or fix-ups to your own home are! Please — DO tell! 🙂

>> Thank you to Urban Compass for supporting this post! <<