A little bit of nostalgia...part 2

Continuing on from my post here, here's the upstairs tour of our lovely former DC row home.

The Stairway/Landing:

You may wonder why I'm spending any time talking about a stairway.  Well, this wasn't just any old stairway.  First off, it had a really neat feature - an up lit "museum" ledge, shown below, that served as a unique architectural element to an otherwise fairly nondescript home.  We used this ledge mainly to hold plants - we had 2 cats who were always trying to get into the plants, and this was one of the few places in the home that they couldn't get to!  The second neat feature was the fact that there was a skylight in the roof directly over the stairwell - this allowed a great deal of light to enter the home, and really made it feel a lot more like a loft living space than a row home - we used to like to describe our house as "DC row house meets NY city loft" - not that we had any experience living in a NYC loft!  Here are the pics - the hole in the wall you see to the right is actually an interior "window" into our bedroom - very cool feature:

Master Bedroom:

Here's our master bedroom.  First things first - the main reason that we chose purple as our wall color was due to the fact that our original bedding was grey/black/white/purple striped bedding from Nautica - a gift off of our registry.  However, it didn't hold up very well, and we ended up returning it to Bed Bath and Beyond (this store has the GREATEST return policy EVER!).    But, we liked the wall color, so it stayed, and we went with white/black bedding and accessories so as to not compete with the wall color.  I'm sure this was probably the first thing the new homeowner changed about the house, but that's fine with me - owning a home is all about making it YOURS, right?  As I mentioned above, I loved the interior window in our room - complete with wooden shutters which could be closed for privacy if you had company.  Since it was really only the two of us most of the time, we kept the shutters open.  The other shutters you see on the exterior windows were original to the house, and existed throughout the home - I liked the rustic feel they lent to the house, and put them back up even after we had to take them all down after having all of our windows replaced.  This room also had 2 closets in it - a rarity in DC which we loved.  I did end up eventually taking over both of the closets in this room and relegating Robb to the guest room closet, but oh well...

The Upstairs Foyer:

This area between our 2 bedrooms served as a pseudo-office for us, as you can see from the desk in the lower picture.  You can also see in the lower picture how we used to use the metal office organizer "rack", which I talk about in this post.  In the top right of the top picture, you can see a curtain just outside the master bedroom door - this curtain was hiding a floor to ceiling bookshelf, which we used for additional storage.  The doorway you see in the middle of the bottom picture leads to our one and only full bath/laundry room (as our washer/dryer was in the bathroom as well).

The Guest Bedroom:

We never really used this room to its fullest potential, I'm sad to say.  The layout was always a bit awkward, which made furniture placement tricky, and we didn't feel the need to invest in a guest bed, since we didn't have overnight guests that often, so it ended up being used as a second family room.  The wall color we chose for this room was "Corn Husk Green" by Behr.  I found the red bench at a bargain outlet for only $20!  It has a much better home here in our Virginia house.   The plaid couch you see in the pic was a hand me down from Robb's parents - it has since found a better home elsewhere in the universe that is Craigslist.  The wardrobe has also been sold via Craigslist. 

The Bathroom:

This is another room where a "before" pic would be really helpful.  It looked NOTHING like this when we moved in! I spend one Sunday ripping up the old tile floor, but then we had professionals install the new (ceramic tile made to look like white marble) floor.  I'm happy to report that I installed the medicine cabinet and vanity and sink myself - with some help from my dad.  We had the tub reglazed, and a new shower door installed, and a tile surround installed to match the floor.  The paint we chose in this room was "Gull Wing Grey" by Sherwin Williams. 

So that's it!  That concludes my 2-part installment of memories about our DC house. Stay tuned for more junk drawer makeovers with my next post!