Our house - the layout

I've debated the route I'm going to take in terms of the path of my posts.  I considered doing one long post filled with the "before" pics of our house, and then smaller posts detailing each room and the projects that went into them, but in the end, I've decided to do room by room before and afters, with additional posts or tutorials where there were several projects that went into a room.  But to start, I think it would be helpful to give you an overall summary of our house and its layout.

I think the architectural style of our home is considered Southern Colonial Revival or something, owing mostly to the big white pillars out front.

 

Our house sits on a hill, elevated from the street below, with a circular driveway out front (which is super fun in the snow and ice, let me tell you!), but the backyard is very flat.  The backyard backs up to the golf course in our neighborhood, which I love for the fact that a) there are no houses behind us and b) it makes for a very picturesque setting, with all the well maintained grass and trees (and the occasional sand trap!).

You can see it in the background of this photo - did I mention that deer are frequent visitors to our yard?  Took some getting use to at first, but now we pay them just about as much attention as the squirrels.  Below is a view of our house from the back - looks a tad different from the front, huh?  Forgive the photo quality - it's a copy of a copy -

In terms of the interior layout of our house, I think it was originally built as homes located on the waterfront so often are, with the living and dining rooms at the back of the house (where the view is), and the kitchen and family rooms at the front of the house.  So really, it's a sort of "flipped" layout from a traditional colonial.  Here's the floor plan that was provided to us when we first looked at the house - note that we call the room that is noted as the "family" the living room, and vice versa. The "gym" is now the playroom, but we will get to that in a later post -

So, now that you can see the overall layout of our house and the orientation, I will dive right in to a room by room reveal of where things stand currently, and what they used to look like.  Up next - the living room....