Welcome Home: The Lounge

We're back!!

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday and a happy new year.  We certainly did.  After an absolute whirlwind of a month (18 months, actually), I am happy to say that we have moved in to the new house and are settled.  
 

Now that we're in, a lot of people have asked me what it's like to build a house.  Here's my best shot at explaining the process:

Building a house is a lot like taking a boat trip.  There will be fantastic parts of the trip where the water is calm, the sun is shining, and the horizon is beautiful.  There will also be times where the waves are choppy and you lose your lunch over the side of the boat.  Who you choose to work with will have a huge impact on how often the water is calm.  Eventually, your trip will be over and you'll go back to shore.  Whether it was long or short, fabulous or awful, it's the moment you step off the boat that you realize how different your time at sea was from a normal, regular day.

That's where we are now.  We are back on the shore.  And now that we're here and unpacked, we have the perspective of looking back on the process, and it's through this perspective that we feel like we can finally exhale.  It's an amazing feeling.  We did it and I am so grateful to be here.  

There are so many people who helped us throughout the process - far too many to count.  To everyone who had a part in our process, thank you.  Thank you to all of the neighbors who were supportive of our home, even when the construction inconvenienced their lives.  Thank you to all of the family, friends, and coworkers who checked in, asked questions, listened to the good and bad stories and provided support.  

​Most importantly, thank you to Pancake.  

Without my wife, this house would never have happened.  I would have never thought to test the market and sell our old house.  I would have never found the land that we bought.  And I would have never had the gumption to design a house on a seemingly unbuildable lot without her constant and unwavering support.  She made this house possible, and I will be forever grateful to her for fulfilling this dream.

Enough with the sappy stuff.  We're in the house, so let's see the house, right?!  Let's start with the lounge, which is also our guest bedroom.  Here's what it looked like before we started designing/furnishing it:

It was  perfectly nice space, but nothing about it was particularly exciting.  The lounge is between Stinky Face and Monkey's bedrooms so we use it as the spot for our bedtime routine.  As such, Pancake wanted it to have a fun vibe for the kids.  The first thing we did was put up wallpaper:

Pretty fun, right?  And technically it's contact paper, not wallpaper.  It's basically a giant, removable sticker.  So if we get tired of it, we can just peel it off without hurting the drywall underneath.

Next we needed something to sit on.  Since 90% of the time, this room is a lounge for the kids, we didn't want to have a giant bed taking up floor space.  But we do have family and friends come visit, so we needed to have a place for them to sleep.  To make things just a touch more complicated for ourselves, we didn't like the idea of a sleeper sofa in this room.  So what to do?

I designed custom floor cushions.  For the 90% that this room is a lounge, the cushions sit on the floor and essentially make an "L" shaped couch.  For times that this room needs to be a bedroom, the cushions can be rearranged into a queen size mattress.  And since they're individual cushions, the arrangement is totally flexible - the kids can have fun putting them wherever they want.  Here's how my sketches translated to the real thing:

Lounge for the kids

Cushions rearranged into a queen size mattress

Memory foam mattress topper

Bing, bang, boom - bed

And did you notice that light fixture?  That's custom too.  I'll tell you how I made it in a future post.

Since I'm super thoughtful, I'll save you the trouble of scrolling up and down for the before/after:

Going to be in town, and need a place to stay?  Gimme a shout - we have a pretty comfy spot for you.

​Bye for now,
TJ