Second stop is the other half of the dining room. The bones of this house are surprisingly contemporary given the fact it was built in 1967. I prefer the intimacy of designated spaces and don’t generally care for open concept homes but they did a great job planning this house to have just enough openness for the dog to run, yet not so much that I feel like I’m living in a dimension-less box with a quartz island in the middle.
We got beat out by cash investors on almost every single home we looked at before this one, and because we are obsessive we would drive back by to see what they’d done: without fail, ripped out every architectural feature and wall to create a box with a kitchen in the corner and a bunch of fake hardwood for the rest of the now 1500 square foot living space. Haaaaaaaaaate!
Back to the point: the house we did get. There is a lot of blank space in our home, at least in my maximalist opinion. This is partly due to the fact we were constantly in project mode and would barely semi-finish a room or repair before moving onto the next, and partly because my husband cannot stand “happy crap” or clutter of any kind so I have to really warm him up to new items before I bring them into the space. We did, however, leave the wall above the fireplace intentionally bare so we could use it as the screen for our projector. Long-term I would install a hidden retractable screen so I could redo all the art in this room, but the blank wall was pleasant to my other half and worked well for the time being.