Introducing Our Yellow Prairie House in Texas

Introducing our yellow prairie house in Texas!

Hey friends!  Gosh, I can’t believe it has been over three months since I have written a blog post.  That is the longest I have went without blogging since I began this little blog of mine.  You see, we relocated halfway across the country back in July.  And with moving came new jobs, a new school for our kiddo, and the purchase of our new home in Round Rock, Texas.  We are calling it our yellow prairie house!

As I am sure you can imagine, a lot goes into making a move this big, and with all of the chaos, something had to give.  And unfortunately, it was blogging.  I sure have missed my blog and all of you!  And we are finally starting to feel settled enough that it is time to get back to blogging.  And today, I am introducing the world to our little prairie house in Round Rock, which is a suburb about 15 minutes north of Austin.  So, without further ado, I would like to share a before home tour of our new home!  All of these photos were taken when we were in Round Rock looking at homes, and we landed a contract on this house.

Yellow Prairie House

If you follow me on Instagram, you have already seen all that has been going on around here since we moved in.  But for the blog, this is my first time revealing our new home.  One of the major things that attracted us to this particular house was the neighborhood.  It is such a quaint little village, where all of the homes are different colors and in a similar style to ours.  All of the houses have white picket fences surrounding the yards, and it put us immediately in the mindset of a beach town.  It happens to be the only neighborhood we saw that looks like this.

There is also a park on the right side of our home that has trees, picnic tables, and green space.  So no one will ever live on this side of our house.  Coming from West Virginia, this was very appealing to me personally.  The exterior of the house obviously needs power washed in these photos.  And the trees were in need of a good trim.

We do love the fact that this home has a sunroom on the back, and there is a patio that spans the whole width of the back of the house.  But we don’t exactly love the color that it is painted.  We have future plans to repaint all of the patio, and add a pergola, and maybe some sort of water feature.  But for now we are enjoying having a fenced in back yard where our dog, Tyson, can run around and play.

Before we go inside, I want to tell you a little about what type of house I was looking for in the first place.  It was important for me to find a home that we could live in comfortably, but at the same time, I wanted a home that needed some updates, so that we could put our own flavor on it.  So I wasn’t looking for a house that was completely move in ready and needed no changing.  After all, I am a home blogger, so I wanted a lot of fresh projects that I could share with all of you.

We had looked at this house incessantly online before we made our trip to Texas to house hunt.  We had even toyed with the idea of making an offer on it without seeing it, but we were to afraid to do that.  This house was the second home we toured.  And the very minute we pulled up at the curve, it just felt right.  The second we entered the front door, I felt like I was in my home.

This is the view inside from the front door.  As you can see, the ceilings and the walls are the same color.  And I apologize in advance for the sub par photos, but these were taken from my phone, and the lighting was bad at the time.  The ceilings being so dark did not help matters, and I knew that I would want to paint the ceiling in this downstairs white as soon as possible.  This front are will eventually have a dining table and a small seating area with a couple of chairs and maybe an end table.  I do love the windows with pretty shutter that you see here to the right.  The window ledge is big enough to sit on.

This is looking back towards the front door, into the small half bath, and up towards the stairs.  I definitely want to install a more traditional looking stair railing at some point down the road.  But for now, I plan to paint this one and live with it for a bit.

The half bath is just a simple room with a pedestal sink, a toilet, and a window to the front porch.  I do like the mirror and the light fixture, but the rest, I can live without.  My husband likes the sink, but I’m not a big fan.  I would like to do a dramatic makeover in this space eventually.  I want to make this half bath something really special.

The room beyond the half wall is our main living room.  this is the space where we watch TV and hang out as a family.  It’s not a very large space, but it is large enough that we were able to fit two matching sofas in here that sit right across from one another.  I will be sharing more of the way this space looks like today soon.  It isn’t quite finished yet, but it is coming along nicely.

Another thing I want to change in the downstairs is the flooring.  The current flooring is vinyl or laminate (is there a difference?) and it is not a very good quality flooring, so one day we will replace it all.

This is the breakfast room right off of the kitchen.  There is another window with the pretty shutters in this space, and I do happen to like the chandelier in here.  It needs a good cleaning though.  I was able to use the dining table from or previous dining room in here, and the vintage buffet too.  I just took the leaf out of the table and now we have a round table in here.  It all fits very nicely.  You can see the dining table that I made over last winter, and the vintage buffet that I painted here.

This kitchen is really what sold me on the house.  Well, not really this kitchen exactly, but it was the vision I had to remodel this kitchen that sold me the most on this house.  We actually were able to purchase this house for less than we sold our home in WV for, so it left some room in the budget to do a major kitchen remodel.  But here is the kitchen when we first moved in.

It had oak cabinets from the 90’s, black appliances, and laminate counter tops.  It also had a two tiered island with outdated lighting above.  As soon as we had this house under contract, I began scheming and dreaming about the renovation we would do in here.

Actually, we got started with this kitchen renovation as soon as we moved in, and it is already almost finished!  I will be joining the One Room Challenge on October 4th, and sharing our entire kitchen renovation with you.  This was not a DIY project, we hired someone to do most of our remodel, and I will be doing a few DIY projects to finish off the space.  So I am very excited to share the whole thing with you for the One Room Challenge.  I will be sharing progress photos every week for 5 weeks and then the big reveal of our updated kitchen!

This photo was taken standing in the kitchen, looking out to our breakfast room, and the sun room.  I have always dreamed of having a sun room, so I am super excited about the possibilities in this room!

It’s not a very large room, but it is just big enough to add an outdoor sectional a coffee table, and maybe an end table.  But here is a look at the sun room as it is now.  We have actually been using this room to break down and store boxes as we have been unpacking, so this room still hasn’t even been touched.

Our garage is quite interesting.  The width of it is only large enough for one car, but it is long enough to fit two cars, one in front of the other.  This is not a problem for us.  Even when we lived in WV, we have only ever parked one car in our garage.  We will be using the back half of this garage for storage, and for my husband to have a space to work out.  Honestly, I don’t know that we will ever paint the walls in here.  At least not before every other project in this house is finished.

The rest of these photos are of the upstairs part of the house.  Having a bonus room at the top of the stairs was very high only list of things I was looking for in a new home.  This house only has three bedrooms, so the only way I would agree to go down to three bedrooms from four was if there were some type of extra space like this.  I would like to change out all of these railings in the upstairs as well.  The lighting in a good bit of this house is a little fancy for my taste, so I will be looking to slowly replace most of it.

The entire upstairs of this house has beautiful hard wood floors, and I really do like them.  This bonus room already looks completely different than it did in these photos.  You will see when you get down to the photos of the third bedroom that we had some built ins relocated from the bedroom into this bonus room.  We will be purchasing an upholstered daybed that looks a lot like a sofa.  The daybed will have a trundle that pulls out, so that two guest can sleep here when needed.  But it will function as a sofa for our every day lives.  This space will have a desk that we can sit down and work at, and another desk area for our child to do homework, and arts and crafts.

This space you are looking at below is still part of the bonus room area, and we had some of the built ins installed across this back wall.  This is the part of the room that will be serving as a craft and homework space.

These double doors lead into our master bedroom.  This is by far the largest master bedroom that either of us have ever had, and we love it!  Another feature I love is the double doors that lead into the room.

The blue paint color on the walls was not my taste at all, so I painted this room before we ever moved out furniture into it.  We also added a light to the existing ceiling fan using a ceiling fan light kit.  Because there was no overhead lighting, and I am not a fan of that.  This room is large enough to house our bed, a dresser, a large comfy chair that I plan to purchase in the future, and even a vanity area where I can sit and do my hair and makeup in the mornings.

Our master bedroom is in need of some minor updates, but it did check off some of my house requirements.  I wanted a bathroom that had two sinks, and a separate tub and shower.  This bathroom has all of those.  I would like to paint the cabinets, the walls, and have some lighting added over the tub and shower areas eventually.  I also want to replace the mirrors over the sink are and add a light that hold more lightbulbs.  I find this room to be too dark at night for my taste.

This is the second bathroom that is upstairs.  This is the bathroom my kids will use, and also guests who come to stay.  Although the vanity is good quality, it doesn’t fit with the style of house that I am going for.  I do like the gold sink and fixtures though, I think they add some character.  I have plans to add some shelves to this room, and maybe paint the vanity so that it will fit with my style more until we can afford to replace it.

This is our guest bedroom.  It had built ins installed on two walls when we moved in, and although we really liked them and thought they could be very useful, we need this room to serve as a guest room.  So we had these built ins relocated to our bonus room.

Unfortunately, when they were removed, we discovered that the hard wood floors were not underneath the cabinetry.  Fortunately, I was able to connect with the previous owner, who kindly gave us some flooring that she had leftover.  She brought it her and dropped it off, and we are currently waiting for someone to come and fix those.  We also have some repair work to do with the walls since removing the shelves and cabinets.

Lastly, this is our kiddo’s bedroom.  She fell in love with the chandelier in this room.  We have already begun a makeover in this space, to give her the bedroom of her dreams!  We bought a new bedroom suit, and painted the walls a pale pink.  I’ll be sharing it eventually.

And that, my friends, is your first look at our yellow prairie house!  We think this house is the perfect amount of liveable, and fixer upper.  So I plan to have may years of new projects coming your way!  I hope you enjoyed this little tour of our new home, and I hope you will begin to follow along once again on our journey to making this house our home.  Please join me next week as I join the One Room Challenge for the 4th time!  We will be sharing our kitchen renovation from start to finish, and I cannt wait to share the big reveal with you!

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