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Prairie Home Tour



Welcome!


I struggle with housework--so the day my whole house is clean--all the rooms at the same time--and the sun is shining--and the camera is charged--and no one is home and underfoot--well, that's the day we'll have a whole house tour of all the rooms.

And then I'll change something and it'll be outdated!

In the meantime....

In June of 2013, I accepted an "Accessory-Free" challenge--and decided to clean and photograph the house for a home tour. If you'd like a quick look at all the rooms at once, from back then, that's here.

In 2011, I tried to do a house tour looking at each room in turn. I managed to present only three. The Kitchen,, the Living Room, and the Dining Room.

If you're curious to see how the rooms have evolved, year by year, from 2007, when I started the blog, to 2014, see the Retrospective: A Series of Rooms. (More below.)


Background:

Our house is home to four people; me, and my husband (called Daedalus back in the day when I was afraid to use our real names. His name is Chris.) and our two children, (our son, Ben (though I called him Caius a few times) and our daughter, Emma (sometimes referred to as Aurelia) and a four legged toddler, our beagle, Stomp. (His real name).

The house is known as a "story and a half." There's about 800 square feet on the ground floor, 400 upstairs. The basement is unfinished. We have three bedrooms, and a bath and a half.

It was built in 1948 as part of a new subdivision on an old farm, at what was then the edge of this city on the Canadian prairie. There were still war shortages in effect which is why the house has no eaves. It also has outmoded electricity, cracks in the walls and ceilings, a choppy floor plan, an inadequate kitchen, oak floors, archways and plasterboard walls.

Today, our neighbourhood is greatly coveted. Among those in real estate, our houses are referred to as "$400,000 tear downs." Our lots are large and city council is pro-development, so lots of duplexes and skinny houses are going up as well. Most of the houses still standing are rented to University students--and have been for some time--and that's been hard on these modest houses.

Fall 2015

Ours has been lucky, though, and we're lucky to have it.
(Living room on the left, dining room on the right.)

Come on in. You are so welcome.

The Floorplans:
(North is at the top.)

Main Floor:



Second Floor:
Basement:



The Rooms:

In the fall of 2015, to celebrate this blog's eighth anniversary, I did a retrospective of each and every room in my house and all the changes I'd made over the years, including the outdoors.

Here are those posts.

Introduction to the Series.
1. The Front and Back Yards, 2007-2014
2. Passageways: Entrys, Hallways and Stairs, 2007-2014
3. The Bathrooms, Laundry Room and Pantry, 2007-2014
4. The Bedrooms, 2007-2014
5. The Dining Room, 2007-(early) 2015
6. The Kitchen, 2007-2014
7. The Living Room, 2007-2015


We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us. 
Sir Winston Churchill