We moved into our first home in 2006.  It was a wild ride.  I was almost nine months pregnant and my water broke the morning after our move-in day. We had had a rough night sleeping on a slowly deflating air mattress in our mostly-empty old apartment.  Trixie came 3 weeks early.  I was looking forward to those weeks to do some unpacking, but instead we spent 5 days in the hospital and then brought home a gorgeous, healthy baby girl to our new house filled with boxes.
Our first night in our first ever house was our first night home with a baby!  My mom and a few other family members worked hard unpacking the necessities when they weren’t with us in the hospital.  Needless to say, most of those boxes stayed packed for a long time.  Some of them are still packed in our current basement – no joke.

About 2.5 years later, in 2008, I introduced a new product line of cashmere baby items to my business Kistner Supply.  As part of promoting the new line I worked with Gabby Blair at DesignMom.com to do a home tour for Cookie Magazine.  These shots are from that 2008 tour and interview.

Our house was a typical 2.5 bedroom/1 bath 1000 square foot Chicago bungalow.  Like many bungalows,

you enter into a small foyer, then into the living room and you walk back through the dining room to get to the kitchen.  The entrance to the bedrooms and bath are through the dining room.

In our home I decided to switch the living and dining rooms so that the main living space wasn’t all the way in the front of the house.  The end result was a larger space that didn’t have to work around an entry and fireplace, and that was closer to the bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen.  When we put the house up for sale in 2013 I switched them back to the traditional layout.

To see what the house looked like when we put it on the market stay tuned for another post coming soon.

Also coming soon is a before & after post of our old house.

And of course you can see these three tours of our current home: Before & After, Holiday Tour and The Old House We Love to Live In.

Living Room

We fell in love with the original woodwork in the house and the grass-paper wallpaper.

The coffee, endtables, stool and magazine rack belonged to my parents in the 1960s and the large brown chair was something my grandparent’s purchased in the 1950s (at one point it was upholstered in brown vinyl!).