:a tiny house tour:

Take a peek into our home

This is a small tour of our house. We don't have a tiny home, although I'm mildly obsessed with the idea. Who knows? Maybe when Stella ships off to college, we'll downsize to 700 sq. ft. or less. Take the money and run. 

In the meantime, here are a couple rooms in my home that I spend a substantial amount of time in with my family. Our living room, dining room and whatever this other weird space off of our dining room is. We'll call it the green couch room. 

A few years ago, a friend visited our home for the first time and she said she liked our style (she's an incredibly talented graphic designer, so this was a high compliment imo) and she loved how it felt lived in. 

God, I hope so. We definitely do a lot of living in our house! This sapphire couch from Interior Define serves as both a home theater for my Harry Potter viewing parties with Stella and as her personal obstacle course. She sometimes piles every pillow on the first floor (of which there are a great many) into the corner and will 'trust fall' backward or leap into the middle. I'll usually tell her she's getting too big to rough house on the couch like that but if I'm being honest, I adore how she plays on our furniture. 

We love a white house but with a big black dirty dog and a sloppy kid and self-tanner season, we're realistic about the fact that there's no way we could invest in white decor and keep it looking decent for more than a year. And frankly it's just not us. On the other hand, we're obsessed with grey. Whenever we look for something new, we do our best to move away from the shade but inevitably we agree that we just won't like whatever it is quite as long if it isn't grey. When we redid this house, we painted the entire thing this dove grey color mostly as a cost-savings measure. The contractor had this left over from a previous job, we liked it so we went with it everywhere. And we're still pleased with it. So we own our shade. It suits us. 

Our gallery wall has a few stories tucked into it. A Pearl Jam concert, a couple of our favorite murals from our old city neighborhood, a king's head I got for my first apartment when I lived on my own, Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Pittsburgh. Our memories together hang over us always. 

Perfection is not our deal. Tidy, yes. But perfectly fluffed and adorned, no. In this house, you should be able to plop down anywhere at any time and feel as though you were meant to be there all along. This chair is CJ's throne. It's his favorite spot during college football season (a coaster fits just perfectly on the arm btw) and his second favorite overall. It's the corner of the couch that gets everyone's vote as best spot in the house. 

Our dining room table weighs ten billion pounds. It was an awesome find by my darling husband on World Market. It looked almost exactly like a Restoration Hardware table we admired at a fraction of the cost. 

Three of the four photographs in that quad were taken by an old friend of ours who lived in our building downtown when we first moved to Pittsburgh. She was a nurse who taught herself photography and now she's one of the best. Beth is brilliant. She's one of the first people ever to play with me on the streets of Pittsburgh for my old blog many, many moons ago. I still love the photos we picked up from her.

This green couch! There's a story, of course. My husband occasionally likes to find mid-century modern furniture, refinish it and sell it (or keep it depending on how much I love it). During his searches, usually on Craig's List, he'll come across some crazy stuff, as I'm sure you can imagine. But sometimes he finds these little gems that seem too good to be true. One is the carrara marble table pictured here (he was going to sell it and I said absolutely not). The other is this green couch. I guess a young woman was trying to offload it. She was moving and didn't want to take it with her. Plus, she had accidentally gotten a bit of blue ink on the seat so she decided she wanted something different. CJ showed interest, went to check it out (how bad is this stain?) and when he saw that the stain was hardly noticeable he decided to do the lady a favor and take this couch off her hands. The result for us is an eye-popping accent amidst all the grey and brown. It's a comfortable spot with a ton of natural light where I love to read a book or my newspaper. I don't do it nearly often enough but I know I have the perfect place to go when it happens.  

That's it! Not much to it really. We love grey everything, local artists and Craig's List steals. We're simple folk. 

I hope you've enjoyed this tiny house tour! If you're curious about where we picked up any of these things, let me know. CJ does a lot of our decor scouting and he's found some pretty awesome gems during his searches. 

photos // lauren