Would you like to meet the inside of my house?

Last week, I introduced you to the outside of my house in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Would you like to see the inside? I thought you might! Come on in, and and we’ll go back in time to take a peek at how it looked in 2018.

This is the living room! The baseboard radiators aren’t my favorite, but let’s focus on the beautiful wood vigas, the hand-textured plaster walls, the steel casement windows, the oak floors, and the traditional adobe fireplace (I’m trying very hard to not use the term “kiva fireplace,” having learned only recently that this is a culturally disrespectful misuse of the word “kiva.”). It’s a beautiful room. It feels like a home without even doing a single thing to it!

The house (built in 1950) is small by modern-day standards—only about 875 square feet. When Allen Stamm built the houses in this neighborhood, he did so with the assumption that families buying them because of their affordability would eventually build additions. For that reason, the house sits on a relatively large yard. And while almost all of the other houses in the neighborhood do indeed now have additions (and additional additions, and even second floors), this one does not. That’s one of the things that was so appealing about it to my boyfriend when he bought it—he was looking for a house that hadn’t been altered much. This one fit the bill.

The dining area is open to the living room. I guess it’s kind of a nook? But I feel like nooks generally have a third wall? I don’t know if that’s right. Anyway, let’s call this the dining room. I’m not a huge fan of “open concept” living spaces, so part of my immediate focus when I saw the house was figuring out to make the dining area feel separate from the living space. Fortunately, the kitchen is not open to the rest of the house.

Here’s the kitchen! The countertop and the floor are each their own special brand of ugly, but the cabinets are original (YAY YAY YAY), and I absolutely LOVE that the vigas continue into the room. I’ve noticed that sometimes kitchens and bathrooms in Santa Fe don’t have vigas, but I really like how continuous they are throughout this entire house. They’re even inside of the cabinets! The moment I saw the kitchen I started planning out exactly how it would look one day.

This is the sole bathroom in the house. The shower tiles and vinyl flooring aren’t original (neither is the toilet), but everything else is. It’s a really special little room, and I can’t wait to show you what we’ve done with it. I know it’s not popular to say you like small bathrooms, but I really do. I’ve never understood the point of things like double sinks and bathrooms so large that you can put a chair in them. Then again, I don’t have kids. I feel like kids probably make you want to have a bigger everything.

This is a very sad photo of a room that’s not sad at all! It’s the slightly larger of the two bedrooms, and it looks very cute now. I don’t know why I didn’t take a better before photo?

Here’s the smaller of the two bedrooms, which is now my office or studio or whatever you want to call it. It’s the room I’m sitting in right now while I write this post. I spend a lot of time in this room.

BONUS!! Here’s a sneak-peek of the backyard, including the super-cool sunken patio. I love this patio, and eventually it will be adorable. Right now it’s not adorable. The yard is also not yet nice to look at, but…someday. We’ve done some stuff already like cut down dead trees, dig out monstrous weeds, and remove weird landscaping materials, but the backyard is going to take a lot of labor and materials and creative thought and planning (oh, and money), and I’m kind of short on all of that right now. SOMEDAY. Someday it will be an oasis.

So that’s how the inside of the house looked before we moved in and got started with renovations and restorations and decorations! I am super-duper excited to share all of the projects I’ve had going on for the last couple of years. It’s all still very much in progress, so there’s going to be a ton of catching up to do. I can’t decide whether to start with the kitchen or the bathroom! What do you think? Which project would you be most excited to see first?