Home Sweet Carolina Home Tour 10 '07

Home Sweet Carolina Home Tour 1

We’ve been in our new home nearly six month and I thought y’all might like a tour of our South Carolina Villa (that’s what So Carolina real estate agents call these homes.)  Enjoy.

Entering the front door you can see the entire length of the downstairs.  From front to the rear are the kitchen, dining and living room areas. We had a lot of custom features added to the home while it was being constructed.  Tile floors downstairs, display cabinets, and a fireplace in the living room were just a few of the upgrades.  

 (Also notice all the ceiling lighting …. I will write more about that topic in another blog.)

I love the spaciousness of the downstairs.   I want to paint some very large paintings to match the scale of the room.   Until I get around to this project, I decided to leave the walls bare and soften the view with houseplants (as opposed to cluttering up the view with smaller paintings).

Viewed from the rear of the house you see the dining room, entryway, and a portion of the kitchen.  All of the furniture in this area (except the carpets) is new. As you probably know, I sold a lot of my big antique furnishings before we moved here.  I really wanted a fresh start with a more contemporary look.  Hah!   As it turns out, Bruce didn’t want contemporary.  After much negotiation we settled on an Island Colonial look which fits in well with the local historical plantation setting in which we now live.  Finding furnishings that we both really like is easier said than done. It is taking forever, but the place is coming together nicely. 

At the front of the house, to the right of the entry is the kitchen.  We upgraded the granite countertops, and the cabinets to cherry wood, and added a number of small appliances (e.g. a hot water dispenser) while the house was under construction.  Bruce put up the pot rack over the sink.

At the far rear of the house, off of the living room, is a large room that was originally designed as the master bedroom.   We are using it as our recreation room… It holds our piano, TV, and exercise equipment, as well as a lounge chair and sleeper sofa. (It has a large Jacuzzi & shower bathroom off of it.  Hence the room can double as a guest room in a pinch).   Again, we are holding off on wall decorations.  It’s not pretty, but it is very functional

During the construction we upgraded most of the upstairs to teakwood flooring.

Above and below are views of the master bedroom.

   I love the way it looks out into the tree-tops of the woods behind us.  

We are currently having an electric fireplace installed in the master bedroom.

There are four bathrooms is the house…two upstairs and two downstairs. The bathroom off of the upstairs master bedroom has been turned into a ladies retreat.

 It is completed with pretty pictures (painted by yours truly) and other girly accessories.

There were originally four bedrooms in the house.   Three of those now serve a dual purpose.  One of the upstairs bedrooms serves as our office.   It has our desks, our main computer equipment), new bookcases and a new leather sleeper sofa (with a padded air mattress so our guests get a good night’s sleep). 

The final room is my art studio. It was the last room to be finalized as we were using it to store all the miscellaneous stuff that would eventually go into other rooms of the house. I just completed setting up my art studio last month, and have painted three pictures since then.  Two of them can be seen in these photos. (Do you like them?  I will do another blog in this topic later.)  For obvious reasons we installed heavy grade vinyl flooring in this room.  All of the storage cabinets and bookcases were bought off of the web, and Bruce put them together for me. Not shown here is a small washroom, and a 10’X10’ climate controlled attic which adjoins the studio. Both are used for art storage.

That pretty much completes the inside tour.  The front exterior of the house is still very bare looking.  It hasn’t changed much because the front yard will be torn up when the builder repaves all of the driveways next month.  HOA rules restrict me from planting anything in the ground that is not in a container.  I am getting around doing a lot of container gardening on my screened porch and on my deck. 

Deck as seen from the office.

Deck  Herb Garden as seen from the master bedroom.

Above: Screened Porch tropical plants.

In the back of the villa there is a small strip of community flowerbeds and grass separating us from the woods.  

We have all of our birdfeeders set up here, so we can watch them feeding from the office window and living room. They are also good at attracting squirrels and raccoons and hawks feeding on the birds.