OK! We live in Auburn now! I can’t believe we pulled it off. We have been here for one month and each day gets a little easier/better/calmer. It has been a REALLY challenging month and our move was just one piece of it. Our former town in the Bay Area was near the epicenter of the horrible LNU Lightening Complex Fire, causing heavy smoke over the whole Bay and Sacramento area. Friends of ours lost their home to the fire, a farm I love burned down. Then alllllll of the other fires started and continue to burn today. There are dozens of fires burning in Northern California right now in various stages of containment. The air is thick with horrible smoke, the air quality terrible. We check air quality and particulate matter multiple times throughout the day on several different apps and sites. Those photos and videos you have seen on the news? Yep, it really is that bad. We had about two weeks of 100+ degree weather which made every single thing in life worse. No relief, even at night. Friends of ours (and former neighbors) were the victims of a horrendous tragedy when their 18 year old son was gunned down while at work. Our family was devastated; it still doesn’t seem real. That happened two days after we moved. Add the pandemic and weird distance learning all of our kids are doing with the general apocolyptic world we live in and YES, the past month has been a bit much. At a time in our lives when we desperately needed the safety and peace of HOME we were literally saying goodbye to timeworn comfort and setting up a brand new home. There were a few times over the first two weeks were I honestly was not sure we were going to make it back to a sense of normalcy, whatever that word means now.

But! We did it. We made it. We are basically out of boxes inside the house, everything has its place and now we are finalizing things like artwork and little touches. We continue to carve out storage systems in the garage and that will take a bit of time. We have come to an agreement with our septic system (the first two weeks were stressful…), we got the outdoor kitchen fired up and the well is doing what it is supposed to (praises to the well). We’ve been tackling what I refer to as “land work” because “yard work” doesn’t really explain what we are dealing with over here! Our land is beautiful. We are on 4.6 acres with probably 100 oak trees. I love it so much and yet there is still have so much to learn and understand about our new property. Lots of projects, lots of changes and improvements, lots of ideas.

So what have I pulled together inside the house so far? Well, the front porch, the living room, my office and a few other spots are looking good right now! So come with me on a little tour!

The front porch is one of my favorite places in the whole house. With the wood slatted ceiling, tile roof, heavy wood door and iron light fixtures it feels very European. I loved adding all of our plants and lanterns. The iron chairs with grey and white striped cushions are my favorite finishing touch out here.

Our foyer makes me really happy. It is kind of a two-story foyer with tall, vaulted ceilings. This door is my favorite style of door and I feel so lucky it is our front door! It even has a mini-door that functions as a large peephole!

Our living room gets the most use in the house. The view out the back deck is absolutely incredible; we had no idea how magnificent it was until we actually closed on the house. The view we have from Casa Toscana is my favorite thing about the whole house. Because the house is Spanish style with dark wood and terrecotta tile floors, white walls and iron fixtures we knew the color we wanted would need to come from furnishings and not from painted walls. It is still a work in progress bringing in the layers of color and texture that I want but we are sooooo close! I have big plans for the tile around our fireplace…

I wanted my office/workroom to be really colorful. I work best when my senses are alive; I need a lot of color and texture and interest around me to keep me inspired! We have a beautiful view out the window and I didn’t want to cover that up with a curtain so I created a garland curtain instead. The canvas frames are on the wall across from my office and were originally just canvas colored but they looked too washed out on the white walls. A little blue watercolor and now they pop.

I will do a whole post on our kitchen/dining soon but for now, here are some garlands on my kitchen chandelier. If there is a place to hang garlands I will find it.

And finally, this is the view standing outside our house and looking down our driveway…which is 700 feet long and steep. It is beautiful even if I really hate walking down that driveway.

This is just a little bit of what we have been working on and there will be more to follow soon. For now it feels good to walk through a room and have it feel like home. Hopefully by the end of the year we will have things REALLY pulled together.