Preparing to Move | Hicks House

As we’re preparing to make a life in our new home we realized with our love of open floor plan we encountered a little problem:

This little booger…

In our condo she is given the entire run of the kitchen with a baby gate at the exit to keep her confined. Once we move into the new house there is no way to gate her into the kitchen since the kitchen and living room run the entire width of the house and are one big room.

This wouldn’t be such a big problem except that we don’t trust her. As soon as we leave the door she will beeline directly to whatever furniture she is not allowed on and curl up on it. This is NOT OK. The other problem is metal dog crates are ugly and do not go with our vision for how it will look. Also, Chloe hasn’t been crated in over 4 years and we didn’t know how that go. One thing we agreed on was that it would definitely be too mean to move her into a new house and stick her into a crate for the first time in four years all in one day… So in the interest of trying to be good doggy parents, our first purchase for our new home was Chloe’s new home.

So we looked online and found out they make wooden crates. Perfect! End table and doggy crate all in one! We found one online and were all set to order it and bite the insane price tag in the interest of having a fashionable, non eye-sore crate. To ensure we ordered the correct size we went to Petco to look at their metal crates and lo ad behold they had a wood crate and it was on super sale deal of the day! SOLD we bought it on the spot.

We got it home and Ken got to work assembling it. (He’s very good at things like that)

assembling king

A couple things we noticed while putting this together

The box said the color was espresso but it’s definately red, I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen a red espresso…
It’s super tall… much taller than an end table

But even with those imperfections, its still pretty decent looking as far as crates go, so we’ll survive having a high end table.

It’s done!

Chloe doesn’t seem to like it yet…

We keep telling ourselves she’ll forgive us once she gets her new backyard. Maybe then she’ll stop crying when she’s in there and we’ll stop feeling like terrible doggy parents. I’m convinced she’ll learn to at least tolerate it.

I know some of you have looked through my “dream home” pin and are hoping to see a lot of those ideas incorporated into this house as we get going with making it our own. Unfortunately, this is the real world and we do not come from infinite amounts of money… I keep waiting to look in my bank account some day and see a huge amount of cash I just forgot about, but so far that hasn’t happened.

What you hopefully will see is a lot of rooms inspired by this blog House of Hepworths

I’m completely obsessed with this blog, I feel like she’s my design soul sister, we even share the same favorite color ORANGE. Although I am completely in love with the color for pretty much everything I can find it in (I’ve been carrying an orange purse for the last few months and Ken had to talk me out of buying an orange skillet pan I had to have from Big Lots) I do not want my house overwhelmed with the color.

Imagine my glee when I saw what Allison from House of Hepworths did to her living room:

I’m completely and utterly in love with everything about this room. From the wood shim mirror, the chandelier, and most important of all… the orange curtains. In my future attempt to re-create this room there will be several references to House of Hepworths because she’s the bomb.

I really don’t think I could get Ken on board with bird fabric though as awesome as it is. He thinks my pattern obsession is crazy. Maybe one of these prints will be toned down enough to sway him:

a cool Morocan theme

awesome damask

What do you think? I think it would help blend in the half bath on the first floor we want to pant a burnt orange color (mostly because we bought a whole gallon for the half bath at the condo and don’t want to waste it). This way the bathroom will be less of a OMG when you open the door because its not the first time you’ve seen the color… or I’m just crazy and trying to rationalize adding orange to my house.

Either way it’s going to be a hard sell, the beautiful orange curtains I already owned and wanted to hang in the condo living room were unceremoniously vetoed 3 years ago 😦

Fingers crossed!