Blank Space

But not like the Taylor Swift song. This blank space is our new house.
When we first saw our future home, it was beautifully staged.

 Of course, that's very different from how it looked when we moved in.

But ya gotta start somewhere, right? I'm not one to buy out the entire living room section of West Elm and have our house polished from head to toe the first week we move in. I like to go slow and take my time with each piece, moving and changing things, switching out pieces of furniture or decor, as we grow into our home. My first move: make this home ours.

If there's anything Alex and I have in common in terms of our background, it's our mutual love of books, books, and more books. We both wrote (multiple) novels and were avid readers at young tender ages.

My third grade bestseller, Mr. Mole's Glasses

And so, sans furniture, sans appliances, the one thing we decided to splurge on to make this home truly ours--even before we had anything else-- is to build in the bookcase that we have always dreamed about, using this Design Sponge pic as my inspiration:

I asked our contractor, who's also a carpenter, to build in a floor to ceiling shelving unit right by our dining area. This way, we can pull books at random off the shelf while we eat, or they can be topics of conversation when we have guests over. Here it is, in progress. He used solid walnut for the vertical inserts to match our floors.

Wait for the reveal on the finished project in my next post! In the meantime, this is the blank space we were starting with.

 And here's me, waiting in an empty house for the refrigerator delivery guy to come.

Just me and my vintage salmon handwoven Persian rug.