storehouse designs: Little House On The Mountain

So, where to begin with wrangling this tiny house into a realistic full-time home for my family?

Let me say, we moved from the largest house we'd ever lived in (about 2,200 square feet) to the smallest house we've ever lived in (about 800 square feet). Our intention has never been for this to be our "forever home," but rather a guest house, a place for ministry and sometimes to rent it out. But first, we knew it would have to be our family's home, probably for the rest of the years we have kids at home.

Before we moved, I gathered all my things and put them into groups according to color. To my amazement, I saw the vast majority of my things were black, brown, red, cream & some form of metal (gold, silver, rusty iron). The ranch house in Texas was so big that I could have more variety of color, but I felt that since this house was so small and so open, there would almost need to be a monochromatic feel to it so that it flowed visually. So that's how I decided my color scheme for the main part of the house on the mountain. I just wasn't sure how that would look. I hadn't seen that color scheme in any magazine lay-outs lately. But they were colors that worked for my family and for how the house would be used by others.

For me, the obvious place to start inside was the kitchen because that's the heart of the home. And it's the first thing you see when you walk through our front door.

Even though I knew it was about to be a construction zone, I cleaned. I also had the kids remove the plate rail at the top of the cabinets, the cabinet doors, the handles & rip out the nasty shelf paper.

Then I went shopping with girlfriends. At a flea market in Eureka Springs, this caught my eye...

God help me, I'd rather work with this than something mass produced any day of the week. It's a crumbly old needlework that says, "With Joy We Greet Thee." This was the inspiration piece for my kitchen, and really the entire open space of the house. I brought it home and sat it on the kitchen counter.

The way I am wired, I need to balance the practical with a boost of creativity, which inspires me to get more things done practically. So even though we had many practical things to do, I went shopping again. This time, I came home armed with Annie Sloan Graphite paint with dark wax and went to town on the kitchen cabinets. I'm pretty sure my family thought I had lost my ever-lovin' mind.

However, I knew what I was seeing...

I remembered I'd had these old doorknobs for years. I happened to have just enough to make them into knobs for my cabinets. The ceiling fans were taken down and trashed. The walls were painted Laura Ashley Old Gold 5 and the ceilings Old Gold 5 (50%).

The doorknobs looked every bit as good as I thought they would.

Don't worry. Later, I filled in the extra holes with wood filler & painted those, too.

Now, what to do for drawer pulls? I remembered these vintage pie servers I had in a box somewhere. I got a bundle of 6 of them for $1 at a junk store before we moved from Texas.

We pulled out all of the trim and stained it to match the floors (Rustoleum Kona).

I found this great old ceiling tin in Texas and used part of it as a backsplash behind the stove.

Later, we mounted a microwave/vent-a-hood where the solid white space is in the picture above.

These fixtures (above) from Lowe's replaced the ceiling fans. I think they were $25 each. I already had brown velvet curtains, which we hung in the kitchen and living room on metal rods we already had.

I remembered I had these two mini chandeliers, still in the boxes, that I had intended to hang in our daughter's bedroom back in Texas, but never did. We staggered these over the counter that we lovingly refer to as the "tabinet" [table + cabinet], because it served as our dining table for over a year.

I found a length of red ticking at a junk store on the mountain for $3. It was enough to make cafe curtains for above my sink, a sink skirt and 4 napkins.