Our Beach Cottage

It occurred to me that we've lived in our house for almost 4 months and I still haven't done a real post about it. I love our house, it's absolutely perfect for us. We have named it the "beach cottage" because it is about 2 blocks from our local neighborhood beach. When I say "beach" I mean the Chesapeake Bay...I'm not talking the ocean here people. But the beach is very lovely and we like going down there with Spencer so she can run around, dig in the sand and swim.

A little background about our house (which I think is very interesting, but maybe that's just because I live here). It was built in the 1950's and it actually was originally someone's beach house...DC residents used to come to Annapolis on the weekends as their "beach getaway". So that's why it does have such a beachy feel to it. In the late 1970's, our landlord bought it and turned it into a daycare. So no one actually lived here during that time, it was just a business. Because of that, there's some weird features to the house. None of the windows open, except in the bedrooms. The front door opens out - which is slightly frustrating when you have an arm full of groceries. All the doors have these weird child locks on them and we can't figure out how to remove them. While the house was being used as a daycare, there wasn't even a kitchen or anything, just one big room and then 2 smaller rooms off of that (which are now our 2 bedrooms).

3 years ago, our landlord moved her daycare to a new location and decided to make our house an actual house. They added the kitchen (literally just built it right in the middle of the house), washer and dryer and added closets to the bedrooms to make them bedrooms. They kept the beach feel to the house and gave the entire thing a white wash on the inside (including our amazing wood beam ceilings).

Ok, onto the pictures:This is what it looks like as you walk in the front door...you literally walk right into the main room (our whole house is just like 1 big room - everything is open)

Our kitchen, which I'm obsessed with. It's all updated and we have a HUGE island, as you can see. It works great with some bar stools (those are the ones we got from IKEA for $11.99 each...we stained them so they look much better)Our living room...I still need to find more stuff to put on our mantle. I've never had my very own fireplace before!
Looking from our living room into the kitchen and the back of the house. The kitchen has the door that leads outside to the backyard. We also have a huge full pantry/storage closet off the kitchen.
Our "dining room" - which is really just the far corner of the room. We hung the light to make it more defined as the actual dining room. The double doors right behind the table lead into our bedroom.Random picture of the wood beam ceiling. The entire house is like that, even the bathroom. It's an A frame house, so the ceilings are really high - which is good since it makes the tiny house seem so much bigger!

So that's our little house...we hope to stay here for several years to save up money, since our rent is very reasonable. I'll have to do a post about our weird backyard sometime soon!