House Envy

One of our first dates was a run where we ended up in an open house in Beverly Cove... only it was a brokers only open house with wine and cheese and we showed up in our running clothes. Yeah, embarrassing, but regardless, we got to see a fabulous house that we could never afford and drink some wine in the middle of our run (maybe all runs should have snack breaks in the middle of them...). Today was similar to that day... we went to an open house at this gorgeous carriage house in Manchester. The house is listed for $629,000 so it's unfortunately off limits but I am suffering from a major case of house envy. The house is about 3700 sq. ft, on 2.5 acres and it's about a mile and a half from the ocean. I would love love love to take this house from the 1970s to 2011. What would you do?

AJ and I would want to change the color of the house, and possibly the shingles, add in some grass and fabulous gardens, add in a smaller window above the one closest to the front door and change the garage doors to something like this, which is actually called a carriage style door (how perfect for a former carriage house):

Here is a series of photos of the open space of the living room, sitting room (directly in front of the foyer) and the dining room that seats 20 easily. Could there be a more perfect party house? I would even love to take their 70s style furniture and reupholster it in fabulous prints and paint the woodwork on the chairs.

Okay, so the parquet floors and red carpet need to go. It sounded like I was on a dance floor walking across it. But I'm in love with all the windows, especially the small ones, they add a lot of character.

The woodwork painted white would make the house look so much more open. Something would need to be done with the pillars. Maybe something like this with a shorter bookcase and taller pillars (taken from This Old House):

The kitchen has so much potential as well... this house has unbelievable storage (there is only a crawl space for the basement so they have a lot of built ins):

Image a brighter kitchen with no dropped ceiling (there are 2 smaller windows that have been boxed in because of the dropped ceiling). White cabinets? Yes, please. :) I don't think I'd do any upper cabinets because there is a full length wall to the left of the photo of cabinets. How about some extra windows where those upper cabinets are? I'd get rid of the pillar in the middle of the room holding the double oven and I'd place it elsewhere. Oh, and a breakfast nook by the giant window would be fabulous. Maybe like this:

or this

Oh to be able to do all this in real life... and not just on the blog. Maybe some venture capitalist would fund AJ and I... :)