First Christmas in My First Fixer Upper

As another year comes to a close, many of us tend to get a bit reflective. In holiday fashion, I would like to reflect with you on how far we have come with our very first fixer upper. In conjunction with CountryLiving.com and Hometalk.com, I am giving you a holiday home tour with “before” pictures so you can appreciate just how much we have accomplished in 10 months. Not to mention, we accomplished all of this on a relatively meager budget.

Looking at the current state of our living room, with it’s light and airy vibes, you may not believe me when I say it used to be dark and dingy (and infested with lady bugs). When we moved into our 1980’s ranch home in February of 2015, this is how the living room looked…

After some paint, decor, new light fixtures, a fireplace makeover and removing the popcorn ceilings, this is what our living room looks like.

As you will notice, I am not a “red and green” type of girl when it comes to holiday decor. While I think it looks lovely in many other homes, I think it distracts from my aesthetic. So I prefer to play off of my year- round decor….using neutrals with pops of coastal turquoise.

Because the room is so light and airy, I like to add warmth to the space with fur textiles. Then, I like to add pops of Christmas glam with metallics.

I love the juxtaposition of earthy, rustic elements against shiny, glam accents like mercury glass and sequins. I refer to my Christmas style as “rustic glam”. It is particularly ideal for me, because I get to leave it up the entire winter. Unlike traditional Christmas decor that must be put away once January rolls around, “rustic glam” holiday decor is so vague you would not really classify it as only being suitable for the month of December.

Here is another before and after comparison of my living room…

Before:

Now:

Let’s head on to the dining room. Here is my dining room when we first moved into our fixer upper.

And here it is now..

We painted the dining room in a light gray, replaced the light fixture and covered the texture ceiling with beadboard planks.

Don’t judge my “tablescape” and assume we are alcoholics. You see, we don’t celebrate Christmas in a traditional fashion. No formal dinner…no formal gift exchange. On Christmas eve, our close family gathers and we throw a cocktail party of sorts.

In lieu of gifts, we all bring a nice bottle of wine or whiskey to exchange.(Ok..we do kind of sound like alcoholics)

We wouldn’t want to distract from precious time with family by slaving away over an elaborate meal. So, we serve heavy hor d’oeuvres.

And of course we listen to the classic holiday tunes. We especially enjoy The Rat Pack, Perry Como and the Vince Guraldi Trio’s takes on Christmas music.

Let’s move on to the kitchen.

Here is what it looked like when we moved in.

And here is the kitchen after painting the walls and cabinets, new appliances, subway tile backsplash and building a pantry door. We also took the existing cabinets up to the ceiling.