Since many of you enjoyed our earlier messy house tour videos (like the one we shared from our last house in 2011), we thought it was the perfect moment to remind everyone that our home isn’t a staged photo all the time. With most of our attention on the showhouse and some last-minute nursery tasks, several other projects have been paused—some literally half finished—and a few rooms have slid into chaos. When the house looks like that, why not document it and share the real, lived-in version?
[Video embed removed for cleaner load times. A short, candid house tour accompanies this post and shows the same scenes described below.]
A few quick notes about the tour and what you’ll see around the house:
- There’s no rapping in this video. I’m both relieved and mildly disappointed by that fact.
- I don’t love narrating these tours, so I usually hold the camera while Sherry talks. This time she was tied up with showhouse work, so I stepped in and did the voiceover myself.
- Burger, our dog, is everywhere in the footage—constant and enthusiastic company.
- The droopy fiddle leaf figs in the office recover quickly after a drink. They look thirsty in the tour, but they bounce back once watered.
- One throwaway moment in the video mentions an imaginative childhood wish to attend a wedding between a saber-toothed tiger and a pony—that’s a personal, nostalgic aside and not a new design direction.
- We were proud to show the gleaming hardwood floors as you climb to the second floor; seeing them shine still makes us smile.
- If you’ve been asking about the fourth wall in the nursery, you catch a brief glimpse of it in the tour. Right now it just has a floor lamp and the doorway to the hallway, but we might add a playful “wall of fun” there someday, similar to what we did in Clara’s room.
- You’ll also see some rarely shown footage of the unfinished storage room at the end of the upstairs hallway—and yes, that’s messy too.
- I trimmed the video ending to remove an impulsive shout of “keeping it real.” It felt a little too 1995 Backstreet Boys for public consumption, so it stayed on the cutting room floor.
If you can’t watch the tour right now, here’s a brief screengrab-style walkthrough to summarize the highlights and odd corners you’ll notice in the footage.
If everything stays on schedule, we expect a small window between our major Homearama deadline and the arrival of our baby when we can finish a few outstanding projects and restore some order—at least briefly. Of course, soon after that a new routine will arrive with Barnacle, and things will change again.
Do you have unfinished projects spilling into other rooms? Is there a project that’s half done and creating multiple small messes around your house? We’d love to hear how you handle those in-progress blues, because we know we’re not the only ones juggling imperfect spaces and busy schedules.
Psst – Showhouse deadlines have kept us busier than expected this week, so we won’t have a new post tomorrow. We plan to be back with fresh content on Monday.