our home on first avenue

I am so excited to share our home with you!  It is being featured today on Inspired by This, where I dive into my design motto and give tips on how to create a home that truly reflects your style.

First Avenue was home to us for over two years.  It's the longest I've lived anywhere other than my childhood home (thats right, I've lived in 7 places in the last 9 years). We found our San Diego bungalow in a heat of desperation and it was quickly clear that it would be one of the best decisions we ever made.

Situated on First Avenue, our aptly named apartment was a house of firsts.  The first time designing our own space, first real home, it was the place we came back to after we got engaged and spent hours calling family and friends, its the home where we'd dance to Frank Sinatra, the home we found a taste for good wine and aged whiskey and the house we came home to as husband and wife.  This little home was also there to carry us through bad days, hard times and rainstorms.  Good and bad, it felt like us.

We moved in with the remnants of our single life - Ikea furniture, hand me down kitchen goods and bare walls.  Together we hunted local antique shops and consignment stores, scored art we actually felt proud to hang, bought furniture warranting reupholstering, became chair addicts (really, I have a problem - 6 chippendales, 2 louis, 1 eames, not to count a leather armchair and our patio chairs...don't even get me started on benches and trays).  It became a reflection of us, no longer just him or me.

It was the first home that felt like home since we left home.  So here's to First Avenue, may whoever the new occupants be, I wish they experience the complete joy that comes with living in such a magical place with the one you love.

*images by the ever talented jessica kettle