Happy Monday! Hope your weekend was stellar. We enjoyed a casino night, dinner with friends and some good ol' garage cleaning. Action packed weekend right there.

Today I'm going to start a series called Then and Now. (I need to update our house tour page and these posts will help.) Our house is always a work in progress. We still have so many projects in mind but it's kind of fun to see how our house has progressed and how our style has evolved. We've had some friends comment on how put together our house is. I remind them that it's taken us a good five years to get here!

Let's start way back in 2008. Oh, 2008. The year I graduated pharmacy school. The year we started building a house when I hadn't even passed my pharmacy boards. 2008 when Ike was only a year old and I had blond hair. What a year.

Then and Now Living Room | Decor and the Dog

We started building in May of 2008. The living room walls were up late that Summer. Nate and I were both at work when they lifted the wall of windows into place using a crane. I wish we would have been around to watch that one.

By late Fall we had drywall and paint. For the record, I have hated the paint color since the very first stroke of paint. It was the only paint color we did not pick out ourselves. It was suggested by the designer at Ethan Allen when we purchased our furniture. Young and naive Nate and Michelle went for it. I cried when we placed it on the wall. Nate said "So sorry. We just bought many gallons of this color." Little did he know that I would con him into repainting it 5 years later. Who's crying now?

The furniture arrived. Well, the chair and couches arrived. Although the Ethan Allen designer led us astray on paint color, we would hands down buy furniture from them again. These couches have held up so well over the past 5 years. They are used and abused but show little wear.

We went from furnishing 1300 square feet to 2800. It took us some time to add luxury items like coffee tables and end tables. And pillows.

Ike's style hasn't changed. He's still decorating with tennis balls. See above.

As time went on, I started to develop a slight interest in home decor. I decided that the living room needed a rug. So I picked out this little teeny tiny number. It was in my price range. It was cute. The place was resembling a home that adults would live in.

A year or two passed (time gets fuzzy here). I started to read home decor blogs. I decided that we needed a larger rug in the living room. I found this Pottery Barn rug at Tuesday Morning for a great price. This is where Nate begins to think that I have a rug problem. Little does he know....that he is right.

Have you noticed that the styling on those shelves hasn't changed since 2008? It won't until 2013. Take note of Ike's spot on the couch. There has been no change there either.

More time and blog reading lead me to needing an even larger rug! Do you see a theme developing? I purchased this jute number. I loved that it was neutral but added some texture. After a few months, I realized that it was killing Nate and I. This was actually one of my favorites. But the whole not being able to breathe thing was kind of a deal breaker.

The jute killer found a new home via Craigslist. (I can only imagine the search traffic that sentence might bring.) I decide to bring color into our home in 2013. I added this blue ikat number. Color is scary. Color is hard to decorate around. It was a good try but Nate and I are neutral kids.

After 5 years in the house we are finally starting to understand what our style is. We've decided it's industrial farmhouse. That's a thing. I think. Our kitchen, dining room and office are almost complete with this style.

Our new rug changed the feel of the room but we have quite a ways to go. This Summer we plan to tone down the flesh colors on the wall. We have plans to build custom built-ins and beef up the fireplace. Our big box store coffee table needs to be replaced with something a little more unique. We're also debating a new chair to make the room a little less matchy matchy. Hopefully these plans will get us to a room that is a little more us and a little less catalog.