Spunky Tucson Home Tour

Hi my friends!

Thank you so much for thinking of me and sending messages, about how we’re doing with our move from SoCal to Tucson! I feel the love! I won’t be shy about it, we moved because we needed to pay our credit card debt, and reduce our mortgage significantly to stay out of debt permanently. But I’m so glad for the friends we made and the experiences we had in our 6 years in California! The girls will always remember all of our Disneyland trips, and Zoe will cherish her many charter school camping trips to Catalina Island for her whole life 🙂

At the beginning of 2020 our Rather Keen business was really exploding. We had bookstores and gift shops all over the country making new wholesale orders every week. It was so exciting! Then the Rona came and the stores all closed. Some even went out of business, so sad! I knew that our house had increased nearly $50,000 since we bought it (plus there was our initial downpayment and equity), so we decided to sell the house and do what we always talked about doing: move somewhere more remote and inexpensive.

Initially I suggested we move to our favorite place, Palm Springs. There are AirBnB owners who own multiple rental houses there (and elsewhere). They were forced to stop renting their houses, and I wondered if any would sell some of their houses for a bargain. We love the desert, the heat, the mountains, and the mid century architecture, and visited Palm Springs once or twice a year. So we spent several days house hunting there as soon as our house was listed for sale. We did look at AirBnB’s that were listed for sale, but we couldn’t find the size and condition of house we were looking for for less than $300,000.

One night after the kids had gone to bed I couldn’t sleep. “What if there was a place like Palm Springs in another state?” I thought. Then my mind went to Tucson, where I spent a semester at University of Arizona, before graduating from Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania. It had been 20 years since I lived in Tucson, but I remembered the beautiful desert, surrounded by mountains, similar to Palm Springs. But what did it cost there? I pulled up Zillow and typed in Tucson. Then I narrowed the search down to old houses, since we wanted a mid century ranch house.

BINGO

It took everything out of me not to reach over and wake Andrew up to tell him about my discovery.

The next day I took Andrew aside and pitched him my Tucson idea. I showed him houses I had found on Zillow. I expected him to freak out, but to my surprise he was immediately interested. After another day or two of contemplating and researching he was fully into it.

And so it was on.

Our California house had already had two offers, both $15k below asking price, both of which had fallen through. Then we got a full asking price offer, someone REALLY loved our house. We were SO excited! We accepted the offer and got really serious about finding a new house in Tucson. I spent hours searching and texting our realtor in Tucson. Multiple houses that we wanted to buy in Tucson sold only days after they were listed. We realized that we were going to have to act quickly when we loved a house.

A few days after we were under contract to sell our California house I said to Andrew, “It’s too bad that you didn’t like that ‘southern’ house.” “What??” he replied. “You know, the house I showed you a couple days ago that you said looked ‘southern’.” Still Andrew had no idea what I was talking about. So I pulled up the listing and showed it to him. “Oh! I said it looked like Nashville!” he laughed. “But you didn’t like it, right?” I continued. “No, I love it!” Andrew said. “What? Why didn’t you say that? All you said was that it looked like Nashville. You didn’t say if that was good or bad.” I half laughed, half rolled my eyes. Mars and Venus, am I right?

I picked up my phone and texted our Tucson realtor to ask if the house was still available, and it was. Here we go! I said that we wanted to make an offer right then, and if the offer was accepted then we would drive straight out and see the house. Like a whirlwind we gave her the go-ahead, and we made an offer for full asking price, $269,000. The way other houses we wanted were selling (most of them closer to $300,000), we didn’t want to risk loosing this house. In what felt like only a few minutes the offer was accepted, and we were packing our bags to drive to Tucson!

We pulled into Hotel McCoy late that night. We got a room with two bunk beds, and it was super cute. I highly recommend them! After taking some Calm we fell fast asleep. The next morning we checked out and drove to see the house, which I felt like I had already seen, thanks to Zillow and driving up and down the street with Google Street View. Sure enough, it was exactly as it looked online, and we were happy with our decision. 🙂 Driving back to California after the satisfaction of seeing the house felt like only a few hours to me, as opposed to the 7 hours it actually takes, which had felt like an eternity the day before.

I made you a video tour of the living areas of our new house!

 

It was going to cost more to move our furniture out of state than it was worth, which was fine by me, because I relished the idea of starting over with my decor. There were some pieces that I was able to fit in the uHaul though, so you may recognize them from before. Here I am above on moving day, after a friend and I had gone to get my Lincoln attached to the uHaul. The uHaul was only a 15 footer, and I thought driving it was fun!

North and East Tucson are peppered with developments that look just like ours, from the 60’s and 70’s. These ranch houses have  slightly pitched roofs, which can appear flat from the front. Many of them have tall narrow arched windows like ours, and brick walls. Like Palm Springs, there isn’t grass in Tucson neighborhoods. I love that about Tucson, keepin’ it real! 🙂 It does make me very curious though: In the 1987 movie, Can’t Buy Me Love, Patrick Dempsey plays a teenager in Tucson who mows lawns. Did Tucson used to have grass everywhere or was that just made up for the movie? 😂

I have to preface this tour by saying that a couple months ago Amazon reduced the affiliate program to almost nothing. I make only a few dollars a month now from Amazon when you follow my links and buy something. I really appreciate you following my Amazon links all these years (you guys are the best!), but I will no longer make anything from them. However, since I know how useful the links are to you I’m taking the time to add as many as I can to this post, just for you. 🙂 If you would still like to support my website and newsletter, which cost money to run every month, please order through my other affiliate programs: PrimeMyBody and Araza. I love you all!!

I hung the same floating shelf and wreath (both Target) as before in the foyer, with the same photo and pothos plant. (As I was selling my things in California I had more people ask me if I was selling my plants that anything else. But only two of my plants didn’t end up fitting in the truck, and they went to family friends.) I added the runner in the foyer just yesterday, after much searching for a geometric pattern with those colors, which are used in the living room and office. I can’t tell you how delighted I am for those 3 feet we call “foyer.” Ever since I was a little girl I have loved foyers. To me a little foyer is like the house itself is saying “hello and welcome”! Did I mention that when I went to University of Arizona I wanted to major in architecture? Yup! 🙂

The foyer opens to a higher ceiling in the living room and office. The living room is really long so I wanted to create a few different seating areas. I always start my planning of a room based on the location of the TV/fireplace. It’s really helpful if you can place your TV on a wall that isn’t across from any windows. That way you don’t have glare. The window wall is across from the wall without windows, and it has only one logical place for a TV, a long space between two of the windows. That made the decision easy. So a sofa across from the TV would be the first seating area. I really liked the idea of the sofa there because the room isn’t square, it widens a few feet where the couch area goes, making a kind of cozy nook.

To the right of the sofa area I decided to hang the macrame swing that had previously been in my bedroom, with the same leather pouf in front. I hung my longest pothos from the ceiling in that corner. The sofa and swing wall was looking really long and horizontal. I needed something tall besides the plant to add some vertical hight. It made sense to me to find a bookshelf to go beside the swing for all our homeschool books. After searching I fell in love with this airy angled metal bookshelf.

The otherwise empty TV and windows side of the room was very unbalanced across from all of the furniture on the opposite wall, and I wanted to put one more seating area there. On Facebook Marketplace I found a West Elm chair and footrest that someone had never used and didn’t want to pay the shipping to return. It was a bargain and it fit my design like a glove! I added a kilim pillow and faux fir that I’ve had for years, which look great on the chair. Next to it I placed my favorite little wooden side table, that I had saved, as well as one of my snake plants. But the corner needed some height and a light. I wanted to echo the airy metal bookshelf on the other side of the foyer, so I searched to find this lamp with shelves, which was also metal. The bookshelf and the lamp with shelves look great on either side of the foyer are not identical, but compliment each other so well.

I had taken videos of the house when we came to see it, so I designed the office before we even moved, as you can see in my illustration above. It came out exactly as I had pictured it! I wanted to put in a kind of built in desk with shelves above. I found these mid century looking cabinets on Amazon, which we put together. I placed them on either end of the office space. Then we had to find a wood shop that could create the desk top. WoodWorkers Source in Tucson was great! We chose 3 roasted oak boards and they glued them together, sanded, and cut them to fit, 10 feet. With 3 coats of matte water based varnish we have an awesome wall to wall desk top that matched the cabinets perfectly without any staining at all.

Andrew and I chose a peach color from the stenciled jute living room rug to paint the office wall as an accent. After adding the shelves above to hold some of our books and plants the office looks fantastic. It’s so amazing to see a design come to life like that!

The kitchen (as well as the bathrooms) had been completely remodeled with new white shaker style cabinets and granite countertops, which is exactly what I would have chosen myself. It’s a wide galley kitchen with a bar on one side, open to the dining room. In the kitchen I added the two open shelves, for my jars of coffee and tea, new ceiling lights, because the ones the house flipper had installed were as bright as the sun, and white metal bar chairs to pretend we’re at a diner. 🙂  The kitchen and dining room sliding doors and the brick wall look great with the floor to ceiling white curtains and industrial looking rods that I put up. I like a blend of industrial farmhouse, mid century modern, and boho chic.

The dining room has a ceiling fan that’s not even close to centered over the table. In addition to the poor placement, I’m not a fan of the lights on the fan. However, it’s really useful having a ceiling fan in Tucson. So eventually I’ll have the fan moved to the correct place, but in the meantime I’m just going to leave it there and remove the lights. I added a accent table to the wall across from the sliding doors, where I placed 2 large Wayfair table lamps. I love the color, shape, and height of the lamps. The table holds my wooden fruit bowl on top, and basket containing my cookbooks on the bottom. On the wall behind the dining table I hung the shelf which I made for the kids artwork. Seeing their art makes me so happy! Then I found a fun lamp to arch over the art and add light to the dining room. The combination of the 3 lamps lights the room perfectly in the evening.

UPDATE: We removed the fan lights so I’ve inserted a new photo 🙂

I can’t tell you how long I looked for a flat dining room area rug in these colors. Loooong. I love it. It’s fun and colorful and works great. After having a dark grey dining table I was in the mood for a natural wood table this time. The dining table is next to a very long sliding door to the patio, where we put some large beautiful plants and strung lights. I wanted a dining table that brought the outdoors in, even looked like it could be an outdoor table. When I found this acacia wood table with hairpin legs on Wayfair I was sold. I kept the dining room eclectic by using 4 white mid century modern chairs with 2 woven end chairs (all Wayfair).

Finally, in this video you see the laundry room. I don’t know about all my neighbors laundry rooms, but ours doesn’t have heat or air conditioning. It’s the same temperature in the laundry room as it is outside. This is why it’s important that we keep the laundry room door closed at all times. However, the cat boxes are in the laundry room. So my husband installed this cat door so that the cats can go in and out with the door closed.

Through the laundry room is the door to the garage, so it’s where we keep some shoes, our keys, hats, bags, and in the winter, jackets. I wanted the space to be organized and fun, which is what I aim for with every area in our home. In the video you can see there was an empty nook at the end of the built-in cabinets where I assume they had a second fridge. I put the cat boxes in there and across the front I hung the same curtain and tension rod as the living room windows. Andrew painted the wall for me with the leftover peach accent color from the office, and I got a piece of wood to run the length of the wall for hooks. Lastly, I put together a bamboo bench for storing shoes and for sitting to take shoes on and off.

I don’t know if I’m coming back to Instagram, but you can still find me here on Spunky, and subscribe to my newsletter. 🙂 We love the Tucson house and I’m looking forward to showing you the rest of it!

UPDATE: see the new exterior of our home HERE

♥, Kelly