Here’s a little life update for you all!

When our lifestyle outgrew our current home, my husband and I started looking for a house a few months ago. As much as we loved our beautiful apartment, which we spent over a year renovating, our needs quickly surpassed what the space could allow.

Mike and I both work from home, I am constantly painting, content creating & focusing on photography, so my space is in a constant state of change (not to mention, a never-ending state of cleaning up). Our penthouse is a 2-bed, 2-bath, 1,300 sq. ft condominium unit with a beautiful, private rooftop patio. When we first purchased it, it definitely needed a little love, and we wanted to invest in it to one day purchase something a little bigger. You can read more about our renovation here.

We’re lucky to have two living rooms here, but over time I realized I needed to have a desk, an easel, storage, and so much more. We first addressed the issue by clearing out one of the living rooms into my mom’s townhouse and turning the space into a studio.

But, soon after living in the newly-arranged space, we quickly learned it was hard to maintain. We love entertaining and having people over—and I’m easily embarrassed if they walk into a mess. So I tried various storage & home organization solutions, but because my walls mainly consist of windows, it was really hard to make everything look organized & *ahem* aesthetically pleasing at the same time. In order to be creative, you have to get messy! Another stressor is that our friends have small children, and we have a dog. Trying to keep them out of the mess was an incredibly difficult task. It was time to find me a space with a door to close off and let be its own room.

Our second bedroom has a number of functions, including Mike’s office, an unofficial full-time storage room & place for guests to spend the night. With these in mind, we decided to just look around in the market to see what’s out there.

We found a house

A big thing we learned is that right now, Vancouver is very much a buyers’ market. There is much more inventory out there but a very cautious demand of people looking to buy. Luckily, we have an amazing realtor, Mike Wilcox from Mike & Will real estate. He’s extremely knowledgeable of the Vancouver market & has a great understanding of buying & selling psychology. He’s never pushed us past our boundaries and always points out details like flaws in a property. All in all, I trust him with our buying & selling processes. Will, his business partner, sometimes stepped in when Mike was unavailable. He, too has the knowledge and attention to detail we value as buyers and sellers.

Finally, after months of multiple open houses and late nights thinking, we found a home to grow into. The best part is that it still has the entertaining space we were looking for. It was easy to build a ramp for our ADA needs and it had the rooms to accommodate two offices + a few littles in the future. See below for more pictures of our home :)

Stay tuned for how we furnish & problem solve our home needs!

with love,

Veronica

Photos by Ana Douglas Photography