Purists would say I shouldn’t call our midcentury ranch house a bungalow, but let’s face it: are purists really enjoying the hell out of their lives? I think not.
After traveling all over Florida for years and swooning over countless small-town neighborhoods near all the beaches, we found our little slice of paradise in the kind of town you drive through and don’t realize it’s a town. You pass mid-rise condos, gas stations, a funky family-owned burrito shack, and an ice cream shop with a giant fake hot dog out front, paint peeling, beside a giant smiling cow. A Cuban restaurant with an ancient, interesting Cuban car on blocks out front, a 2-story bar where if you sit out back upstairs, you can just see the ocean. But most likely you’re on your way to somewhere else and may not notice all of this, and we’re glad.
Our town may not be sparklingly enticing like some of the popular tourist towns north and south of us or on the Gulf coast, but to not have to inch through tourist traffic or weave our cart around mobs clogging the grocery store aisles makes it all worth being here.
The owners before us fixed this place up pretty well, and we’ve been happily changing things the whole ten years we’ve been here. Nothing was horrible, and much of it is fine, but as consummate DIY-ers we just want it to be ours. First off was getting rid of the exterior paint, which was brown.
No longer brown!
The two little guest rooms were kind of granny-styled, and we changed that. We’ve painted the interior walls a couple of times, and now some of them are a soft gray which I feel is clean and crisp but now I’m reading that gray is no longer cool (but it is, literally, way cooler than beige) and we’re not going to jump on the trend wagon and change that any time soon.
Below you’ll see the pool bedroom (it has its own little deck, overlooking the pool) as it was when we bought the house, then how we changed it, and then how we changed it again, recently, when we decided to make it more zen. Slowly color is creeping back in, read more about that, here.
Robert built a storage cottage for me (no one is allowed to use the word shed here) and while I sometimes secretly long for a second bathroom, and kitchen countertops that don’t remind me of floor tile (why do people do that??) everything else is perfect. Our bungalow is small but cozy and welcoming, fun and maybe a little unconventional, like my favorite refrigerator magnet that I have to remember to remove when polite people are coming to visit. We want to live simply but humorously, after all (someone famous came up with that, I can’t remember who) and I think we’ve pulled it off.
Some more photos, and links to our stories on how it all came about:
The storage cottage
The second guest room, before
The second guest room we turned into a bunk bedroom until we had an actual grandchild and I had nightmares about her falling off the top bunk. That room is in the middle of a total re-do, stay tuned!
Read this full story here From Granny Guest Room to Shipwrecked Bunk Bedroom.
Come back (give me a few months – or, perhaps a year?) for more updates as we slowly continue to make improvements!
