A few pic­tures of my house, some­thing that’s become a sym­bol of my tran­si­tion into adult­hood. My next house project is get­ting enlarged prints of my pho­tos to hang around the house.

The first thing you see when walk­ing in the front door is the break­fast nook. It’s one of the best fea­tures of the house, espe­cially in the morn­ing. Even though it’s on the south side, it’s extremely bright and sunny. The win­dows face a major road, so I usu­ally have the blinds closed for a lit­tle pri­vacy, or open them when I’m feel­ing social.

There are two path­ways that lead into the kitchen: the break­fast nook on one side and the hall­way on the other. It’s a rather nar­row place, but there’s enough elbow room to do some aggres­sive cook­ing. Tons of cup­boards and plenty of table space keep every­thing tidy.

I recently bought this din­ing set from EQ3. Most things from there are custom-made: I was allowed to chose the mate­r­ial and colour of the seats, as well as the metal fin­ish and diam­e­ter of the glass. The first thing I did when I bought the house, before I had things moved in, was to have a dim­mer switch installed here, and in the two bed­rooms. I had the entire area pro­fes­sion­ally painted a neu­tral beige for a café feel.

Trolley took most of the liv­ing room with him when he moved out, so I’m still look­ing for pieces. It’s the one part of the house I’m not sat­is­fied with yet. I’d like to pur­chase one more couch, and a book­case to clean up that shelf. In the future I’ll be blow­ing up a few of my pic­tures for the walls. The TV is hooked up to the dig­i­tal cable box, an HD DVD player, an HD Gamecube con­nec­tion, and a lap­top (which unfor­tu­nately doesn’t out­put DVI). The couch was also from EQ3, and the cof­fee table, prob­a­bly my favourite piece in the house, is from Zone.

One of the odd­i­ties of the house is the fact that the bed­rooms are in the base­ment. It really turns some home buy­ers off, but I didn’t mind. It’s nice to have some stairs; they act as a gen­eral par­ti­tion between the work and rest areas, and have come to define non-student liv­ing for me.

Trolley used to be in this room. I haven’t decided what to do with it yet. I may turn it into a guest room, a photo stu­dio (which is doubt­ful, because of the red paint and how small it is), or a tai chi stu­dio. Most likely the for­mer, since it’s the only open-space large enough in the house for me to practice.

The bed­room is where I spend most of my time. It’s become a safety zone. The good thing about Ikea is that it’s so easy to match things in a set or series. I had the mir­rors installed soon after I bought the house, and they hide an entire wall closet.

These are some of the most tech­ni­cally dif­fi­cult pic­tures I’ve taken. A 1.6x field-of-view-crop-factor meant that I lost a lot of the wide end of my lens, and mixed light­ing con­di­tions made things espe­cially dif­fi­cult. I didn’t take pic­tures of the sec­ond bath­room or the laun­dry room. In the next series, I’ll get shots of the house at night.

The house changes it’s per­son­al­ity when it’s dark and moody.