Real Estate Photos vs. Blog Photos

Hello friends!! Today I thought it would be fun to watch how different real estate photos can be from the style of photos I take or magazines take to share our home. It’s always so funny to me that pictures showing the same room can be so different. As we got closer to putting our home on the market, I was always wondering what the photos in the real estate listing would look like and would they really be that different from the photos I take and share of our home. .

Come take a look ~

Cooked

My photos ~

There is nothing I loved more than when the sunlight poured into our kitchen. I loved how light and airy it would feel and always tried to capture when taking photos in our kitchen.

Bath on the first floor

My photo ~

I never had a chance to take pictures of our downstairs bathroom once we replaced the kitchen floors that cross this space. When we did the floors, the beadboard wallpaper was damaged at the bottom, so we ended up covering it with faux rabbet and painting it the same pepper color as before. I shared how I added more faux rabbets to the bathroom ceiling HERE, to cover another DIY that went wrong, but that was it.

Click HERE to see our bathroom renovation on the ground floor.

Dining room

My photo ~

Our dining room was right in the middle of our house. You have to cross it to go from the living room to the kitchen, or from the kitchen to go upstairs. One of my favorite features when we bought this house were the half walls with columns that separated the dining room and living room.

The living room

My photo ~

Just like in our kitchen, I loved the way the sunlight poured into our living room. The large windows that ran the entire length of the first floor were such a selling point for me. Jesse (my husband) teases that I could live in a glass house because of how much I love large windows, and he’s probably right. One of my biggest challenges when photographing our living room has always been the sloped ceilings. Our house is slanted towards the middle, where the fireplace is, because it was built in 1846. At this point, the only way to solve this problem would be to get everything down to the studs and level the joists on the floor. I didn’t mind that it was a quirky charm, but as I grew in my photography skills it turned out to be a challenge. Nonetheless, I have gotten pretty good at finding the right angle to make things look as straight as possible 🙂

Staircase | Gallery wall

My photo ~

I have always enjoyed sharing our gallery wall as I go up our stairs. My favorite shot was where I was sitting in the chairs in our living room looking at him directly from the other side. It was a sight I could stare at all day.

Office | Laundry room

I loved turning this awkwardly shaped little room in our dining room into an achievable space for me. Yes, he also doubled our laundry room (shown HERE), but over the past couple of years it has really been like a little retreat sitting here at my desk, looking out the windows. Due to the small and awkward shape of the room, I always took close-up photos of my desk like in the photo below.

My photo ~

Click HERE to see how I decorated my office for Christmas one year.

Room n ° 1 | Girls room

My photo ~

One of the questions I was asked the most when we announced we were selling was why did we do all the work in my daughters room if we weren’t going to stay. The reality is that we actually remodeled her room between Thanksgiving and Christmas last fall, and although we didn’t know we were moving at that time, I had a hunch the change was coming. I just felt like we wouldn’t be in this house any longer, and I knew that when it was time to put our house on the market, I would need to neutralize his room. Fortunately, this also happened to align with the bedroom makeover she always wanted, so it was a win-win in my book!

Tween Girl Bedroom Makeover – click HERE

Room n ° 2 | Son room

My photo ~

The last time I shared my son’s room was when we gave it a makeover – HERE. Other than rearranging her room once since the makeover, it has remained pretty much the same. He doesn’t need a change, unlike his sister, and was pretty happy in his room – and probably would have kept it that way until he graduated from high school if we had stayed in this. House.

Upstairs hallway

We have a small hallway upstairs connecting the three bedrooms which was one of our wishes to have a little more space as the kids got older. Just outside our sons’ bedroom, with our main door (barely) seen to the right, there was this little nook, which housed a wardrobe that I used to put away the bedding, as we did not have a laundry closet.

Master bedroom

Our room has seen many different looks and has been remodeled several times. The sloping ceiling and half-cut door to our living room have always made photography difficult. Not to mention its size. Our master bedroom was a 14 × 10, so its narrow length always made photography difficult unless using a wide angle lens (which is not my favorite). So I took closer photos, rather than tying up to capture the whole room.

My photo ~

It wasn’t until last summer that I finally put the finishing touches on our room. I had tried several paint colors, and none of them felt right until I finally painted it the same white as our living room – White Heron by Benjamin Moore. My motivation was to finish it in time to be able to photograph it for my next book, but I never shared After! So it will come NEXT! In the meantime, here’s how it looked decorated for Christmas last year.

Christmas tour of the master bedroom – click HERE.

Living room | Mom’s cave

My photo ~

Even though this space made its debut HERE, I usually only shared it when it was decorated for the holidays. It’s a small room attached to our master bedroom that you walk through to access the master bathroom. And honestly, most of the time would end up being the collector’s item in our house because that was the farthest space no one could see. But I loved this space no matter how it was used. It was such a lovely quiet retreat from the rest of the house with a lovely bird’s eye view of our yard and flower beds.

Master bath

Above you can see the real estate ad photo from my angle below. One obvious thing – besides the paint color you can see how warm and yellow the interior lights are, which makes the photo look different from my sight whiter and brighter using only natural light.

I painted our bathroom last fall, just before taking pictures of it for my next book, The gift of the house – released next year. We were obsessed with how we liked the darker color better. It was the same paint color combo I suggested for our barn door in the kitchen.

You can see our entire master bathroom revealed HERE.

Staircase

I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever taken a photo of this room in our house, but in case you’ve ever wondered, here’s what it looks like at the top of our staircase.

Outside

All of these photos were taken in March, which is popularly known as the “brown” month around here. The snow has melted but there is no sign of spring yet as we anxiously wait until April so the spring bulbs can start to come out of the ground.

I tend to take sharper photos of our porch. Usually on one side or the other, sloping, due to the length of our porch. My favorite view however was looking at our entire porch at one end leading directly to the door that led to our kitchen. This is the photo below.

Overall, I was very happy with the outcome of our real estate ad. We received so many compliments from people who were wondering if this was a “real” house, because of the quality of the photos. Our real estate agent and photographer did a fantastic job, and our house sold out in a flash the first weekend it was on the market!

I can’t wait to share our new home with you! I promise it will happen soon !! In the meantime, I would like to know your questions on the sale of our house or on the purchase of our new house? So feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below ~