The Mom, Wife, Dream Life

Owning your own home means you will change something at some point in time. We have owned our home for the last two years, and we are still working on home projects. To be completely honest, I don’t know if home projects ever really stop… do they? 

Ethan and I have lived in two apartments, with family, and finally, our own home. To learn the story behind the day we bought our first home, check out this blog. Our home is perfect for us right now, though some changes need to be made, and other changes we want to make. Lately, we’ve been painting the walls in our home. At first, we had this whole plan to remodel and paint, add new carpet/flooring, take out a wall, add a wall, extend the backyard, etc. Welp… that’s changed, too. 

We realized that to do all those things, we need to have the time to do them, the money to drop into all those projects, and the supplies to actually accomplish them. Certain projects would require getting some outside help, such as tearing down a wall, making sure that it doesn’t have a support beam inside, and then talking to the city to make sure that our backyard does extend back past the fence we currently have out there. House projects can be done, but realistically. So we had to start small and slowly work towards modernizing and upgrading our house before making drastic changes.

Where did we Start When beginning our Home Renovations? 

At first, we started with one room; that way, our whole house wasn’t torn apart trying to complete multiple projects at once. We got a new table and chairs, we painted them grey, and then we built a gate to put around our pellet stove so that our children didn’t go too close to it during the wintertime. We picked the color scheme we wanted for painting, and tried to center our decorations and furniture around those colors. 

Have We Bought New Furniture?

Originally, we had a two-seater dark brown couch, but our family is growing, and we needed something bigger, and something that better matched our house and the modernizing theme we were going for. We ended up buying a long, light grey couch that fits our whole family, and it’s perfect. The worst part, and will be the worst part someday when we move, was getting it in the house… It was a pain in the butt. Let me tell you, there were some naughty words said about this heckin couch. It was so annoying that we ended up just shoving it through the corner of our wall.. The halls in our house are not very wide, and we obviously didn’t think that through when purchasing the couch, and looking back, we should have just done it the hard way by taking it through the door in the backyard, but no.. instead we went the most difficult ways and ended up up taking paint off the walls, and scuffing the couch up in the process. Not too much damage was done that couldn’t be fixed! The paint was no problem, as we planned on repainting anyway, and the couch was only chipped in places nobody would see, looking at it anyway. It worked out, but this couch will either stay and die in this house, or it will be taken out roughly through the back door.

How Have We Painted Our House? 

Ethan and I painted our bedroom a light grey color, and painted an accent wall a dark navy blue color. We then cut wood firring strips and spaced them out on the wall. We gave it some dimensions instead of just a plain colored wall. Next, we hung up shelves in our room, two on the accented wall, and two on the wall across the front of he accented wall. We offset them so that they weren’t straight, but added both attractiveness and purpose. Once the room was painted, we took off the trim, and we plan to get different trim for the whole upstairs living quarters of our home. The current trim is an oak wood colored trim, which doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t fit with the modern look we are aiming for. We then moved on to our bathroom. We actually repainted and changed some things around in about one week. We repainted all the walls a dark tan color, but ended up looking like a light purple/tan mixture (it’s actually very pretty!). We painted the vanity in the bathroom black, as well as the bathroom shelves, and we also hung up two shelves that match our bedroom ones.

What Are Our Next Steps in our Home Renovations? 

Our next steps in renovating our house will most likely be the finishing of our living room/dining room area. We painted one accent wall thus far in our living room, and it too is the same dark navy blue, and we aren’t sure yet if we want to add any dimensions to it. We have little window slits that go down our stairs, and we were afraid of the girls falling through them, so Ethan built little wooden “windows” inside the open gap to keep the girls from falling through. We painted those window openings the light grey we have in our bedroom. The living room walls are going to be mostly the tan/purple color with the navy blue as the accent. From there, we would probably do trim in the living room as well, to match the trim we end up getting for our bedroom and bathroom. Moving on from the living room would lead us into the kitchen.

We want to paint the cabinets in our kitchen. We aren’t sure what color we would want to paint them yet, but it would accent the tan in the living room and stick to the modern look we are going for. We would probably end up painting them either white, grey, black, or a shade of blue. Right now, they are the old oak brown color that matches the trim along the house inside. Our kitchen isn’t very big, which is why in the beginning we wanted to take down a wall and extend it out, but with our current renovations, and possible future opportunities and changes, we will probably keep it the way it is, and modernize it as best as we can with what we have.

Are We Going to Keep the Carpet in Our House?

The flooring in our house is nasty, old, run-down carpet that I’m sure has been here for years and years. The previous owners of the house had little dogs, and never vacuumed or cleaned up… So every time we vacuum, we pick up some of their dog hair, dirt, and whatever else they left behind, on top of all of our hair and dirt we produce and bring in the house. It’s gross, but we vacuum often to keep and maintain it as best as we can for the time being. Eventually, we plan on getting new flooring. We talked about getting hardwood flooring instead of carpet, and keeping carpet on the stairs and in the bedroom. It would be much easier to clean, and if we ever rented the house out, it would make us feel better about allowing animals and other pets.

What Are Our Plans For the Exterior of our House? 

We don’t have a whole lot more we want to do in the interior of our home, but it’s enough to keep us busy and planning. Onto the exterior. First and foremost, we are planning on fixing our front stairs. They were slanted, sunk in, and pulling away from the house when we bought it, and it’s only just progressively gotten worse over the last two years of us living here. We want to tear out the front deck stairs and redo them completely. We want to extend the platform of it out, and then put stairs going down, that way we can put in a little storage space underneath, and we wouldn’t have to crawl through spider webs and yucky bugs to get to our totes and decorations.

Another thing we had talked about doing was adding rocks to our front driveway to create a spot for another vehicle. We’ve been parking our truck on the dirt/lack of grass under a tree in our driveway, and we want to make a more permanent spot for parking. Our driveway is decently sized, but it would allow for more than just the single-car space of the driveway, and if we have visitors, it would offer them a spot that wouldn’t be in the road. Along with rocks in front of our house, we’ve talked about adding rocks to the backyard as well. 

Our dog, Remington, gets muddy when he goes outside and it’s rained or snowed. Putting down rock would offer him an easier, cleaner, and more available place to play and do his business. Not to mention that the little rocks would make it so much easier to clean up after him and rid the backyard of the weeds. Our backyard isn’t huge, but the small amount of space we do have, we’d like to make a bit more intentional. For example, having grass in the bottom half of the yard for the kids to play, or making a small garden bed to plant crops in, building/buying a chicken coop to raise and grow chickens, etc. Logically, and more realistically, we will probably just end up growing nice grass, and later on, maybe look into garden boxes or a small coop.

Why is it So Difficult to Start Home Renovations?

Our lives are always busy, and I am pretty confident with the fact, that it’s not going to settle down any time soon. Life is always going to be busy, and we can come up with a million excuses to not do something every single day, but making and setting the time to renovate our home not only brings us closer together as a family, but it also increases the value of our lives and our house itself. Renovations don’t have to be enormous things that change the house; they can be in the simple and small things, such as repainting or even buying a new couch or picture frame. What house renovations are you working on? Or, what house renovations do you want to someday accomplish/do? Let me know, and if you want to know more about me, I would be happy to answer questions!

“A House is made of walls and beams; A Home is made with love and dreams.”

McKenna Sanders

The Mom, Wife, Dream Life Blog

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