As many of you know from following along on Instagram, we bought a house at the end of fall and have been slowly (quickly?) renovating to make it our own. You guys have really loved following along so I decided I’d write a quick blog post featuring a few of my favorite projects so far.

We closed on our house, celebrated with champagne and pizza. Somewhere around our 2nd bottle of champagne, my hardwood floor guys called me to say they could start the job earlier than planned and would be at the house 8am next morning. Let the work begin!

We ripped up carpet runners from all the stairs and removed the tracking for the bifold doors. The original hardwood floors were a yellow-toned wood. We freshened this up by going with a darker coffee color and we love the results.

After floors, we had the entire house painted, including walls, ceiling, trim and doors. Honestly, paint made the biggest transformation with the house. We painted all the wood-toned trim and doors white to modernize the space. Most of the walls were beige, tan or yellow. We covered this up with Benjamin Moore Stonington Grey, which is a beautiful light gray with blue undertones. We used this gray color throughout the main level, downstairs and upstairs hallway. Since we didn’t (and still don’t) have a plan for our extra bedrooms, we did Simply White by Benjamin Moore for an easy neutral. And in our master bedroom, we went with Colorado Gray, a beautiful green-blue color.

 

After paint, we replaced the hardware on our doors. The existing hardware was most likely original to the house from the 80’s so all the brass knobs were pretty banged up. We replaced all knobs and hinges with black matte hardware. We removed our mirrored bifold closet doors (again, hello 80’s) and replaced them with a shaker style bifold door that we painted white and added brass pulls. Mirrored doors not pictured because we literally removed them in less than 24 hours of closing.

I’d say the biggest transformation so far happened in our downstairs family room. We ripped up carpet, retiled the hearth of our fireplace, repainted, put a new luxury vinyl plank down on the floors, put down a vinyl peel and stick tile in our laundry room (the floor is sloped so we couldn’t put down a real tile), and added modern, brass sconces (literally went up a few days ago and haven’t taken photos yet). As I’m writing this, I found out the couch I ordered over 9 months ago is *finally* being delivered this week, so expect more photos of this space soon.

 

 

There’s been other things of course too… like having to put in brand new insulation throughout the house (we found out half of our attic had ZERO insulation and the half that was there was probably original to the house from 30+ years ago), updating LOTS of electric (*SO* many switches that didn’t do anything and we can now turn on our family room lights from INSIDE the room instead of from the garage), adding at least 9 new light fixtures throughout the house and installing battery operated motion sensor lights in all of the hall closets (I’m not telling you how to reno but it really pays to have an electrician for a father who accepts Busch Light as payment) and trying (and failing) to remove a family of raccoons from underneath the foundation of our sunroom.

Now that the weather is nice, I’ve been focusing a lot on making our outdoor space great. It’s still a work in progress but we repainted our front door, installed raised beds in our soon-to-be vegetable garden and added some new deer deterrent landscaping that will hopefully survive the summer (we get 6 deer visitors regularly each evening between about 6-7pm who come through our yard for dinner).

I’ll try to post more updates as the house comes together. Be sure to follow along on Instagram where I share updates there too.