Our Deck Makeover Reveal

Today, I’m revealing our (finally) finished deck makeover! When we moved in, our deck boards were old and rotted, the pavers were overgrown with weeds, and our yard had been about halfway taken over with vines and overgrown plants. This deck was one of the items on our 2020 home projects list, and it felt great to cross it off! Having lots of livable outdoor space is a high priority for us, because we know we’ll be spending lots of time in the backyard with Jamie this summer!

Image of finished deck makeover with table and chairs.

The backyard was one of the things we loved most about our house when we first saw it; we knew it had tons of potential for a great outdoor living space. Although small, the yard is quite flat and pretty square (a real rarity in western PA!), and we loved the mature trees. A few other selling features were the fence, the privacy (pretty good for a neighborhood), and the perfect combo of lots of warming sun in the winter and nice shade in the summer (once the trees have leaves).

After ripping off the old deck boards pretty early on, we left the joists exposed for a year-ish. We bought the new Trex boards last winter but between an error in our board delivery resulting in a shipping delay, the winter, and a baby, we didn’t get around to finishing it until this spring. We are SO happy that we finished it just a few weeks before our state’s COVID-related stay-at-home order went into effect. We’ve been getting a TON of use out of it already!

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10 Home Projects on Our List for 2020

Happy New Year! After a much-needed break from work and blogging, I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle some home projects in the new year! Scott and I recently sat down and figured out our priorities for this year. We have quite a few unfinished projects that we want to complete, and a few new projects that should make our house work much better for us!

Today, I’m sharing what projects we want to tackle this year! While we have plenty of items on our list, I’m just going to focus on the 10 bigger projects here. Throughout this post, I’ll include a few photos that show what some of our rooms look like currently, and discuss our plan of action for each project. If you’ve missed my previous updates, you can catch up on all our house progress here. I’ve talked through our buying process, a few intense months of renovations, and our 1 year progress!

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Our 1 Year House Update

For those of you who haven’t been following along, Scott and I purchased our first home almost exactly 1 year ago! Today, I’m sharing a bunch of before and after photos (the good, the bad, and the still-very-much-in-progress). This post is going to be a little bit of a doozy, so I’m just going to jump right into things!

Since our previous house progress post back in November, we’ve gotten quite a few things done! We finished and sealed all our Pergo floors downstairs, started working on our baseboards, replaced our furnace and a/c system (just in time for summer!), completed the nursery, had our sagging garage wall fixed, and added lots of furniture and decor!

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