2020 Home Projects: What We Did (and What We Didn’t)

At the beginning of 2020, Scott and I came up with a list of home projects we wanted to complete. (If you haven’t read our original 2020 house projects post, click here to read that first! You can also find every home-related blog post here.) Today, I’m sharing our “Report Card” for that list: what we got done, what we didn’t, and what grade we’d give ourselves for the work we’ve done so far. I’m also sharing some before and after photos; most show what the space looked like early in 2020 compared to now. (Some photos will be from when we completed the project and a few I took in the past few days!) Later this month, I’ll be sharing what projects are on our list for 2021!

1. Finish the kitchen pantry and doorway: B

What we completed: We finished and painted the pantry and installed the pantry shelves. We prepped the doorway for trim and installed the casing and trim on the dining room side of the doorway. As a bonus, we also painted the kitchen door and replaced the light fixture!

What’s still left: We still need to install the kitchen-side trim and fill and finish all the trim. The pantry doors also need to be installed. The trim work should be pretty quick, but we have never hung a new door before, so that part may be a bit of an adventure.

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Room Tour: Our Toddler Nursery

Image of a decorated nursery featuring a bookshelf wall made of picture ledges.

Today, I’m sharing a few photos of Jamie’s nursery – the first fully finished room in our house! (It’s “fully finished” in that everything has been painted, it has baseboards, and it’s furnished and decorated.) Obviously, we had a little bit of a time crunch since we moved into the house at the beginning of my second trimester and we had a LOT of work to do still! (You can see here what it looked like shortly after we moved in. I almost forgot this room was an office until a few months before Jamie’s birth!) We’re very happy with how it has turned out – it’s simple, unfussy, calming, and uncluttered.

While we didn’t approach the room with a theme in mind, we semi-inadvertently added a lot of woodland/forest/bear elements. We mostly tried to keep it simple and child-friendly, with plenty of room for Jamie to move around and play. We don’t keep many toys in here – just lots of books! (Eventually, we do plan to have a playroom, which will have plenty of space to make big toy messes.)

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An Easy Update: Our Painted Kitchen Door

Photo of a muted green painted door with brass hardware: Jungle Camouflage by Behr.

When we bought our home, we knew that a kitchen renovation would be in our future. I originally had dreams of painting the cabinets, since I knew we wouldn’t be replacing them for a few years. However, they’re metal cabinets with a plastic-y wood veneer on top, so I knew they wouldn’t hold paint well. Instead, we decided to focus on more permanent changes for our “phase one” update.

Since buying our home, we’ve replaced the floors, primed all the walls, opened up the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, built a brand-new pantry (sans doors for now), replaced the light fixture, added new appliances, and – most recently – painted the door. New cabinets and counters are in our future, but we’ve totally transformed the room without even touching them yet!

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