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!
Today, my plan is just to share a bunch of before and after photos (without talking too much since there a lot of them)! These aren’t the highest quality photos; I just wanted to snap some pictures on my phone to commemorate our 1 year houseaversary.
As we complete rooms, I’ll dedicate a post to each room with photos from before we bought the house, while in progress, and the completed room. I can’t wait to finish some rooms and get to those posts!
If you need to catch up on our previous renovations, you may want to check out our posts from when we purchased the house and when we moved in a few months later.
Living Room
Not pictured: the 57 baby items we have in this room 90% of the time (big waterproof mat, baby gym, swing, diaper caddy, etc.). In all seriousness, though, we love this room – it serves us so well!
Office
These before photos don’t really do the condition of the house justice – imagine the before pictures, but way worse, way dirtier, and WAY smellier. This room will eventually be a playroom once we finish Scott’s office and drum room in the basement.
Downstairs Bathroom
We haven’t really done anything to this room except replace the toilet and make a giant hole in the ceiling. Eventually, we plan to re-drywall and paint. Of course our “giant hole in the ceiling” room is our guest bathroom. Living in a fixer-upper is obviously very glamorous.
Dining Room
I love this room SO much – the high ceilings really get me. We have plans for a large photo grid on the left wall, and I can’t wait to decorate the piano top for Christmas!
Kitchen
If you look closely, you can see a new thermostat in the above picture – we replaced our furnace and air conditioning unit this spring! While it wasn’t a very glamorous project, it definitely made a huge difference in our quality of life!
Upstairs Bathroom
The pink tile is growing on me. I can’t believe it, but I find it strangely charming.
Spare Bedroom
Currently, we affectionately refer to this room as “the junk room” – I think you can see why.
Nursery
Another one of my favorite rooms, and currently the most finished room in our house! We still have plans to add some artwork and paint the window white.
Master Bedroom
We moved our second dresser into the nursery to use as a changing table, marveled at how much nicer and more open the room felt, and then promptly put a pack n’ play where the dresser was so that Jamie could sleep in our room.
Our Future Plans
While our renovations have certainly slowed down since having a baby, we still have some plans for the future! A few things that we hope to accomplish soon(ish) are:
- Add baseboards. (They’re all made and painted, just need to be added to rooms! We finished the baseboards in the nursery, and have started installing them in the living room.)
- Complete back deck. (We’re replacing old rotted deck boards with new composite ones.)
- Finish the kitchen pantry; trim the doorway between the kitchen and dining room.
- Paint the kitchen and spare bedroom.
- Paint all doors and wood trim white; replace doors as needed.
- Fix retaining walls in our front and back yards.
- Build a drum room/office for Scott downstairs.
And a few other projects that will be for farther in the future:
- Add storage and a mudroom “drop zone” to the garage entrance downstairs.
- Add a shower to our downstairs half bath; renovate both bathrooms.
- Update the house’s exterior – painting the brick, landscaping, adding a garden to the side yard.
- Replace kitchen counters, cabinets, and cabinet hardware; add a bench or bar.
- Add recessed lighting and/or new ceiling lights to the living room and dining room (and possibly the kitchen).
I wanted to end this post with some thoughts that I recently shared on Instagram:
It’s been exactly one year since we closed on our house, and about 364 days since we’ve been hosting people here. Shout out to all our wonderful friends and family who cooked over a fire in our backyard because we didn’t have any kitchen appliances and who spent summer weekends in our living room even though we didn’t have air conditioning (or floors); sorry our house smelled so bad.
In all seriousness, though, we’re passionate about making our house a home, but we don’t think it needs to be finished to do so. We are so glad we didn’t wait to start enjoying our home – some of our fondest memories here are from times before our walls were painted, before we had a functioning kitchen, and before we had any furniture in our entire first floor! We’ll just be over here celebrating how far we’ve come in a year, and we can’t wait to see what this place looks like a year from now!