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!
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!
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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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!
