After six weeks and much ado, I am sincerely thrilled to be sharing our den and powder room makeover with you! With the completion of these two rooms, nearly the entire downstairs of our home has been transformed since we moved in three and a half years ago. It feels so good to have finally shown this area some love. Before scrolling, revisit the before photos and my original mood board!
Home Renovation
After living in our house for a little over three years, I am so so excited to finally be sharing the reveal of our master bedroom makeover! It took so long to make our bedroom a priority, and it’s also a particularly small master bedroom, so my goals were to make it feel cozy yet resort-like in the way the best Airbnb bedrooms always feel. The new paint color from EasyCare® Ultra Premium Paint is the pièce de résistance of the room and the element that brought it all together.
I am so excited to be joining my first One Room Challenge as a guest participant! If you’re not familiar with the One Room Challenge, it’s a semi-annual design extravaganza where bloggers, content creators and Instagrammers make over a room in their home in six weeks while sharing weekly updates. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing it in the past, but this time I’m officially on the bandwagon and so excited.
When we first bought our house last year, it was practically begging for an amazing backyard patio. We considered putting one in right away, but figured we’d first live in the house for a while to see how we really used the backyard. And, let’s be honest, there was the whole budget issue too since we’d just bought a house and had already tackled big renovations in the living room and dining room most notably. As it turns out, we lived in our backyard all last summer. Long, lazy dinners that lasted well into the evening, copious bocce ball matches, the grilling of numerous homemade pizzas and the construction of one very fun homemade slip ‘n slide defined our summer days. By the end of summer, the patch of grass closest to the house was brown and beaten into oblivion from being constantly trampled over and we knew constructing a patio would be a top priority come spring of this year. Then spring came and it didn’t stop raining. For months and months and months. (Which, no, is not our normal weather pattern.) That derailed our “must have a patio by Memorial Day weekend” timeline, but sure enough come early July we were finally ready to begin construction. After one seriously intense month of work (which so many of you followed along with on Instagram Stories), our backyard makeover is now just about complete as of a few weeks ago and we’ve been loving using living in this space. It feels like a huge addition to the back of our house and we just can’t get enough of oohing and aahing over the transformation. So today, I have all the before and after photos for you! Plus a few photos of the construction process, too, just for kicks. Scroll through for all the details and chime in below with any questions.
A year ago today, Bob and I carried a little baby girl into an attorney’s office across town. There may have been a lot of nerves. There may have been some pinching to be sure we weren’t dreaming. We sat across a big wide table, with our tiny girl sitting with us, and thanked the now former owners for selling us their childhood home. Their parents bought the house in the early 1950s (making us only the third or fourth owners of our 100+ year old house) and having lost their mother in her 90s back in 2014, it was a bittersweet day for them as they said goodbye to more than six decades of memories.
The brick started kind of a yellowy speckled color that I always knew wouldn’t be long for the living once we were moved in and settled. The chimney is actually the same color and outside I kind of love it, but inside it was doing nothing but taking away from that gorgeous mantle. It instantly grabbed your eye when you waked in the room and definitely not in the good way. It was quite distracting actually. So finally after months of sitting and waiting and being sure I was 100% on the painting train, a few weeks ago I got the job done!
Today’s post is long overdue, but no less exciting – the completed renovation of our dining room! Our dining room is easily one of my favorite rooms in our house and one where we spend a lot of time. Unlike a lot of people, a majority of our meals are actually eaten around our dining room table and we also play cards here a lot on the weekends. The kids can be playing a board game on one end while we’re playing rummy at the other and it acts as the perfect hub for entertaining, eating, and lounging. Because I’m getting ready to make some final decisions in this space regarding curtains, a big area rug to anchor the room and art, it seemed like the perfect time to take a look back at what this room looked like when we closed on the house and what it looks like now.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve finally started to pluck away at the puzzle that is decorating our living room. When I shared my general inspiration for our living room decor, I mentioned that since our initial living room renovation (removing 3+ layers of wallpaper, fixing the walls, painting every square inch of wall …
I am so excited today to share photos of our living room renovation with you! If you’ve been following along on Snapchat, you know we have countless hours into renovating this room. As a quick recap, when we began we thought there was just a single layer of wallpaper on the walls. As it turns …
I mentioned in my renovation update last week (and also multiple times on Snapchat) that we would be looking to swap out the existing light fixture in our dining room sooner rather than later. Frankly, it’s just not our taste so we had always planned to change it at some point, but then we discovered …
One month ago we went to the bank for a really large check and then drove to an office across town to hand that check over to some people we had never met before. We were really nervous and both felt fairly sick to our stomachs over the whole thing. Turns out, we got a pretty …
To say that this post today has been a long time in coming would be a complete understatement. On so many levels. To sit down to share these photos and this experience with you is nearly impossible to capture in words. It feels pretty monumental, if I’m perfectly honest. So I’m just going to say it …