Don’t get me wrong, this is a beautiful {and much bigger} house. But as everyone does when they first move in, you have to make it your own and feel comfortable there. You also have to make adjustments to suit your personal needs.
For example, in this house we needed to find a place for my office, which is obviously a big part of my life as well as a closet for me. there are two tiny closets in the master bedroom and it just simply isn’t enough.
Here are all the BEFORE pictures of our house and a brief rundown of our Project Plans, which we have divided out into years…
1st year Projects
- Bogey Kennel
- Outdoor Maintenance
- PAINT
- Kitchen & Spa Bathroom Back Splashes
- Kandice Office
- Kandice Closet
- Stair Safety
It is really exciting to have a bit more room to spread out! Although that leaves Bogey with no containment. We also have an unattached garage now {which is not ideal} so Billy and Bogey have their own Man-Space. Billy opts to put up a Puppy Palace right next door!
We also have this super awesome dream porch now too! But for safety, storage and appearance we are going to enclose it with lattice. We also need to put in some faucets around the garage so that we can water Billy’s yard {his constant work in progress challenge}
Of course every new house has to have a pink bedroom in it! And with boys, that was the first room I painted!
Then, for some reason they thought it was a good idea to match all the walls to the floor colors… The kitchen and spa bathroom with a brown tile floor were both painted a sienna brown wall color to match, and the rest of the house which had a yellow bamboo floor were painted yellow to match. That makes for a lot of warm, monochromatic living space… we needed to cool it down and neutralize a lot of it.
You’ll notice above that the kitchen has no back splash and is actually not the only place in the house unfinished… So our March/April was also filled with many trips to Lowe’s!
We wanted to maintain a spare bedroom for all of our family still down south in case they wanted to come visit. So instead of taking it over for my office, I moved into the house’s “formal living room”with the fireplace. There is a very large family room at the other end of the house, so we didn’t need another one, much less a formal one! But I sure do love having the fireplace in here! Wait until you see how I changed it!
These are the only two closets in the Master Bedroom. I know pretty silly right? There was only one closet in the other biggest bedroom…
However, they built out the attic and made permanent {dangerous} stairs up to it. Like a built in pull down ladder that doesn’t fold back up. We obviously can’t have the boys going up and down that so we turned it into my closet space.
Then, because the stairs are pretty dangerous for a toddler running around, and he’s a professional baby gate climber, we had to secure the stairs so Cash could not climb them.
These were our first 7 immediate projects that we took on in the first few months just to make the house more livable. As you can see this was a good start, and reason for ignoring the blog! Even after these projects there are many more ahead! Follow along by going