We recently completed another successful round of the 40 BAGS IN 40 DAYS™ decluttering challenge and the second year of our email course, our membership surpassed that of last year! It’s amazing and crazy to see the number of participants grow each year; I’ll never tire of hearing stories of how a simple decluttering challenge has challenged lives. Thanks for all your support, inspiration, and spreading the word on our humble challenge.
Behind the scenes (or if you follow on instagram stories), we’ve been prepping to start remodeling the entire first floor of our house, starting with the family room pictured below. Before I tell you what we plan to do in this phase of the project, let me take a step back. I’ll share a brief timeline of what we’ve done up to this point and plan to do for the renovation.
Since our current #whbs1910house needed SO much work, we wanted to do as much as we could right off the bat.
April 2017 we first toured the property. I didn’t even take any pictures while looking!! I didn’t want to get my hopes up. As I drove up, I had a strong feeling this was it. This was the house. As I toured the house, I got more and more excited. It needed work, sure, but I didn’t think of it as a “tear down” despite the listing selling it for land only. The demand in our neighborhood is high, and many small old homes get torn down to make way for beautiful new ones.
We looked at it on Doug’s lunch break, and he returned with my dad and a structural engineer that night. He confirmed what we had thought – there were some structural issues, but they were able to be fixed. We got several quotes/opinions on the basement work and started making plans on what we’d do to the rest of the house.
Our rough timeline looked like this:
- basement foundation, drainage, and supports
- all four upstairs bedrooms painted, new flooring
- expanding the family room
- complete gut of kitchen, dining room, bathroom
- adding laundry room to back porch
- making front porch more porch-ish
- landscaping and exterior projects
I didn’t announce until end of July, the closing kept getting delayed and we wondered if it would even go through. 2 1/2 months after our offer was accepted we reached a resolution. We got the news we could close on a Thursday, closed Friday, moved in on Saturday, cleaned up our old house on a Sunday, then closed early that week. Ahhh!
First we finished the basement, then while the major work was done down there, we started all four upstairs bedrooms. The original hope was to finish those two before moving in, but life happens.
Once we moved in, the major basement work started. After the structural stuff was done and the house settled a bit, we started room by room on the ceilings, walls, and trim. Over several months we did that work, emptying one room bedroom at a time, and shifting everyone’s mattresses and stuff around. Once that was done, we had the floors upstairs refinished. Once all THAT was done, we needed a breather.
We finished our bedroom, had baby Nora in December, and stopped all work until now. We’ve been sourcing things, getting quotes, and planning our next steps. We finished up 40 BAGS IN 40 DAYS for 2018, took a family vacation in Florida over the kids’ Easter break, then made plans to start once we came home.
So here we are today!
This year we are hoping to remodel the entire first floor, all 800 square feet of it. Here’s what we plan to do in 2018:
- 1st phase – HVAC, downstairs bathroom expansion, family room expansion, move basement door
- 2nd phase – kitchen, dining room, adding 1st floor laundry room
- 3rd phase – (what we would like to do but not sure if we’ll get to it) front porch/curb appeal updates, add patio
The 1st phase was started, HVAC is done and demo on our family room starts Monday, which is insane.
In the next post I’ll share more details on what we plan to do, and then go into detail for our design of each room. Room layout, finishes, etc. The fun part of course is decorating, so I’ll do another post on that eventually. I feel this house has pushed me past my safe zone for decorating and I’m feeling more comfortable picking bold, out-of-the-ordinary style choices, which is so fun! I think my style would best be described as classic/traditional, yet eclectic at times. I’m drawn to bohemian styles and textures, bold color, and it will be interesting to see how those play out in our old home.
Stay tuned! Any questions, leave them here or on facebook, or on our instagram stories. I’m constantly sharing updates on instagram stories, it is the best place to follow us these days. I’m revamping our email newsletter and will keep you posted on how to get updates there.
