In case you missed it, we moved!
We bought a house and it is SOOOOO perfect for our family. It hit all our “requirements” – huge shaded backyard, great neighborhood, and four bedrooms. Win win win!
We have already done some updates ourselves, and plan on doing more. So I want to share what we’ve done and what we plan to do.
Done So Far…..Paint!
We painted the dining room and our hallway and stairs a fresh white. Both spaces were a dark brown and it made everything so dark and dingy. White has made a huge difference and paint has got to be the best bang for your buck in terms of updating. Yes it takes time and patience but the payoff is immediate and huge. We used Du Jour by Sherwin Williams which we purchased at Lowe’s.
New Lighting
We replaced the boring dining room fixture with this gold chandelier from Wayfair. It has made the room brighter – more bulbs! – and it feels much more updated. I love it so much! It has made a huge impact in the space.
Going upstairs – we updated the flush mount lights in the hallway. The lights before were dim and boring. These new fixtures from Home Depot are brighter and updated.
As a random note – we have a lot of lights on dimmers but they didn’t have dimmable lightbulbs. These are specific lightbulbs you have to buy if you have a dimmer. The previous owners didn’t do that so all the lights would flash or flicker. It was so annoying. We swapped all the lightbulbs and now all the dimmers work. Also, they had just let bulbs burn out and didn’t replace them, so everything was dark. (For example, the guest bathroom upstairs has 6 bulbs but only 2 were working…) Note to readers – replace your lightbulbs when they burn out!
Clean Clean Clean
I don’t have any photos to share how dingy the house was when we moved in. They clearly had not really done a deep cleaning in years, if ever. We were convinced the trim was brown….it’s actually white and just needed to be cleaned. Talk about insane. So we have mopped maybe 10 times in the last three weeks? And my mom and I cleaned each and every baseboard in the house with hot water and powdered Tide. Yes, down on our hands and knees wiping baseboards but it made a *gigantic* difference right away.
We also cleaned doors with Magic Erasers and discovered – you guessed it – that they were white, not dingy white. It’s so wild what cleaning can do! I’ve also bleached tile and grout and we cleaned the carpet and vacuum multiple times a week. Cleaning isn’t glamorous but a clean house is a house you want to live in. It’s shocking how much it has improved the space.
Some bigger projects are on the horizon and I’m super excited for them. We are going to save for a few months and live in the space to confirm how we want to proceed.
New Carpet
We’ve cleaned the carpets but we still hate the color – it’s a dark brown and it just drags the upstairs down from being fresh to being dated. It’s also in bad shape (they were renting out two rooms to roommates so I’m convinced they never vacuumed. Literally ever). Replacing carpet is a big expense so we are shopping around to find something we like at a price we like. Not the most glamorous expense but we are so excited for it.
New Guest Bath
Originally I had wanted to do the primary bathroom and closet right away, but after living here for a few weeks I want to update the upstairs guest/kids bathroom more. It’s all original to the 70s – when the house was built. It’s in fine shape but it’s dated and worn around the edges. We might actually tackle this as a partial DIY! We are thinking that we would put in two of these vanities from Ikea because the space is very long. Then we would re-tile the floor, shower, and paint the walls. Add some new lights and fixtures and it would be a huge transformation.
More Painting
Not exciting but we need to have all the trim in the house repainted. It’s a bunch of different colors – or not painted/peeling – and we need to have professionals come in and paint it. Or maybe we will do it ourselves…we’ll see. But like the fresh white on the walls, fresh white trim will make a MASSIVE difference.
Kitchen?
This is longer term, but we are considering doing an Ikea kitchen as well. The layout is great, and we love the space, but the cabinets are original and look worn. So we are considering this. If you’ve done an Ikea kitchen can you share in the comments?
Wow – so much to do now that I see this list! But each item we cross off is a huge sense of accomplishment and it’s fun to have projects on the horizon. Now that we have done the urgent things (like cleaning) we are being more methodical with the longer projects and will work them in over the next few years. There are also some more decorating changes I want to make and I’ll share those too. Nothing like some fun home content, right?!
Here are some pictures I took the other day – loving these little vignettes of the house!
I love how these photos look in our bedroom on our dresser. Makes it feel like home.
New lighting and paint has made SUCH a difference to this dark hallway!
Grabbed some acrylic shelves at IKEA to create a cute area of my son’s room.
Hello bathroom that needs to be updated! I actually love this shower curtain from Target and want to incorporate soft blues into the new bathroom.
