I CANNOT BELIEVE we have lived in our house for 6 months (almost 7!). We love this house so so much. It is perfect for us and I truly cannot believe how it is working out. We bought it sight unseen – only my mom saw it once we were under contract! For like 30 minutes! – so it’s a true blessing it is so perfect for us.
The house needed a lot of refreshing immediately. It has great bones but hadn’t been cleaned or updated in a lot of areas. Ok so here is what we’ve done so far….
- Painted – we painted the whole downstairs Du Jour by Sherwin Williams. We also painted the upstairs hallway and the stairs. This INSTANTLY refreshed the whole look of our house!!! Seriously painting is slow going but so so worth it. You can see the greenish white above before we painted. Gosh, it’s so much better now.
- New carpet – we had the old, dark brown carpet replaced with a lighter tan/white. Basically cream carpet. It has made such a huge difference and the upstairs is SO MUCH brighter and lighter.
- Switched a lot of light fixtures – we updated the dining room, play room and hallway lights. We put this in the dining room, this in the play room, and these in the hallway.
- Outdoor landscaping and cleaning – we added dirt to our raised beds, planted plants in empty beds and added some new planter/bed areas around our backyard shed.
- Kitchen – new counters, appliances, and backsplash (whole post coming on this!)
All these changes have made such a huge impact on how fresh and clean the house looks. It was so dark and dingy when we moved in. Now it’s bright and clean! Some of these updates were expensive (countertops), but paint is truly transformational and will give amazing bang for your buck.
We still have a lot of things on our list that we want to get done! Here’s a quick list.
- Update the guest bathroom upstairs – paint, new trim, new vanities, new lights, new mirrors. We are going to keep the original tile and maybe clean the grout with something like this? The tile is in fine shape so trying to get some cosmetic updates without spending a ton. Or maybe I will paint the tile a fun stencil? It’s a basic white porcelain so it’s a blank canvas!
- Paint and trim in our daughter’s bedroom – I want to add picture frame molding and paint her whole room! The walls are really banged up so it needs paint and figure we might as well do something fun. I love this look!
- Front landscaping – we have some blank areas out front that are sad and need some bushes or something. We will tackle this in the fall once it is cool enough to plant again.
- Update all trim and doors….UGH! This one is going to be brutal. The trim paint is in horrible condition throughout the house. It’s peeling and flaking all over and badly needs paint. Currently we have three different types of baseboard upstairs so we want to make it the same…we’ll see how this goes. Also our doors were never painted to match the trim so we need to paint those as well! The fact that the doors and trim don’t match has driven me crazy since we moved in. This is going to be a huge project and I think I’m just going to start painting parts of the downstairs trim this summer…
Well our to-do list is long! I hope we can tackle the upstairs bathroom later this summer and maybe the paint this fall? We’ll see. I don’t want to overcommit but I do think these changes will be amazing.
It’s fun to see our house change and add more interest and dimension to various rooms. I’ll be sure to share as we make more updates. What would you do first??? Let me know!
