Home Renovation Progress

It’s been so long since we’ve talked reno!!! So, I think it’s time to catch you up 🙂  Slowly but surely, we are progressing on our house projects.  Over Christmas break we were able to get a few things done and prepped for a few others.

In the flooring department, we finished two upstairs bedrooms and moved all our furniture into the office bedroom for the foreseeable (short-term) future.  For several reasons.

First, after re-calculating the square footage left in our home that needs flooring, we realized we just have enough… and that’s without counting waste! Oops… not sure how we got in this boat, we must have calculated wrong initially because we’ve wasted very very little thus far and even subtracted a room (the half bath to be tiled) from the equation.  And, the flooring we bought has been discontinued…. of course.

We’re still hopeful we can finish it all with what’s on hand. But, no matter what, the first floor is priority… meaning the master bedroom and adjacent closets will be floored last.  In case we run out, we can always buy something similar for the closet areas and patch upstairs.

This lovely realization means that we need to rethink our plan of attack a little bit.  (Maybe the kitchen gets bumped up in the priority list??)  We will see….

All this to say, we are now enjoying a *mostly* finished room as our bedroom.  And that is oh so nice.  No, it’s not decorated, but just having flooring, paint on the walls, and new curtains makes this the peaceful oasis of our home at the moment.

Our master bed is now housing all large tools and flooring supplies since it will remain floor-less for a while.  In other great news, we finally cleaned out the dining room!  This is such a relief… remember what it looked like?  A festering ground of sawdust, tools, and debris? Not to mention the dresser-turned-workbench-of-death… yes, I had to help carry that thing up the stairs and. back. down. again.  and yes, it’s solid wood.

Now it is mostly cleaned out; mostly because sawdust doesn’t go away with one wiping.  I’m afraid it may take months to fully clean.  And is housing an actual dining table!!! Yippee 🙂  Some time I’m going to redo this table… but I haven’t figured out how yet.  My biggest obstacle is that right now I can’t love that base… Maybe with paint I will like it ok??  I guess looking at the picture it is pretty hidden…

Also we made progress on some curtains that I hope to be sharing here soon, as well as a gallery wall.  And, I ordered fabric for the sectional! In the end I went with navy.  So excited to see how it turns out 🙂

Finally, we made some headway on a project that is currently a little painful to discuss.  You may remember that months ago (literally) we ripped out the bathroom and bought everything to tile and redo…. Then we got busy with flooring, the holidays came.  We finally went to install the cement backerboard to prep for tiling and disaster struck.

Working with mortar is a time-sensitive business… when the cordless drill that Jake had ran out of juice half way through screwing down the board, he had to finish screwing in nearly one hundred screws by hand into the cement board.  That was a scarring experience for him… hence the extreme procrastination on tiling.

So, we finally starting tiling this past week but ran into even more complications and realized that we made it a million times harder than it needed to be.  Right now the room (it’s only 3×6) is 90% tiled… Pray that we can squeeze out the last 10% and grout before I go half-bath crazy!!

Hmmm… I think that’s gets you up to date on the home front.  I am really excited to be sharing some *pretty* home DIY posts in the near future 🙂  It has been too long!

Look for a new blog series coming your way this year!  I’m going to try and post 3 times a week this year.  Generally, each week here you should see a post on home design and DIY, a post on building a blog, and a curated content post where I share my latest finds from around the interwebs.

This year I’m focusing on my brand, and my goal is to be a DIY/Home Design blog that is a resource to other DIY/Home Design bloggers.  A home blogger for home bloggers… does that make sense?  I’m excited for what this means in 2015, let’s do this together!