Hey, y'all! Man, the last month has been an absolute whirlwind. Just before Thanksgiving, we bought our very first house. We spent about 3 weeks cleaning, painting, and working on projects before we began moving in. We wanted to wait until our foster children went home before we move all of our stuff over. We didn't want them to have to deal with moving from one house to another only to have them move again when they were reunified.
Our new house is just 3 miles away from our old place so the move was super easy. I am so excited about being able to fix up our little house and making it our home. We've already painted many of the rooms and had Ashley's dad do some woodwork in the entryway. Soon we'll be swapping out light fixtures and installing a backsplash. I can't wait to see it all come together.
In the meantime, here's a look at some of our projects, so far. The photos on the left are the before shots and the ones on the right are after shots.
Out with the old and in with the new! The previous homeowners had a pet bird that had free reign of the house...like, for real. Our first task was to clean up bird crap and try to get rid of the smell. We put a fresh coat of paint up in the entryway, living area, dining room, kitchen and master bathroom. We swapped out the basic cream color for a more modern, and more forgiving, gray.
Every single male that came into the house during the painting process told us we were doing it wrong. Each and every one of them picked up the paintbrush to show us the "proper way" to paint. We either had too much paint on the roller or not enough paint. Our strokes were wrong, our brushes wrong, etc. Lord, have mercy.
Ashley's dad came into town and ended up repainting all of the living spaces for us.
While Ashley's dad was here, he completed our biggest project, yet. One of the things that we noticed about the house is the lack of storage spaces. We only have one linen closet and the world's smallest laundry room. We also don't have a coat closet. To fix this, I asked Ashley's dad to help us transform our entryway. He put in a batten board wall for us and I added some hooks so we would have somewhere to hang our coats and bags.
The house is slowly but surely coming together. We're still waiting for our new living room furniture to arrive, in the meantime we're working with what we have. I can't wait until the new stuff comes in!
One of the main things we've noticed about our house is the lack of storage. Our priority is going to be to create smart, practical storage spaces to give us a place to store our things. We've got some pretty lofty goals to help us accomplish this however we'll be starting off with smaller projects like window seats and reading nooks.
Here's a sneak peak at our next project:
Be sure to follow me in Instagram to see a sneak peek of how our house is progressing. Head on over there now for look at our dining room and library. I'm off to tackle the master bathroom. Wish me luck and see you next time!