2020 Home Renovations Round Up

Well well well… To say that 2020 was quite a year would be an understatement we can all agree on. If anything that’s come out of 2020 for me personally, its focus. Focus on what’s important, and how I go about my goals. I won’t go in too deep, but one thing me and Frank both decided to focus on going forward is the house. We have lots of plans and hopes for the future and finishing our home renovations is the one thing we feel will make the biggest difference right now.

Mostly for my own sake, I wanted to round up some of the big highlights we’ve accomplished this year at our house and celebrate some big wins!

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Home Renovations of 2020

The Office Makeover

This room had been “re-done” in the first few years of owning our house but it never felt quite right, nor did it have much of a true purpose – it was essentially just an extra room and it felt like it. Since it had already been re-done once before it was a lot easier this time around and I was able to mostly just re-paint and re-decorate. Still, it was one of the most fun projects of the year, and it’s really what got me excited to work on house projects again after I had taken a long time off from getting my hands dirty.

You can check out the full before and after here. I also shared the progress as part of my One Room Challenge guest posts, and you can find all of those posts here.

The Office Before + After

The Entryway

I haven’t shared the full before and after here on the blog yet (but will soon, so stay tuned!), but I did share the DIY color blocking I did in the entryway. The entry needed a lot more than paint. The heavily textured walls were cracking so there was a lot of plaster repair, as well as skim coating to smooth it out. We also changed the light fixture and I repaired the original window.

Entryway Before + After

Color Block Wall DIY

Small Sunroom Makeover

Like the entryway, the den had cracked textured plaster walls and ceiling, so it needed the full workup. I also painted the massive radiators and did a lot of work to fix the crumbling windowsills. I’ll also be share more details and a full before and after for the den makeover on the blog in the near future, so stay tuned!

Kitchen Update

While we are still a little ways away from calling the kitchen “finished” we’ve also made huge progress. The kitchen has been work-in-progress since we first bought the house, but we’ve been really pushing to get it done these last few months. After living with the kitchen in a semi-gutted state for a few years and debating what exactly to do with the awkward layout we decided to just go ahead and fully gut it. We also decided to widen the doorway between the kitchen and the sunroom, which was by far our best decision yet.

Currently we’re working on getting the floors in the sunroom up and new joists and subfloor put down so we can tile the kitchen and sunroom at the same time to create a seamless transition and pull both rooms together. Once that’s done we can finally start on the extra fun stuff – like kitchen cabinets!! After 7+ years of never having real kitchen cabinets, you could say I’m more than a little excited.

I am so excited for what this next year will bring. It’s only been a few months since we both decided together to focus more on the house renovations, and when I look back I can see how much we’ve already accomplished!