5 Year Blogiversary

As of last Wednesday this little blog is now officially FIVE YEARS OLD!! It’s crazy how the time has flown. I still remember the day I hit publish on my very first post about the little corner mudroom that we created in our old house. Oh how things have changed!

I was excited, nervous and utterly terrified about beginning this journey, but I’m so glad that I did! It’s been my creative outlet to share my ideas with the world, has created some nice side income to feed into our fixer upper and it’s introduced me to so many wonderful friends.

Each year I seem to learn more and more. This past one I’ve learned that it’s important to not get stuck in the world of comparison, to always be true to myself and that there’s always going to be room for improvement.

I feel that if I didn’t have this blog I wouldn’t be nearly as motivated on our house projects! Actually, I KNOW that half of the things that I’ve shared on the blog would either have never happened at all or would have taken a heck of a lot longer than they did to finish! Having a goal to get at least one post a week pushes me to get my butt in gear and get stuff done–I absolutely love it!

It’s tradition for me to use this anniversary to step back and go through all that I’ve accomplished in the last year, largely thanks to this blog. Get settled, this is going to be a long, but very fun look back at the past year!

1. Powder Room

If you’ve been following along you may recall the washing machine flood that happened immediately after we moved in and left our powder room/laundry area completely gutted and ready for a makeover.

As of today I’d say it’s about 95% done.

After years of dreaming of having a vessel sink “we” (mainly the hubby because plumbing stuff terrifies me) finally installed one on top of a new vanity.

We also ripped out the wire shelf above the washer and dryer and built floating wood shelves instead.

The only reason that I haven’t shared a full tour on it yet is because I still need to install the quarter round along the top, in the corners and the corner trim on the pony wall. It’s kind of embarrassing that a year later I still haven’t gotten around to that actually! Hopefully I can get to that sooner rather than later to so I can share an actual reveal on it.

2. Exterior Paint

When we first purchased the home I immediately started dreaming about new paint colors.

I found myself scoping out houses for inspiration pretty much anywhere we went, and it took me forever to narrow down color choices to get samples of. I compared them in this post.

I ultimately chose Requisite Gray and am 100% happy with my pick! It goes beautifully with the brick and I think it’s the perfect mid-point between cool and warm gray which is exactly what I was searching for.

You can catch the reveal post here.

3. Floors

I’m sure the hubby will agree with me when I say that the biggest project that we completed this past year was installing the new engineered hardwood flooring through the entire main level. I never got around to doing a tutorial on it, but I promise that I’ll try to do that before the year is over!

To show you what difference it made let’s take a peek at a few before and afters.

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The color is called French Seacliff by Malibu Flooring and as far as I’m aware it’s only available at Home Depot. I spent months looking at samples and am so happy with this one!

4. Doors

When we first moved in all of the doors with exception to the front door were flat orangish wood. I never cared for them, so when we finished installing the hardwoods I decided it was time to get ride of them.

We started by replacing the coat closet door with a brand new slab, and then I painted the front door Urban Bronze by Sherwin Williams. You can read all about both in this post.

I felt like it made such a huge difference and totally updated the entire room! I decided to keep the momentum going in the back hallway since it had the same orange doors and trim.

We replaced the bathroom door with a new slab, but when I found out how much new garage entry doors cost I was totally shocked!

So instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars on a new one, I painted it and added some trim and when we were done it looked brand new!

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I added trim around the basement entryway since this photo was taken, so this little hallway is complete as of today!

5. Basement Stairs

This the perfect example of the trickle effect. The new floors made me want new doors. And the new doors caused us to leave the one off of the basement (it’s a long story…) which left the staircase open and made me want to make the stairs pretty.

Using paint and dark wax I created a faux wood look on them.

It was the perfect solution to tide us over until we can afford to replace the treads with real wood.

6. Master Bathroom Makeover

When the spring season of the One Room Challenge rolled around I chose to move upstairs to give our master bathroom a little budget refresh since it was extremely dated and I felt like I couldn’t stand it another day longer–especially the carpet!

The full reveal can be found here, but this is a glimpse at our “new” bathroom!

Since I was trying to spend as little as possible on this makeover I did a lot of DIYS. And I mean A LOT….

Such as painting the shower stall,

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putting a concrete overlay over the laminate countertop,

installing grouted peel and stick tiles,

and framing the existing mirror.

I even figured out how we could create more storage by building these industrial pipe shelves.

It was a lot of work but I’m thrilled with how it all turned out. It feels like we have an entirely new bathroom!

7. Mudroom Nook

And finally, the most recent project that we completed is what we call the mudroom nook.

As a little backstory, when we first purchased the house we noticed that the pantry was awkwardly placed along the wall between the dining area and the living room.

We decided to use some of the cabinets in the kitchen for food storage, and once I ripped the doors and shelves out we were left with this empty nook.

We decided to build an area that we could utilize as a drop zone. So we got to work building the bench, and installing shiplap.

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We added a shelf up top, along with some hooks and here is what it looks like today!

I shared all of the details in the reveal post. I can’t even begin to describe the amazing feeling of finally having somewhere to hide everyone’s shoes and hang up coats!

Okay and now for the fun part. As some of you know, I always like to make a list of goals and then look back the following year to see how we did. Here was last year’s:

• Finish the laundry/powder room makeover—welllllll almost a check! Like I mentioned, it’s really close and it should most certainly be done soon. Unless I become super distracted, which is a real possibility!
• Install hardwoods throughout the main level–check!
• Kitchen renovation–Not quite yet! I actually plan on tackling it for the fall season of the One Room Challenge, so stay tuned for that!
• Stairs makeover–not yet on that either! I think that we plan to work on them after the kitchen.

And for next year…

• Kitchen renovation
• Stairs makeover
• Install hardwoods and new doors upstairs
• Playroom makeover

Am I totally crazy for thinking all of that is totally doable?? I sure hope not!

Thank you so much to all of you that continue to encourage me and keep me going. I appreciate you all from the bottom of my heart and can’t wait to share this next journey in our fixer upper with you guys!

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