Friday marked 2 weeks of Lee and I being home owners! We’ve learned so much already – mostly patience for me – but also that’s it’s no cheap task to renovate a house. I’ve never shopped at (or been so happy to shop at) Lowe’s in my entire life and every time we complete a job there are 40 more staring at us.
But it’s a great experience and I have a feeling we’ll be working on projects for this home for the next few years.
For those of you who don’t know, we bought a 1979 brick Cape Cod style house on about a 3rd of an acre in a quiet little neighborhood a bit west of Greenville. We walked into the house and although there were so many things we wanted to change, we saw the vision of what this house could become and so we pulled the trigger and jumped into renovations.
The list of projects we’ve already completed is impressive (I think) for only owning the house for 4 weeks. In that time we’ve:
- done some serious yard work
- planted a small garden
- tore off a shed attached to the back of the house
- replaced the old hot water heater with a tankless one
- took out a window and put in a door
- took out a door and put in a window
- tore out 2 walls – one was structural, one was not
- put in 2 new windows
- tore out the entire kitchen
- changed the entire electrical in the kitchen
- fixed kitchen plumbing issues
- ripped out and replaced kitchen drywall and insulation
- pulled out paneling in the living room
- removed textured ceilings throughout the entire house
- tore up upstairs carpet
- started laying upstairs hardwoods
… and I’m sure I’m missing a few things.
Now, to be fair we personally haven’t done every single one of these items. We’ve actually had 2 really awesome contractors that have worked in the house and gotten us names of skilled people who have done great work for us -like the ceilings, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Today a local flooring company is going to be in the house for the week working on laying, sanding, and refinishing the downstairs floors. We took out a massive half-moon brick hearth as well as the laminate in the kitchen since it’s essentially one big room now we needed a skilled hand to create one seamless floor pattern/color for us. But we are laying the upstairs floors ourselves.
After the floors are finished it’s going to be lots of painting – if you haven’t seen I’ve been working with Clare Paint to pick the perfect neutral for all the walls in our house (more to come!) And yes, when I say every wall I mean we are painting every square inch of our 2,000 sq ft. house. NBD.
After that we’ll move on to putting the kitchen in place – new cabinets, quartz countertops, subway tile backsplash, etc. and hopefully it won’t be June at that point.
I could keep going with all the projects we want to do – we’re debating about just going ahead and replacing all the windows in the house because they are original to the house and ROUGH! – but we keep rolling with it!
I’ve included some of our iPhone photos of the progress below but if you want a more up-to-date version of our progress hop over to my Instagram Stories where I try share an update a day!
