We took a bit of a break from the home projects during the holidays but now that its the new year and we’ve let ourselves rest for a bit, we’re getting the urge to start back on the project train! Since every spare penny was poured into the house last year, we’re finding a bit more balance in the budget in 2020 and focusing on a couple bigger projects and a few small improvements along the way.
If you’re new here, we bought a house in April 2019, our contractor started ripping out walls 2 days later and we completely transformed the interior in about 2 months. Read a bit about our renovation process here and here.
Planing Our Bigger Projects
We knew right off the bat what our two larger scale projects were going to be this year. Honestly, we have so many we’d love to do, but looking around our home, two stood out that we knew would make a huge difference.
- Getting new windows
This was something we were debating doing in our initial renovation but at the end we really needed to allocate the budget for other high priority items. All but two of our windows are original to the house and are in pretty rough shape. Through the summer we were spending a decent amount on cooling the house because of the gaps in the window sills.
We got one quote already and in the spring will be getting a few more to compare prices.
- Finishing our fireplace + adding built ins in the living room
Not that I’m not excited about new windows, but finishing this statement wall in our living is probably the project I’m most excited about. Our “fireplace” started out as a circular hearth made for a wood burning oven. We got the idea to break it down, build a fireplace frame + hearth and cover it with a cement feather finish.
Now, we’re expanding that idea with the addition of an electric fireplace insert and custom built-ins on either side for book storage. We’re still working out what we want the end result to look like, design wise, and actually how we want to build them.
Photos below for design inspo pulled from Pinterest
Smaller Home Projects Planned
- General landscaping – mulch, cleaning up our side beds, etc.
- Paint our front door – we want to replace it asap, but for now we’ll likely just put a coat of black paint on it
- Finish replacing outlets – our downstairs is finished, but we haven’t started on the upstairs yet
- Re-roof + paint our garden shed – no more leaking
- Update our raised garden + plant a garden – anyone else interested in gardening around here? So excited to share my plans and process this year.
So all that to say, we’re so excited to keep chugging along on improving our little Riverwood Cape Home and if you all have any questions along the way, we’re happy to share our ideas and process!