A hole in our roof!
...and the dreaded porch project
Hello friends! I know I say this every time but how did I go 10 months without posting a single thing??! Well, I wanted to do the next post once I finished our porch project. Little did I know that we would start that project in April and not actually finish it until… September. I also promised myself that we wouldn’t start any other projects until after that one was complete so here we are!
Let’s begin with the one where we didn’t do any work ourselves.
Skylight
Since we’re in an interior rowhouse, we don’t have any windows on the side of the house. The top of our stairway was a little dark at times.
The wardrobe is complete!
...it only took 2 years
Hello friends! This is our last post of 2018 and looking back, I think we have done a good job decorating and making our space feel warm and inviting imho. There haven’t been any big projects, just furnishing here and there. Because we are enjoying just living in the house, I think we aren’t going to kick off the big kitchen and basement reno in 2019. We do have some smallish projects lined up though so expect some updates in 2019!
Also, I decided to delete my personal Facebook account last week so I am trying to figure out whether anyone will actually know there is an update. I do have an RSS feed but not sure whether many folks know how to use that. Should I start an instagram account just for RRH? Should I create an email distro? Tell me your preference in the comments or text/email me if you like.
On to the update! So, back in 2016, we ikea-hacked a wardrobe to look builtin.
You can read about Phase I in this post from 2016. It looked like this:
Earlier this year, Mike added some cubbies & trim at the top. Read about that in Phase II from April.
Getting rid of condo-sized furniture
through impulsive online shopping
I typically take ages to furnish a whole room, piece by piece. But now in the age of Amazon-prime, my one-click shopping trigger finger is finely tuned! I no longer need to see things in person. Instead, I just browse the interwebs in my pajamas, parse the online reviews, click buttons, and pray! It’s oddly liberating and slightly alarming. Usually with a glass of wine by my side because drinking and spending money is always a good combo right? With just a few clicks, voila: the first floor is furnished!
Prior to my shopping spree, the living room kind of looked like this:
Faking a fancy kitchen
in 2 grueling weekends
For awhile, I had convinced myself that I was ok with our kitchen. We plan on doing a big basement and kitchen renovation in the future but after the renovation of 2016, we just wanted a few years to just enjoy the house. But as the living room has been coming together these past few months (more on this in a future post), the jankiness of the kitchen has just started to irritate me as the eye is naturally drawn to the jankiness. And it is quite janky.
Then an Apartment Therapy post popped up on my Pinterest feed that showed how to use countertop paint to fake the look of granite. The post also had cabinets that looked a lot like our cabinets so the transformation seemed within reach.
Our kitchen looked about the same as it did when we painted it back in 2015. You can read about that here:
It was definitely better but the kitchen still had a patchwork feel. You can see that the cabinets above the microwave don’t match the other cabinets; they must have been added later. It just screams of sadness and the 70s. Yuck:
The Wardrobe
Part 2 of (maybe) 3
Back in December of 2016, we began the Wardrobe project. You can read about that here. Well it only took us a year to complete part 2. And by “us”, I mean Michael, because I didn’t lift a finger for Part 2.
A reminder of what Part 1 looked like when completed: