Another Renovation Update…

A while back, when I shared my plan for organizing the kitchen storage, I said I would share a full renovation update soon.  I figured that now is as good a time as any, so let’s give you a rundown on how things are going…

Last night, my husband and I went through each room and made a “hit-list” to give to our contractor on what we think is left to do, and I attempted to take photos (though without lights installed in any of the rooms it was difficult to get quality photos).  Let’s go through each room like we did…

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New Kitchen Layout

While we’ve been waiting for the renovations to proceed, I’ve been looking for ways to keep my spirits up (it’s hard living in chaos), and since I am excited about the new kitchen, and the cabinets are finally getting installed in the kitchen, I thought it might be fun to explore where I would put everything when the everything is done and we can move all our stuff back in to the kitchen…

I’m actually pretty excited to start organizing things… Does that make me a complete dork?  Probably, but so be it…

The List

First step is to make a list of all the things that I want to store in the kitchen, or all the “stations” that I want to have… Basically, I just thought back to every cupboard that  I had in the old set-up, and made a list from that… Here’s what I came up with:

Kitchen Reno Update

Back in June, when I announced that our renovations had started, I promised to do regular updates… Obviously that hasn’t happened, but I have been taking the occasional photo to document the progress, so I will share some of that progress now.

The Renovations Have Started!

So, after my last post about my clothing, I had a plan to put together a series while I worked through the process of sorting and making a shopping list and all that stuff… But, then we got the call that our contractor finally had all the permits and was finished their last job, and was ready to start the renovations on our place…

Home Renovations – The Plan…

As I mentioned in my last post, we have big plans for renovating the inside of our house.  I discussed what we have done so far, mostly to the exterior of the house, and so now I will go over some of what we have planned for the inside.  Although, it may take us years to actually get it all done…  Jordann at My Alternate Life did a similar post when they bought their house this past summer, so I’ll follow a similar format…

The Main Floor

Our house is a classic 1950s home for our area.  There are so many of them around, that the layout is super familiar (and when we were house hunting, we went through a bunch with similar floor plans).  Here is the floor plan of the main floor of house as it was advertised when we bought it:

And just for fun, I also found some of the photos that were used for the listing… So you’ll be able to see how we have updated things so far (by doing next to nothing).

Home Renovations – So Far…

If you’ve been following along lately, you know that my husband and I have recently withdrawn a bunch of money from the equity in our house in order to pay for some upcoming renovations.  We have some big plans and I have had some requests for some “before & after” type posts, so I thought I would go over our plans for renovations, but maybe the first place to start with is what we have done so far… So, here goes…

Home Renovations – What We Have Done So Far…

Our house is a 1950s house, solidly built and well maintained, but was needing a little TLC when we bought it.  And, although we wanted to jump in to the fun kitchen and bathroom redesigns, we first had to work on the inner workings and exterior stuff.  Saving for these things has been on my financial goals lists for the past couple years, so this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you if you’ve been reading for a while…

Before.

Garden Renovations: New Raised Bed

Last year I had a goal of creating a garden in my backyard that would supply me with lots of fruit and veggies… But I didn’t really have any knowledge about any of it, and mother nature had other ideas for me…

My beans were destroyed by the deer… my strawberries and cherries were stolen by the raccoons, and some unseasonably warm temperatures in early spring made my radishes bolt (something I learned about last year), so I only got one or two of them before they turned all woody and weird…

But I also learned quite a bit.  I learned that it is really important to thin out both carrots and radishes if you want them to grow to full size…  And I learned that I need to get some sort of animal protection on my garden to keep the deer and raccoons out.

I had grand plans of planting more veggies in the fall and having winter crops, but my work schedule got in the way…  So that didn’t happen…

Anyway, this year I have new plans for the garden… I’ve made a list in my bullet journal of fruit and vegetables that I want to learn about, so hopefully I can grow them.  I want to learn to use the dehydrator that my grandmother gave me for Christmas.  And, while I haven’t made these official goals for 2016 like I did in 2015, I figure I’ll post about them and share my struggles and lessons…