We knew we wanted a fixer upper when we were house shopping. Lucas and I both enjoy construction projects and were itching to turn a house into what feels like our home. We also liked the idea of building sweat equity.
This post is just for the after photos. Since we remodeled literally everything except for the kitchen (only minor modifications there) I have hundreds of before and progress photos to post. That will have to be done room by room.
We learned several lessons along this renovation journey… like how to tile a floor, which projects are worth hiring out, and how neglecting the yard for over a year results in WAY more work to clean it up than if we just maintained it along the way. I think the most important lesson we learned is about balance. AND that we couldn’t have done it without my dad. Holy crap he is so good at everything construction related and is unbelievably fast. He flew up a few times to help us with big projects like replacing all interior doors and installing the bathtub. But there were countless FaceTime calls where he walked us through how to do something ourselves. We are so grateful for him and his expertise!
Back to balance… We poured all the time and energy we had into this house. For several months we worked our regular jobs (40+ hrs/week), slept on the kitchen floor (because all of our belongings were in the garage and the carpet upstairs was ripped out), tried to go on weekend adventure road trips as often as possible (because… summer in the PNW!), and every evening and weekend home was spent working on the house. We chose this lifestyle because we wanted to keep living our regular lives AND renovate an entire house quickly so we could start really living in it. It took a few months but we eventually learned what true burn out feels like. Once winter came and road trips were less exciting, we reduced traveling and reserved working on the house for only weekends. That helped. Then we took a long break before tackling the full bathroom renovation. Then we waited until spring to work on the exterior.
I think it’s safe to say we’re finally done! Now we’re ready to move on to the next home : )
1250 sq ft. 3 bed, 1.5 bath. 0.18 acres.
Now that we have a highchair and need space for a busy baby to run around in a walker, I replaced the long table and layered rugs with a smaller option.
Lucas’ mother made the cutest art for the white frames so they now have winter, spring, summer, and fall graphics in them.
