The Tip of the House Projects Iceberg

By this point, we’re starting to get a good feel for things we want to change and where to start.

My parents like to joke that one phrase that has never been said in the history of the English language is, “The house is done” and I’m sure we’ll never have every potential project in this house done.

But we do want to make steady progress toward making our house a place we love to be, and we are definitely spending many weekends visiting model homes and the hardware store, because basically we know how to party.

These are our top priorities right now:

1. Painting. The main living areas are all beige, beige, beige, with the bedrooms painted in charming shades of orange, neon mint, and navy/burgundy stripes. This month, we finally picked up some buckets of paint and repainted the entire kitchen, breakfast nook and family room in a much better shade of white. Our bedroom (goodbye, orange!) is up next, as is my office. And then the girls’ bedrooms and the laundry room and dining room. Okay, fine. The whole house needs a good dousing with paint.
2. Flooring. The green carpet just has to go. We can’t make much progress at all without replacing it because it’s just so ugly and no amount of lovely furniture can disguise the fact that said furniture is situated on a bed of green hideousness. We’re also strongly considering replacing the carpet in the basement with wood laminate to open it up a little and also make it more friendly for messy crafts like play dough and painting. In a world where money was no object, we’d probably replace the tile too, because Bart doesn’t really care for it, but I’m not sure that will happen because it is fairly expensive, large tile and it’s certainly not offensive. It’s just not what we would have picked.
3. Lighting. The lighting in this house is just SO yellow, it’s ridiculous. We’ve been slowly changing out bulbs for higher wattage and ditching the yellow covers on the ceiling lamps, but even on those, we’re recognizing that our house definitely needs more lighting overall. The corners stay dim with only ceiling lamps, and although this house has a lot of windows, you kind of have to keep them closed in the summer because otherwise your room quickly reaches the balmy temperatures of a pizza kiln. My office is one of the very worst, so I was delighted to add a natural light lamp to my desk. It’s been so depressing to go into my cave in the evenings and work under the most yellow light imaginable, so having a light that produces beautiful, bright light and looks sleek and modern in the daytime is a huge bonus. I also feel like my eyes don’t feel nearly so tired when I work with it on. And if I ever get around to working on calligraphy, it’ll be perfect for giving me some decent light to practice by – that’s something way more fun to have under my lamp than my laptop.
4. Family Room and Breakfast Nook Decor. We have so many blank walls right now (in part because we know we’ll just take things down to repaint) and we’re trying to figure out what we really want these spaces to look like – our highest priority is the family room and breakfast nook since that’s where we spend the most time. You cannot imagine how many evenings we have spent looking at Pinterest or paging through decorating books and magazines.