Hi friends!
So I surveyed some of you via my Instagram stories, and I received feedback like you would like to see some more renovations posts! Don’t worry you decor lovers, that side of this blog will stay around too! I’m going to try and start giving you guys the best of both worlds. Since AJ and I have renovated almost our complete home since we’ve moved in together, we have quite a bit to show you. Now I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. Are there things we both would like to go back and change? Yes! Absolutely! It’s so hard to get these things right the first time, so I’m here to try and help you learn from our mistakes.
I’m going to start this post by saying, this will be a high level renovation post. I’m going to save the nitty gritty for another time. Why? Because I could probably write a novel on the things we’ve done (but seriously, haha)! The details that go into home renovations are crazy. The high level and the detail. Who can you guess is always high level?! Guilty! I’m always throwing out ideas of what we can do to our home and AJ typically says, “Kristen you are going to need to pump the breaks. You are about 6 months ahead of the updates we need to make first.” Whoops!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the detail person of this relationship when it comes to the decor. But what I’m talking about is the detail part of renovations. You wouldn’t believe the amount of things that come up during renovations. AJ thankfully is a planner and always get’s 10-20% extra in materials because there will certainly be some waste or mess-ups along the way.
Alright so, this post is centered around our spare bedroom that we have renovated. AJ has had several roommates who have lived in this room, so it’s gotten its fair share of use over the years. I wish I had the original photos of when AJ bought the house, but these photos below are from right before we started renovating it.
The walls and the trim have some fresh paint and there were holes that were patched up. This is a mistake I made right here though. We went paint shopping several months before I moved in and decided on this paint. The walls before this were that ugly tan, yellow color and this was such an improvement! The one thing I didn’t plan for, was the fact that this paint was SO much darker on the walls then the sample appeared. Lesson learned: buy the sample and test your paints.
So the overall projects that we needed to do with this room were all cosmetic. We ended up tearing out the trim, the window trim (even replaced the window inserts), and the closet. Once all of that was out, we patched the walls some more and sanded the walls down. These walls had years of different layers of paint on them and you could tell. So we had to put in a little extra work to make the drywall look better. And let me tell you, it was worth it! Seriously, when doing home renovations you are going to be tempted to do things quick. I do not recommend that at all. Take your time and put the work in. You will thank yourself later.
We got the walls painted and freshened up, then it came time to making the final decision on the floors. These floors are real hard wood, so it was a tough decision.
Do we refinish the wood floors or put carpet in?
Most people called us crazy for wanting to put the carpet in, but the upstairs looks so much better. Our wood floors were super creaky and we would have had to replace some boards. By this point in the renovation (keep in mind this was after the bathroom renovation) we didn’t want to burn ourselves out.
The cost difference between the two were just slightly different, but the time difference is what made our final decision. The time to refinish the wood floors, replace the bad boards, and seal everything was just going to be too much. The biggest factor of them all: we still would have had creaky floors and stairs. No thank you! So we decided to go with some fresh light grey carpet to brighten up the upstairs.
We decided to go with Home Depot for the carpet because they had a great deal with free installation. No one else beat their price or service for the budget we had. So it was an easy decision for us to go through them. Here are the photos taken right before the contractors came to install the carpet.
Here’s my plug for AJ: We painted the ceilings and it really did make a difference in the brightness of the room. AKA – This white paint smudge on the floor. Oops!
We waited to install our trim until after the carpet was installed, because the trim can get banged up during the install. I would certainly recommend that if any of you are thinking about getting carpet installed. If you already have the trim installed, just save your touch ups for after the carpet gets installed.
Once all the carpet was installed we had to wait a few weeks to buy our trim. Our projects have been slow and steady when we renovated, but that’s because it’s a little lighter from a budget perspective. We try to plan renovations out by seasons and have an end date we need to hit. The summer time was huge for the bathroom renovation because it was a lot of going inside and outside, but for this renovation that wasn’t a huge factor.
We ended up installing the trim in late November/early December and thankfully it was still somewhat warm out so the weather didn’t end of being a huge factor. We chose to go through Millard Lumber for our trim because it was a crazy good deal. They even helped us make our big cuts to the 16′ boards, so that in itself made this option the best. AJ got everything measured out, and when we installed the trim he only had to make small cuts to get the pieces to fit together exactly.
We got all the trim up and the door was already installed from when we did the bathroom renovation, so it was an almost completed room!
I say almost complete because of this…
Notice the closet doors aren’t there? That isn’t some new design feature by any means. That’s because we needed to take a hot minute and save up a little more to devote to the renovation budget. The closet doors weren’t something we needed to get done, but definitely something we plan to get done this year. I’m excited to get those finished so we can call this upstairs renovation officially complete! There is another bedroom upstairs that is AJ’s office, and that will also need a closet door as well. So we plan to build the doors ourselves and get those up at the same time.
After a little bit of decor, some furniture, and some good lovin’, this room finally became a cozy bedroom! AJ wants this to be our bedroom, but unfortunately it gets too hot up here during the summer. There are ways we could make it cool, but I don’t feel like paying an arm and a leg for utilities. So this will remain our spare bedroom for now!
I’m going to be spending more time on this room in my future blog posts, so keep an eye out for an upcoming blog post on the decor decisions of this room and how you can incorporate some of this style into your own home!
I hope you guys have enjoyed this before and after renovation post! If there are certain features that you want to make sure I touch on in my future posts, please feel free to leave a reply or comment! I would love to hear your thoughts!
With Love,
Kristen