I hope you had a wonderful Christmas celebration yesterday with your family and friends!
The last week of the year is a good time to reflect on all the blessings that you've enjoyed and how far you've come.
When I look back at all we've accomplished this year, it amazing to me and it's only by the grace of God that we've accomplished it all.
The first half of the year was spent getting our (previous) house in near perfect condition, staged and ready to sell. In 2015, we anticipated putting the house on the market in May, so we had already started with lightening up the paint in the basement, master bedroom, laundry room and office. In January of this year, things went into high gear and I worked nearly every day until May sanding and painting nearly all of the trim in the house, repainting the deck and just making everything look brand new. Mr. DIY bought supplies on the way home from work and there was something to do every night. Getting a big house ready to sell is hard work.
One big project Mr. DIY worked on was the Master Bath shower tile surround and repainting the Master Bathroom. I love how the frameless shower turned out and it was so easy to clean.
We didn't neglect the outside of the house. I painted the front door and sidelights, as well as the shutters on the house and Mr. DIY painted the front porch posts.
The front porch was staged with flowering plants, pillows a new front door mat, and a newly painted basket on the front door.
When the professional photographer arrived in May, we were exhausted! Nearly every surface was touched up to look fresh, clean and updated. All our work paid off when we received multiple offers after two days of showings.
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| Brian Stogner |
One of the most stressful projects of the year was packing up and moving. The stress of not knowing what would fit in our new downsized house and getting and moving out of a house you've lived in for 16 years and only having 45 days was overwhelming.
I wrote about our crazy, stressful move and gave you a peek at our new house.
Finding a house in just a couple of weeks that fit all of our needs and in the budget wasn't easy. We had put in an offer the previous day on another house when we viewed our current house and quickly rescinded that offer. I'm so glad because that house was a huge fixer and this one was only 2 years old. We were starting off with a clean slate, still a lot to do, but it is mainly cosmetic, painting and organizing the closets.
The painting in our daughter's room started the day we took posession of our house and before our furniture arrived the next day. Mr. DIY installed cabinets in the laundry room the day the first week after we moved in. I haven't done a blog post on her room yet or the laundry room, but thought they should be included.
Mr. DIY got busy right away transforming closets. There were plenty of closets, but all of them, including the pantry, only had 4 shelves in them. Mr. DIY started with the linen closet in the Master Bathroom. Lucky for us, it was about the same size as our last house, so all of our things fit right in once the adjustable shelves were added.
After the linen closet in the Master Bath, Mr. DIY added some extra shelving in the hall linen closet.
After that, Mr. DIY added shelves to the pantry in the kitchen and transformed a 2nd coat closet into more pantry space.
The organizing continued in the Garage... Since we were downsizing from a large, 3 car garage, to a small 2 car, Mr. DIY added a whole wall of cabinets.
The wire closet in our daughter's room was replaced with a custom closet that I designed and Mr. DIY installed. Our daughter loved it.
Our new yard is really small compared to our last house and taking care of it has been so easy! Still, I had to plant an herb garden in our front yard. There will definitely be more landscaping projects for our backyard this Spring.
This brings us up to October.
Phew!
It's been one project after another!
In October, we hired a company to encapsulate our crawl space, which is tall enough for us to stand up in. Once encapsulated, would be a huge space to store all of our things that we previously stored in our basement. No blog post and no pics yet. Mr. DIY is finishing up the flooring and we still have to organize the containers on the shelving he built in the space.
Since cold weather was coming up, Mr. DIY built our cat Buddy a cat cave for the Screened Porch because he spends most of his days out there.
A fun little project I made for the screened porch was the Lighted Grapevine Orb.
Although, we didn't get a chance the first half of the year to do projects at the Mountain Cottage, we were able to do a few projects the 2 weeks we lived there in between house closings and we've been able to spend a few weekends there this Fall. We're looking forward to doing more projects there in the coming months. We've finished the countertops and installed all of the subway tile. Mr. DIY still has to build open shelves, install crown molding, build a custom wood hood, custom banquette and a custom chandelier. After all of that, we'll be finished in the kitchen.
This brings us up to December, which is all Christmas decorating. We've still been organizing the crawl space and moving things from the garage to the new storage area. We had our 5th and final trailer/pod with all of our storage in it delivered at the end of September and all of that was stored in the garage. We only have a few more things to move and then we'll be able to park 2 cars in the garage! That is something we never had at our last house, even with a big 3 car garage!
I'm looking forward to 2017 with great anticipation.
May your home and family be filled with many blessings!
Pam
Here are all the links to the above projects...
