We’re finally pulling the trigger on a few home refresh projects we’ve been talking about doing for years now! Do you have any projects like that in your home? Sometimes those things are required maintenance, but this time our projects are totally cosmetic.
Home Projects List – 2020:
1.) Replacing the mud / weeds / grass in the backyard with turf.
2.) Removing carpet and laminate from the house and installing wood floors throughout.
3.) Repainting the interior walls of our home.
This little house has great bones and is in an excellent location, but some previous home “improvement” decisions by prior owners weren’t the best quality so now that we’re the stewards of this home, we’re having to repair or replace many of those items. I guess this is just homeownership… lol!
1. FAUX GRASS IN BACKYARD: I was resistant to the idea of faux grass for a long time, but our small back yard had become a mud bog and it’s been a major pain point for us having to wipe our dog’s feet off every time he re-enters the house after going potty.
Fortunately, this project has already been completed ( 🎉🎉🎉) and I shared all about our experience here.
2. INSTALL WOOD FLOORING: Have I mentioned that we HATE carpet and it currently covers half of the floors in our house? 🤦🏻♀️ No matter how frequently we vacuum, carpet just collects dust, dander, dirt (any alliteration fans out there? 😏) and we would prefer hardwood floors everywhere in the house. Of course, I’m sure that we will end up adding a few area rugs here and there, but those can be laundered or dry-cleaned. Have you heard of Ruggable?! I can’t wait to try them out once we have new flooring! Such a smart product.
The existing laminate flooring on our main floor is just not what we would have chosen. In the above image, the sunlight is making the flooring color appear lighter, but it’s actually a very dark chocolate brown color in person that shows EVERYTHING: dust, surface scratches, dog fur, muddy shoeprints / pawprints, etc. I’m pretty embarrassed to share this on the internet, but I just wanted to illustrate the main reason why we don’t care for this shade of flooring and would like a change.
We’d prefer a more medium brown shade, something middle-of-the-road in color (avoiding red, yellow, and grey tones) and we’d like to use real wood instead of a laminate. You can see in the above photos (both in different light situations) the stain colors we’re looking at. I think the top image is a better representation of the true colors, but I wanted to show the color difference compared to our existing flooring in the lower image. I absolutely can’t wait to have the same floors throughout the entire house (obviously except for bathrooms) — NO MORE CARPET 🤢– and for the flooring to be a more durable material in our preferred shade. *Note: I am NOT thrilled about having to move out of our house for a few weeks while the floors are being installed… all of our furniture, us, the pup, EVERYTHING has to be off the floors and out of the house. 😭
3. PAINT WALLS: We don’t hate the existing wall color (which is currently a light sage green), but at certain times of day it casts a weird yellow tone and everything looks kind of dingy as a result. It would be nice to give the walls a refresh and go with something a bit more neutral (and maybe even slightly lighter than the current color?), so I’m ordering samples of grey and “greige” (grey + beige), showing my current selections above, to see what they would look like in various rooms in the house at different times of day as well as pairing with our flooring color options. So many decisions!
I had been dreading this process because paint chips are too small a sample to really get a “feel” for the color and don’t always show the exact paint color / reflect light the same way that real paint will. This meant that I was going to have to purchase at least 5 cans of sample paint to test around our house (and then we’d have random annoying swatches of paint all over the house). 😩 Fortunately, I went online to find out what the top “greige” colors were to help narrow down my search (there have to be a million and a half shades of paint between all of the main paint companies!!) and I discovered a company called Samplize that sells PEEL-AND-STICK PAINT SAMPLES. 🤯 Whattttt?! All of the colors that I was interested in checking out were available to order and each paint sticker sample was less than $6! 😱 No drying time, no commitment to paint patches all over the house, and easy, non-damaging sticker removal; this is such a brilliant idea. Well done, Samplize!
I’ve already received my paint sticker samples, but I am currently recovering from this cold & flu season (and, no, I do’t have the coronavirus…) so I haven’t been up to any home improvement projects for a little over a week and a half other than [FINALLY] being able to do a full house cleaning this past weekend. I’ll play around with the paint stickers this weekend to see how they work and which colors would be best in our house (maybe I’ll find the right shade in this first go-around!).
Hope you are all having an awesome week so far!
xx, Natalie
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