Hello People!
This year Travis and I have saved up enough to do a few projects around the house and I thought I'd share with you what our plans are!
We are finally doing our driveway, and Travis is the most excited about it. We planned on doing it last year but as I stated in a previous post, our refrigerator decided to die and we needed that more than a smooth driving surface I guess lol.
So! We currently have a partially concrete - partially gravel driveway. It was definitely all concrete at one point in time, I'm assuming sometime in the 80's maybe? The back half is all gravel which is where it pools all of the water by the garage and where the basketball hoop is. Then it kind of transitions into cracked and bumpy concrete the rest of the way to the sidewalk. It is the worst to snow blow so Travis usually ends up just shoveling because it's not worth it.
We're planning on sticking with concrete even though it is more expensive in the beginning, it won't need much upkeep versus black top. We got an estimate about a year ago for about five thousand, which totally sucks to spend that much on something that isn't super exciting but it has to be done. Fingers crossed something else doesn't break or happen!
Another to do is installing new flooring on the main level which includes the kitchen, dining and living room. We have the flooring we're going to be installing in the half-bath and entryway already so it'll be a nice cohesive space.
The flooring is Traffic Master hand-scraped Saratoga Hickory. It's a nice deep color that we love and goes well with nearly everything else in the house. Eventually we will also be putting it upstairs but we have big plans for that space and will have to save up quite a bit to do so.
Along with the flooring we plan to redo our stairs. We will be removing the gross shag carpet and the overly painted railing. We've already painted the stairwell and the upstairs hallway a nice gray color versus the pale shiny yellow it was when we moved in. The color we chose is Dolphin Fin (personally I would've just named it Dol-Fin, Behr really missed their opportunity).
The stairs will have similar colored treads and I think we're keeping the risers white. I would think we might put a runner down as well because of Archie but we haven't decided on that yet. The railings we're planning on going with would be something similar to our deck railing in our back yard, you can kind of see it in the driveway photo above, simple wood railing with black cylindrical poles for the balustrade. Not sure on the baluster yet but most likely something dark wood toned that ties into our trim.
We would also like to redo our pantry and bar area. The bar area looks perfectly fine on the surface but underneath where everything is stored is basically an unfinished hole with doors. The pantry I think was put together as an, "oh shit we need a pantry" solution. It's currently under our stairs to the second level and the shelves are way too deep to even reach everything inside. The shelves are also just OS board with shelf liners stuck on top. We are thinking about putting in drawers for the lower levels to be able to reach everything in the far back areas and do some shallower shelving for the top. There is also no light inside so that will be added as well.
Just so dark and not great. I'm glad we have these storage areas but they're just not practical or nice to look at. So we're planning on installing lights, new shelving/drawers and stemware brackets (which I bought a long time ago anticipating this project) and new doors.
We are also planning on finishing painting the outside window trim, I think I have about 3-4 windows left, and staining our deck and front steps. Let's hope the weather is stable enough for us to do so.
I'll be buying our flooring soon so stay tuned!
xoxo,
Myia
