My Experiences in Remodeling My 1st Home

This past April I signed my life away and bought my first home! I found out it is quite an exciting, yet pretty scary step for a 25-year-old (at the time), single gal. But I wouldn’t undo it even if I could. I’m so happy to finally have a place I can call my home again after living in apartment after apartment for about eight years! So, this whole summer I’ve been very busy nesting and trying to do some DIY remodeling. 

Then, the other day, while I was working out some frustrations in the garage on some trim from my bedroom that I should have just left alone a few months back, my older (not always wiser) sister, Kim, said I should be blogging about my home makeover experiences. Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that 4 months ago?! Then I thought, hmm I am going to have to take pictures now. . How am I going to remember to stop and take pictures when I’m hard at work? Well, we’ll see how that goes I guess, but I am going to try my best. Now, the correct thing for me to do would be to go back and blog about everything I’ve done around the house to date. I am not sure how I feel about spending time doing that. After all, I have a lot of work yet to do! I can’t be spending all of my time on the computer. But what I will do for ya’ll is give a little overview of what I have done and share some before and after pictures. 

And, to bring you up to speed on what I’ve done so far in the past four months… I moved in mid-April, perfect time for yard work and gardening, which my home needed a lot of! The previous owners left me with a bare slate to start with, but that also meant the soil had not been worked with in more than 10 years! Special thanks go out to my brother-in-law, Doug, for tilling it up for me. My mom, Debra, and Kim spent one entire weekend trying to help me plant flowers, but it was just my luck that we would have (officially) the hottest summer in history in Wichita this year and practically everything ended up brown and crispy except for the begonias! They must really be a miracle plant. My list of plants to buy for 2012: begonias, begonias and begonias. I wish I had some fabulous “After” pictures to show you for the garden, but it didn’t end up that great for my first year. I do love mums though and it is that time of year now, so maybe I’ll try to plant some of those for fall and get some pretty pictures of that. 

While sprucing up the yard and garden last April, I also learned real fast that a leaf blower/vac is going to be a must-have tool for me this fall. With the help of Doug and Kim, (again, more thanks to them) I picked up 10 gigantic black bags of leaves out of my front yard that the previous owner left for me! I got a nasty note from the trash man that week. Sorry trash man, I didn’t know there was a limit to how many bags I can throw out each week. I do now, though! 

As for the interior of the home, a lot of what I’ve done so far is just cleaning, painting and trying to decorate so it feels like my home. I am slowly getting there. Better Homes and Gardens magazine isn’t lying when it says a new paint color can totally change a room’s appearance! As you may have guessed from an earlier comment, I am currently in the process of trying to paint some trim. I initially was going to replace the 50-year-old, original trim with something fresh and new, but then I realized how much it’d cost me so I’ve opted to paint it for now, but not until after I’d already removed all of the trim from my bedroom! It is all Kim’s fault! I just had to throw that out there. So yes, now I have to put that trim BACK! Chalk it up to experience I guess. I will now know how to remove and install trim properly. 

But, my biggest challenge, and the one I can’t wait to finish, is to redo my entire bathroom! I’m so blessed to have a dad who literally knows how to do anything and everything. My mom is pretty handy with a set of tools, too. Just make sure you hide the duct tape before you turn her loose on anything. He and my mom are planning on coming to visit during Thanksgiving weekend to help me with this task. Wish us luck. Also, I would gladly entertain any advice or ideas that ya’ll might have for me! So please don’t be shy.

Now as promised, here are some pictures...

Living room before

Living room before

Living room after

Living room after

Living room after

Bonus Picture! Mary, the "rug rat"

dining room before

Dining room after (this is also Mary's favorite space so don't mind her kennel in the back corner)

Dining room after

Dining room after

 I welcome any ideas or suggestions if anyone would like to share! Thanks!