House Plans

I am very bored today and need a distraction from my devil dog and would like to get this written out and organized so don't mind me while I do this. It's not the most exciting blog post, more for me than anything else so bare with me. We LOVE our home but in the design department it is not our tastes so we are making plans to do some improvements.

We were going to build a deck this summer and so we went to the home show at South Towne Expo and got a few quotes. One of them came to the house and was convinced I was crazy in wanting a 20x12 deck (keep in mind the back of our house is really wide and the door takes up at least 5 feet of space you can't really use) and told us we needed to do a 15x12. I was really uneasy about it so I decided to take a picture of the back of the house and draw one up. This is what hers would have looked like....

This is what I want

which do you think is better? yeah me too....

So since we are going to wait on the deck and do it next summer (and likely do it ourselves, maybe our dads will fly out and help HINT HINT ;P) along with a few other projects (I'll get to that later). So for this year we are keeping it small. That and our dryer has decided it can't dry even the smallest loads in less than 4-5 cycles on high heat (forget low heat, my shirts are not soft and have now shrunk thanks to it but if I did low heat they took so long to dry they smelled moldy), SO we've decided it's a better investment (for my sanity especially) to buy me a new washer and dryer. I have heard some problems about front loading machines causing a moldy smell but my mom and sister have never had that problem and I read if you just leave the door open and depending on the model MAYBE wipe it down then you won't have that problem. Our laundry "room" is more like a laundry closet, I mean you fit 2 machines in there a tiny garbage and my little body and it feels claustrophobic. So for best optimization of the space we are getting front loading machines and I am going to put a board on top of them that I can use as an ironing board with custom cabinets on top for storage and a pole for hanging clothes like this...(also this is about the size of my laundry room except not quite that deep and a TINY bit wider

We are also going to paint. And by we I mean we hired painters to do the hard part. And by hard part I mean this...

Which will become this... So we are having the painters do the baseboards and trim and the big front room that's a huge pain to paint

Then I will carry the beige color into the hallways, the downstairs bathroom will be an off-white green like the family room, our bathroom will be an off-white blue-green(or really light blue-green), and the playroom and laundry room will be blue. I will also do a stencil similar to this in the laundry room to make it more fun, you use high gloss and matte paint in the same color I love it!

Then these are projects we'd like to do over the next few years. I want to do a tall beadboard in the downstairs half bath like this.

Then do a normal height beadboard in Aiden's and the future baby's room. I also want to do this in the family/tv room (although not that tall just the same design) and do doors for the cutout on the bottom.

We also want to rip out the carpet and vinyl flooring on the first floor and do a hardwood or laminate floor. I fell in love with this one but there is no way I'm paying even close to $5 a square foot so I am on the lookout for something similar

We also have plans much farther down the road to do quartz countertops, resurface the bathroom countertops and tile the bathrooms but those are so far off I have no pictures since they aren't even in the planning stages yet. Fun stuff though I am excited to see it all start coming together!