Earlier this summer, I shared 10 house projects that I was hoping to complete over the summer months.
These were projects that had built up over time, and I was hopeful that by sharing them more publicly, it would hold me accountable to making some progress.
Here’s the re-cap of what I was able to complete this summer:
- Bought two more bookshelves and unpacked more books. We are good to go for bookshelves! Lately, I’ve been purchasing our book storage from IKEA. It’s relatively inexpensive to have bookshelves delivered directly to our house from our local store, so I definitely took advantage of that option to check this item off my list.
- Purchased a couple of tables for different areas of our house. We needed to get a table that can sit behind the couch and hold our speakers for our downstairs television area and a table for our entryway. After looking around, I ended up going with IKEA for this project as well.
- Switched out two ceiling fans. We hired a local electrician to complete this task and now all of our fans throughout the house (there are five of them) all match. That is super satisfying.
- Installed new bathroom mirrors. When we renovated our bathrooms, we purchased new mirrors but never got around to installing them. Recently, we hired a handyman to come to our house and help us complete a bunch of small projects. This was on our list for him, so it’s complete!
- Patched holes and painted. I took down the curtains and rods that were hung in my gym area and I needed to patch the holes in the wall and touch up the paint in that room. The handyman that we hired completed this task for us as well!
- Finish a few more details for our kitchen renovation. The replacement cabinet door, some shelves, and a dishwasher that we were waiting on to wrap up our kitchen renovation all arrived! We still need to install some lighting underneath our cabinets, but I was glad to see those other things get completed.
- Make a plan for our landscaping. With the help of my partner and some local experts, we are slowly figuring out what to do with our yard. We had some grass seeded and have a regular appointment to get our yard maintenance done. Although I expect we will need to hire a landscaper at some point for a more longer-term plan, this feels like good progress.
And here are the projects that are still remaining to do:
- Order a mattress for our guest bedroom. After switching our guestroom with my office, I needed to purchase a mattress for the bed frame so that I could get the process started for finishing that room. We haven’t purchased the mattress yet, but we did get the bed frame put back together after moving it, which felt like a small win.
- Replace light fixtures. We have light fixtures that need to be replaced in our bathrooms, entryway, dining room, and over our kitchen island. We haven’t chosen what we want to install yet, so we’ll need to pick the fixtures and then hire an electrician to help us install them.
- Paint our living room ceiling. During our bathroom renovations, we sprung a leak that caused the need for some damage repair for our living room ceiling. We need to have the ceiling repainted so that it matches the rest of the paint in that area of our house. We’ve identified a painter to help us with this, but haven’t hired them yet.
And here’s are a few bonus projects that were completed this summer that weren’t planned:
- I overhauled my home office. After living with the set-up that I created during the pandemic, I decided to upgrade to a standing desk, purchase some monitors, and install some different bookshelves in my home office. Revamping my office was a fun project to complete over the summer and now I feel like I have a “command center” for the work that I do at home.
- We replaced the trim outside our house. We learned through our home inspection that the original trim on our house wasn’t flexing enough with our weather variations and it was causing our siding to crack. Over the summer, we hired a local company to replace all of our trim to solve this problem.
- I installed a ballet barre in my gym area. Since we replaced all of our bathroom mirrors, we had a few large mirrors that I could repurpose. I decided to install one of them in my gym area along with a ballet barre so that I could experiment with adding barre workouts into my routine for strength training.
What house projects have you tackled lately? What’s on your list to tackle next?