It’s that time of year, finally recovering from the fog of the holidays, catching up on my day job, and starting to plan for the new year ahead. I excited to share my project goals for the next two months!! Do you remember my lofty goals from when we first purchased the house back in August? Check out this post for my overambitious timeline. This time I am more realistic about my timeline, understanding what I can tackle, and where I need to get help. I still hope to have the major remodel complete by the time summer rolls around, I think if we continue at pace, we may be able to achieve that goal. Without further ado, here are my plans for January & February.

January

Convert dining room into an office

The previous owner used this room as a dining room. To make it more practical and functional for us, we are converting it into an office. (We’re planning on building a banquette instead of a formal dining room elsewhere). We will be closing off one of the walls, making the room smaller, and installing a pocket door. Our pocket door got delivered last week, can’t wait to install it. I am hoping by the end of January, we’ll have the following aspects of the office complete; framing, electrical, drywall, mudding, new floors, installed pocket door, and hopefully primed!

Install patio door and window

I always felt that the living room felt unbalanced, with the single patio door, and two windows flanking the fireplace. Once we frame in the new office, the living room will not be receiving as much natural light. The plan was always to replace the patio door with french or sliding doors. Since it’s easier to complete this before floors are installed, we are starting this project now! I ordered the new sliding doors from Lowes last month and it just arrived last week! I will be hiring a contractor to demo, frame, and install the new door, as well as moving the window to the other side of the fireplace (right next to the existing window).

Install LVP flooring

If you’re following along on my Instagram stories, you’ll know that I finally received the Shaw Floors that I ordered back in August! We are installing the floors ourselves and will start with the kitchen, living room and office. The flooring for the rest of the house (bedrooms) will occur when we start working on each bedroom. We currently have all carpet, so those will have to be removed first, hopefully we won’t find any surprises underneath. We already know there are asbestos tiles under the carpet (I suspect they are asbestos as they are 9×9 tiles), so we’ll install LVP right over it to not disturb the asbestos.

February

Finish office

With all structure aspects of the office to be completed in January, I am hoping to finish the office in February! This might be the first room that we’ll complete in the house!! We’ll need to build the built-ins, paint, install light fixtures, and style and then we should be all set. I’ve already started sourcing the lights we will use in here, but still need to finalize on paint color, source, rugs, curtains, art etc.

Fireplace makeover

I would love to keep the fireplace brick exposed, but it is not cohesive with the design direction that I am going in. I will be doing some treatment on the fireplace but haven’t finalize on those details yet. Will be sharing my design process in the stories, so be sure to follow along!

Finish living room

After the doors/window, fireplace and flooring complete, We can finish this living room space! I have some layout options to think through before I can start sourcing materials and furniture. I am thinking about building some custom furniture. I am excited to finally have a central hangout zone in this house. We haven’t had people over since there is no entertainment space, so excited to finally be able to have company over once this is done!

Finish kitchen!!!

Ahhh – the kitchen. I am laughing at the time I thought I would finish the kitchen in 8 weeks. Once the kitchen became function (around Christmas time), I was so fatigued from decision paralysis that I stopped working on that room altogether. But don’t worry, we are hoping to finish in February so you can finally see the finished product. I will be sharing the list of things we still need to do in the kitchen, which include many mini projects! As a reminder here is where we started.

xoxo,