The House on the Hill Blog

It’s that time again!

This will be our 4^th One Room Challenge but we completely failed to finish our spaces for #2 and #3. I’m hoping to turn things around with this one though. If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge is a biannual event where designers, bloggers, and Instagrammers work to finish a space in 6 weeks. It’s not a competition, but instead it promotes community. It also gives you a deadline which can work as a major motivator if you have a space you are wanting to re-do or finish.

If you’ve been following along, you know that we were already attempting to renovate our laundry room but after several setbacks, the laundry room renovation turned into a laundry room and separate pantry renovation. I’m guessing you guys think this will be our One Room Challenge space and you would be right and wrong.

The budget we started with has been cut down a good bit since I ended up needing several hotel stays, several tanks of gas, and food while traveling when my dad was in the hospital (for those that don’t know, my father was recently hospitalized for about a week and a half after suffering a major heart attack and has since passed). Because of that, I have decided to put the laundry room on hold for just a little bit while we work on the pantry. We still have a couple of things we’ll have to do in the laundry room to make our other spaces work but trying to finish the pantry and laundry room completely in 6 weeks especially when I’m not sure how the budget is going to shake out just seems like I’d be setting myself up to fail. Both projects will add function to our house but the pantry excites me more at the moment. So for now, I’m sticking with our closet-to-pantry project.

Here’s how the closet (which we used for our cats) looked a few weeks ago:

And here is where we’re at now:

Here is our pantry to-do list:

• Finish demo
• Have exposed pipes cut and capped
• Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
• Frame new entrance in dining room
• Close up old entrance in hallway
• Install lighting
• Add light switch
• Add outlet (this is a maybe right now)
• Hang/finish drywall in pantry
• Build cabinets and shelves
• Lay flooring
• Paint
• Add counter (this is a maybe depending on the cabinet/shelving configuration we decide on)
• Find antique door for entrance (fingers crossed!)

So now you’re probably thinking “You’re just doing a pantry? Really? What are you doing with the other 4 weeks?” First, keep in mind that we’re building up from the studs here and we only really get to work on our house on the weekends (and one of those during the ORC is already full meaning no work will get done). Second, since we’re adding a pantry where there used to be a closet and re-configuring the layout so that the entrance is in the dining room, I thought it might be fun to add the dining room into our ORC plans. All we’ve done to the dining room since we moved in is paint it 1.25 times and change out the ceiling fan for a light fixture (the room was marketed as a “Florida room”) so it’s probably about time to make it look decent.

Here’s a listing photo from when we first saw the house:

And here it is right now in all of its glory:

The dining room project will be pretty small but I’m hoping it will have a big impact. Eventually we’ll change out the crown molding, add a couple of windows, add built-ins, and change out the existing window for a sliding door but that’s all down the road. Here’s the initial to-do list for the One Room Challenge:

• Clean out room (move my workstation upstairs, move out furniture and random crap)
• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath (already started)
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim
• Paint walls
• Paint Ceiling (this is a maybe since the ceiling continues into the kitchen and down the hall into the foyer)
• New blinds
• Paint armoire (this is a maybe right now)
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)
• Bring furniture back in

So, that’s the plan! I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a design plan 100% nailed down but I’ve picked up some paint samples and have an idea of what I want. I really can’t design the pantry until we’ve got the new entrance framed out and the old entrance closed in but I have a rough idea of what I want to do in there, too.

Now go check out what everyone else is up to here! There are always so many gorgeous transformations that come out of the One Room Challenge and I can’t wait to see them.

Y’all it has been a week. I am super pumped it’s the weekend!

-Tomorrow I get to see my best friend and her girls (and her husband I guess. HI, TOM). It’s been way too long and I’m excited to finally meet her baby girl who was born at the end of last year.

-OG had the flu last weekend and it wasn’t as bad as I feared but still not great. As much as I love being with her, I think we were all glad to get back to our schedules on Tuesday. I even went into the office for a few hours just to get out of the house (I normally work from home on Tuesdays).

-I’m planning on talking about our new new laundry plan next week since our old new plan isn’t going to work. You can read about that here if you missed it.

-The wall mural I ordered for the laundry room was delivered this week and it’s gorgeous and I love it but it won’t work in the laundry room now. Any suggestions?

-We are coming up on our 6 year house anniversary! Sometimes it feels like we haven’t done anything in this house and then I look back at pictures and realize we’ve actually done quite a lot. I’m planning on putting together an anniversary post next month with a few before and after photos although we don’t have many (or maybe not any) true afters. Lots of “in progress” shots that are far better than the before.

The fact that we’ve lived here almost 6 years is huge. My family moved from house to house when I was growing up (I lived at over 20 addresses by the time I was out of college) and it’s been nice to be so settled. Sometimes we talk about putting our house on the market because we could make a good deal of money off of it but then where would we go? We’ve both agreed that while this might not be our forever house like we intended it to be, we’d have to find something pretty special to make us move. Either that or we’d have to outgrow our house.

-I am one of those rare people who doesn’t like to travel. I’m really a homebody and crave the comfort of being at home on my sofa but I have the strongest sense of wanderlust right now. Like, if I could pack up today and go I think I would. I’m desperate to get back to Alaska. We went on a cruise in 2013 and I’ve wanted to go back ever since but lately it’s pretty much all I want to do. It’s definitely out this year but maybe next year? We’ll see. Of all the vacations we could go on it’s probably the most expensive so it would probably come down to a big house project vs. a vacation.

Here’s a shot of the Mendenhall Glacier from our last trip:

Happy weekend!

Well, there have been some interesting developments in the laundry room renovation. We started getting plumbing quotes over the weekend to move our washer from its current location to the newly planned laundry nook. As a reminder, here’s the current floor plan:

And the floor plan we had settled on after our initial floor plan didn’t work out:

After looking into everything, it turns out that the only place to really have the washer downstairs is right where it is.

WOMP WOMP.

I won’t get too into the specifics, but basically the way the plumbing would have to be run into the nook would cause us to lose about 8 inches from the back wall which would make it way too tight to comfortably do laundry. The nook was already going to be cozy and losing 8 inches just makes it nearly non-functional. We do potentially have the option to move it upstairs which is appealing since that’s where all of the bedrooms and full bathrooms are but the only place for it there is our bathroom which would work but our bathroom is already on the small side and I don’t really want to have to squeeze another function into that space.

So, the fact that we have to leave the washer and dryer where they are is bummer number one. Bummer number two is the garage entry. We had hoped to slide the garage access a few feet to the right so that we could add cabinets to the current laundry room to give us some much needed storage. The problem with that is that the spot we wanted to move it is actually the worst possible spot to move it because there’s so much going on structurally. Beams, posts, etc. So not only can we not move the washer and dryer into their little nook but we also can’t move the door which means there’s no room for cabinets. Sure, we could put one large floor to ceiling cabinet where the old hall closet/bench was but that wouldn’t make the space feel any bigger and could potentially cause even more space/bottleneck issues. And then there’s bummer number three; the ceilings. The ceilings in the old cat closet and the laundry room are about 6.5′ which means they are super low. I think standard ceiling height is 8′ and even that’s a little low for me but it’s what we have in most of the house. I don’t know what mess somebody did to this house but the plumbing is crazy and unless we want to basically change the plumbing layout in our entire house, we can’t raise the ceilings much. We can maybe get 2″ through most of the space.

What does that all mean? It basically means that we can’t do much of anything that we intended to do and I tore all of the drywall down in the old cat closet for almost nothing. I mean, the drywall really needed to be done because as you can imagine, having a closet dedicated to cats caused some unpleasant lingering odors.

BUT! Not all hope is lost. The problem with the existing laundry/garage access combo is that it’s just too small of a space to accommodate both. We also desperately need more storage but that’s just a bonus of any new floor plan at this point. So, if we can’t move the laundry we’ll just have to move the garage access. New floor plan #3:

To be completely transparent, we think we can easily move the garage access to the back wall of the garage into the dining room but we don’t know that for sure. We’ll have to open up the wall to make sure we’re not dealing with anything too structural but if we can move it, we’ll be able to keep the laundry as is (which means no big plumbing cost) and we’ll be able to add about 5ft of cabinetry which means lots of storage. Coming into the house from the dining room will actually be great for bringing in groceries and it only slightly changes the future plans we had for the room so even though I had some initial hesitation there, we’re starting to get really excited about this possibility. We are not combining the existing laundry room and the cat closet anymore so instead that cat closet will become a pantry (more storage!!) and we’ll move the entrance to it to the dining room side as well instead of the hallway. We do have one air vent that will need to move to make this happen but that’s really it. I would love to find an old weathered half lite door to use for the new pantry or maybe buy a new one and make it look weathered.

The downside to the new laundry plan is that there isn’t really much wall space to use that wallpaper that I ordered so right now I’m trying to decide if I’m going to use it somewhere else (the new pantry maybe?) or if I’m going to return it. The upside is that now we get two spaces to design and we have an opportunity to try to learn/improve some new skills.

Remember when I said this project was going to be slow? Well, now it’s going to be on pause for a bit because we’ll have to do some clean out in our garage before we can get to the area that we need to open up for the new access into the house. We won’t even have a chance to start doing that until next weekend because this weekend is already packed. I’m thinking we might actually save this project just a few more weeks for the Spring One Room Challenge but there will be lots of planning and investigating in the meantime to make sure that this plan will even work.

Fingers crossed!

It’s happening!

We had originally said we weren’t going to do any new projects this year but I am super excited to tell you guys that we have decided to go ahead and renovate our laundry room! This picture is several years old but the room is an out of control mess right now so here it is at its nicest.

The laundry room in our house is tiny. I think it’s roughly a 5×6 space that fits our washer and dryer, the door to the garage (which opens into the laundry room), and another door into the rest of the house (which also opens into the laundry room). It’s also the very first room we “finished” when we moved in by painting the cabinets and walls and adding a counter over the washer and dryer. This is what it looked like when we moved in.

Before adding the barn door in our foyer, we would regularly keep the laundry room door closed so that we didn’t have to worry about any of our pets running out when we came in from the garage. Any time we would both be coming in or out we’d have to do this weird little shuffle dance so that we could close the garage door before opening the other door. It was incredibly obnoxious to do with the two of us, even worse with groceries, and nearly impossible once we added a car seat we had to carry in and out of the house.

Now that we have the barn door in place, we have been leaving the laundry room door open and it has helped some but the space is still way too tight. We’re planning on taking down the wall between the laundry room and that built in bench and luckily for us, there is also a closet right behind the laundry room that we can expand into.

For years we have used this as a place for our cats to do their business and hang out. I feel kind of bad evicting them but we can gain another 2-2.5ft to our laundry room by taking the wall down between the two spaces which I have already started doing.

Here’s the first draft of the new layout which I already know will need to change:

That empty corner space is where we had planned on stacking the washer and dryer. Adding the cabinetry is going to add so much function to our downstairs that I can hardly stand it! First though, we have to finish opening up the walls and see what we can do about what’s behind them. I’ve already found a good bit of plumbing, some of which we’d like to move and some we’re hoping we can work around. We also need to take a look in the ceiling because the ceilings in the laundry room and the cat closet are both low – probably about 7ft as opposed to a normal 8ft ceiling.

I’ll get more into the details of what needs to be done, what we plan to do, and what we plan to hire out later this week. We had planned on saving this project for the Spring One Room Challenge but in what is shocking news to absolutely no one, I am way too impatient to wait another couple of months so here we go!

I normally do my Weekender post on Fridays, or at least the Fridays that I remember to do them, but I promised a foyer post this week so here we go!

I mentioned before that 2019 will be the year we actually finish a bunch of projects that are already in progress. We have a few different areas to choose from and we decided to start downstairs in the foyer. Here’s an accurate depiction of how the space has looked since the day after Odessa’s birthday party.

The foyer is mostly finished; it really just needs baseboards, crown molding, and window/door trim. Oh and we have to repair the window sill because Barley has to constantly stand on it to bark at every living thing that passes and let’s just say she’s not the smallest dog.

Before we can do any of that though, we have to pull up the floors and re-install them. We originally installed the floors as a temporary fix but turns out we love them and the dogs can run and slide across them all day without scratching them so we want to put them throughout the downstairs. The problem is that to do that we have to install them from the front of the house going toward the back of the house and right now they’re the other way around. It shouldn’t be too bad since they are super easy to install so at least there’s that.

So that’s hiccup #1 with finishing the foyer (because it doesn’t make sense to put in baseboards before the floors are done). #2 involves the “mudroom” bench and laundry room.

We have big, big plans for the laundry room in the next couple of years. It’s a project we never really thought of as a priority but honestly it will have such a domino effect on  how the entire rest of the downstairs functions that it’s something we’re trying to move up the list. When I say big plans, I mean completely changing the lay out and blowing out walls and that includes the wall between the current laundry room and the little bench nook by the powder room and taking out the bench itself. Since we want to carry the flooring into these areas as well, we’re going to need to go ahead and at least tear the bench out and potentially that wall so we can install the flooring properly.

Fun fact: the paint samples at the top of that photo have been there for approximately 5.5 years.

I’m a little sad about ripping the bench out because it’s the first thing we ever built but it tends to just be a place we throw crap so it’s probably better this way.

Once the floors are done we can install all of the new trim and the foyer will be mostly finished! We’re going to get a new front door this spring which should be the last thing we need to finish this space.

Hooray, it’s the weekend!

We’re getting ready to start on our first project of the year and I’m so ready! We decided out of our list of 2019 projects to start with the foyer first. I’ve got a blog post almost ready to go for next week and we’re planning on starting this weekend.  It really doesn’t need much but before we can start the actual finishing process we have some floor work to do. More on that next week!

A couple of weekends ago we hosted OG’s 1st birthday party at our house and it was so much fun! We are so thankful to be surrounded by such great friends and family.

Confession: the bottle brush trees and tablecloths are still sitting piled up in the family room and snowflakes are still hung from the ceiling. We’ll get to it eventually. I didn’t get any pictures of everything completely set up or my kid before she got covered in strawberries but that’s okay.

******

I’ve been day dreaming about our laundry room a lot lately and it’s been really hard to not just go ahead and start tearing it apart. We’re not even close to working on that project though so for now I’ll just keep dreaming, I guess.

******

I hope you all have a great weekend!

A long time ago, I played with the idea of naming my Friday post “The Weekender” but not too long after, a much more well known blog that I love started doing it and I didn’t want to look like I was copying them. But ya know what? It’s okay. It’s just a post title and I have very few readers and even fewer that read other home improvement blogs so I’m going to start using it. So here is my first Friday post in a while filled with random thoughts or things going on in our lives and it’s a long one!

You know what I love most about the One Room Challenge? It forces me to post every week. When it’s over I always slack on posting whether I finished my space or not. Spoiler alert: we didn’t finish our outdoor living space and now it’s too cold to use anyway so we’ll hold off until Spring. We’ve had a much rainier fall than normal and so even if we had finished we wouldn’t have been able to use it much. We did pour the last two pavers (and have left the forms on for over a week…whoops!) and Kyle made some progress on the arbor. We’re setting that project aside until warmer weather comes back in the Spring but we have plenty of stuff inside to focus on.

OG is 11 months old as of today and I just am not emotionally ready for the 1st birthday. I’ve already been planning and ordering decorations but it’s starting to feel too real now. This year has absolutely flown by and it’s so bittersweet. I love watching her grow and change but I already miss some of those newborn and young infant characteristics.

Here’s a little sneak peak of the direction her party is going – yes, that is a pink sequin table cloth. I have also ordered approximately 1,204,813,057,395,372 balloons and I’ve cleared the Target Dollar Spot of all of their rose gold bottle brush trees every time they’ve stocked them so we’ll see what I end up doing with all of those.

Since we are hosting her (or more honestly, our) party at our house, there are some things downstairs we need to at least temporarily take care of. You might remember that a while back I talked about taking up some of the tile between the kitchen and foyer. Well, I took the tile up but we haven’t touched it since which means we currently have 3 layers of flooring exposed.

Our weekends in December are already busy so we won’t be able to completely fix it before the party but we are going to temporarily lay down some flooring just to cover the gap. We also need to put a bullnose flooring piece down where you step down into the front room from the foyer and we need to finish painting at least the dining room and if we have time, the family room. We’re also missing loads of trim but since we need to flip the flooring around downstairs it doesn’t make much sense to install baseboards and door trim just to take it all back out a week later to finish the floors so we’ll just need to make sure no nails or staples are sticking out since there will be kids running around.

Can you guys believe there are less than 3 weeks until Christmas?! I usually have my shopping done by now but I still have a few things left to buy and one present to go pick up. Luckily the ones left to buy are all gift cards but half of them will need to be mailed and we need to ship some of the other gifts. Ahhhh. We’ve been slowly decorating and have the inside pretty much taken care of but all we have outside is a tree and a polar bear on our porch. There are still pumpkins in our front yard that need to be moved and we at least need to set up our cheater lights that project onto the house.

A few years ago vs. this year:

I think 2019 is going to be a major budget year for us as far as house projects go but once I have a list of what we’re thinking about tackling I’ll be sure to share it here. I also need to take a look back at what we had hoped to get done this year and compare it to what we actually got done. My guess is we didn’t check off most of the list but we already knew that would be a major possibility so I’m not too bummed about it.

Happy weekend!