Home Renovation Update #1

I had intended to do this every month or so to keep you guys updated, but let’s be honest, life is freaking BUSY! This remodel has taken over much more of my life than I ever anticipated. Yes, it’s time consuming picking out all the finishes, but I also meet with the contractors and project manager weekly for usually 1-2 hours at a time. Let me tell you, if you are considering doing a remodel of this scale and you work full-time, hire an interior designer! This stuff is a full-time job, no joke! Luckily, as a Stylist and true creative, this stuff comes naturally to me. I can envision a space before it’s even created and pulling together finishes is so fun for me, but time consuming nonetheless. What’s not easy is the countless hours of researching products and making sure they fit into your budget! I literally spent HOURS searching for plumbing fixtures and was completely over-thinking it, but it’s hard not to when it’s your house. You start to realize how picky you become about little things that you never even noticed before. Luckily, I found an amazing showroom that has been a huge help in finding me options within my price range (game-changer)!

At this point, we are less than two months away from completion. I can’t believe I’m even saying that! Right now, we still just have a wooden box, but that wooden box as a roof, windows, doors and now insulation & sheetrock! And because we have been having such great weather in Seattle, they painted the exterior of the house, too! It felt like it took FOREVER to get to this point. But now that the house is painted and the inside has walls, it’s starting to feel REAL! At the start of the project it’s such a whirlwind because things happen fast. You can demolish an entire house in less than a week - it’s putting it back together that takes the longest. Once the flooring and cabinets go in the last week of October I feel like things will move fast again because that’s the fun part!

Here is a breakdown of what we had done to the house:

• Raise the ceilings. The most effective way to do this was to remove the entire roof. We took the entire house from 7.5’ to 9’ ceilings. Our biggest concern when doing this remodel was having it feel as open and airy as possible. We also vaulted the ceiling in the living/dining area to 12 ft.

• Add additional square feet. We basically doubled the useable square footage of the house, making a large open concept living/dining/kitchen and additional bonus room downstairs. In addition, we went from 3 to 4 bedrooms and added another full bath.

• Create outdoor living spaces. This was important to us because we love to entertain. For living in the city (although it is a more rural community), we have a decent size yard, so we used a lot of it for the addition. But we also decided to add a nice front porch and a patio in the back where we can put a fire pit, chairs and dining set.

Exterior progress #1

Exterior progress #2

Before we went on vacation last month I was expecting to come back to so many new things and it was just the opposite. The point right before insulation and dry wall is all the stuff in the walls that we don’t think about as homeowners, like electrical, plumbing, etc - the important stuff! This is the portion of the project that takes time because it has to be done correctly the first time. The last thing you want to do is start to drywall and then realize a light switch is not in the right place and have to rip everything out and start over. My advice for anyone going through this is to over-communicate with your construction team. We walked through the lights we wanted, where we wanted them and how many light switches would power each set of lights at least a few times. And I changed my mind…A LOT. That being said, we had a structural issue downstairs which turned into a bigger deal than we thought. We had to get an entirely new beam to help support the new addition to the house - because of this everything else stopped. This is the stuff you deal with when you are doing a renovation and you just have to accept it. Luckily, we have an AMAZING construction team and they are doing everything they can to make up for lost time and they tell me everything so I’m always in the loop on what’s going on…good or bad.

Interior progress

At this point, we are on track to move back in the first week of December, but they are really trying to have us in by Thanksgiving! So send us good juju and keep your fingers crossed that all goes well. Either way, I’m just happy to hopefully be in before Christmas so I can decorate and get a giant tree to fill our 12 foot vaulted ceilings! You can get a taste of all my home design inspiration blog posts here. I will do my best to update you on the process before we move all the furniture back in so you can really see the before and after without anything in it. Thanks for following along our journey! You can also see videos of all the home renovation updates on my Instagram highlight reel!