I'm not sure if everyone knows but Ryan and I recently became home owners. I personally like to watch HGTV and DIY on a regular basis (Ryan's not a big fan). Because of that I am very enthusiastic about home improvement projects, especially the ones I can do myself. Ryan and I have been doing a lot of home improvements projects recently and plan to continue updating things as time goes on.
The first project I tackled was putting hardware on all the cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. The cabinets and drawers didn't have anything on them before so it made quite a difference. It was more difficult than I had anticipated but after I got the hang of it things went a lot smoother. One project I also tackled which is not shown in this post was I spent over three hours doing touch up painting.
The window in the front of the house was one of the windows that didn’t have shutters put on it based on my mother’s preferences. I prefer the privacy so I went and bought a somewhat similar set of blinds and installed them in the window myself. I am very pleased with the outcome.
Ryan and I are slowly but surely working on improving the back yard. We spent a great deal of time raking up the obscene amount of leaves that fell over the winter. We also plan on putting in new mulch, flowers, and trees. It’s a work in progress.
What you don’t see here is a tree that a few years ago began to grow at a 45 degree angle into the house. We concluded that we would be unable to salvage the tree and decided it would have to come down. Ryan took it upon himself to not only to chop in down but also to pull it out of the ground as well. I was rather impressed and appreciated the free labor J.
The carpet that we had down stairs was white and about 7 years old. Because it is such a high traffic area the carpet had become fairly worn and rather discolored. We thought it best to replace it. Since hard wood floors are in demand and would be good for resell value we went with those. They turned out very well and for some reason has made the room look bigger.
We were worried about one corner of the house down stairs because it had a drainage problem. With the new hard wood floors if any water were to get in it would cause the floors to buckle. We thought it would be a good investment to have gutters put in. Also the run off from the roof had been causing water damage to the back door which will need to be fixed. It killed a lot of birds with one stone.
Because we tore out the carpet down stairs and had the hardwood floors put in there was a gap between the floors and the base trim. We decided quarter round would fix the problem. We had a friend install the quarter round for us since we didn't have the right tools. But Ryan and I took it upon ourselves to finish off the trim with caulk and a new coat of paint. Thankfully in the end it all turned out wonderfully and you cannot tell we added anything to it.
We have been trying to add personal touches here and there to make it feel more like home. We received a HAMES picture from the Huddleston’s for our wedding and hung it above the TV. We put our wedding scrap book along with an "H" I bought on top of the book shelf. Our wedding book from our photographer is also on display on the book shelf. My mom made us a custom Hames tile that is perched on top of the cabinets. And we also hung the picture Ryan’s brother Will gave us as a wedding present.
