Project List

Rob and I are about to take the plunge into home ownership this month (Wohoo!) which means all kinds of awesome things.  One of which is we can paint and decorate and remodel our home any which way we want to.  After years of being suppressed by apartment living and bland walls, we are determined to put paint of them and change stuff around immediately.  

Since we have been through the home a few times and have taken a LOT of notes and pictures, we have been able to daydream about what spaces could look like.  And because we are engineers, we made a pretty comprehensive list noting each project we have come up with, what room it's associated with and a tentative figure for how much it will cost.  The good news is, we are new at this and very optimistic.  The bad news, we are new at this and very optimistic.  We at least recognize we will be bounded by money for our ability to gut the house and redo everything all at once.  So that's helping keep us grounded a little bit.

In any event, our list is over 100 items long which might make you want to pass out, but it's by project in each room.  So changing out the 3 wooden toilet seats is 3 projects on this list.  Still, there's a LOT of things that are on here.  Some of which are future projects and some are like, this needs to be done yesterday.  For example the short shag carpet in the basement.  Umm no, not staying, no way to how.  And this bathroom:

is definitely not going to make it.  Thank god the wall papering was confined to one tini tiny room.  This might be what I work on once the champagne opens. Although, we can't forget the lovely chair lifts.

Those will be removed the day we get the keys as well.  So there's a small list of musts, but hopefully manageable.  Those in the area, you might get calls from us asking if you have a particular tool on hand.  Standby!  These might count towards our "before photos" because you better believe there will be "after photos".  I can't wait to share how well (or not) some of these projects turn out.  We are in for some serious learning.

Another more immediate projects is painting.  We know we aren't going to be able to paint the whole house in a day, but we want to paint as much as we can.  At first this task sounds simple, but then you start thinking about how each room will flow into each other and how the colors will blend.  Perhaps we are over thinking the process, but I also don't want a house that looks like an uncoordinated mess.  We finally came to an agreement on what colors the main floor will have and we are pretty pumped about that.  Now we would like to figure out a color for the basement and our master bedroom.  I do know that paint is not forever and we don't have to get it right on the first try, but it certainly would be nice.  Hopefully paint samples and careful selecting will help us get there.

This blog is going to be hopping with all the project news in the coming months.  Consider this the trailer for the summer smash hit - "Renovation Smiths" coming April 2011!