Love Your Home, Again

Rondell and I currently live in our first home. Of course when we started looking for a house we had a list of the things we were looking for, like a basement (not necessary finished), 3 bedrooms, and of course a kitchen window.

We looked at about 15 houses before we found our current home, and it was love at first sight. As soon as we pulled up I knew I was going to love it...it had a two car garage, 2 1/2 baths (that was a plus), the yard was well manicured, and the backyard was huge and gorgeous. I remember sitting in the living room at our first showing and telling my Realtor to make it happen (not like in a super bossy way but in a "I really want this house" way).

When we had our home inspection our house passed with flying colors...it was obvious that the home was well taken care of and maintained well.

...and then we moved in! Rondell and I are not handy and honestly don't have a lot of knowledge on how to keep up a home. So, after almost four years we're ready to get serious because we love our house and we need to show it that we do. We've started making a list of all of the things that need to be done or that we would like to do to give our house a little TLC.

Over the weekend we rehung a few pictures. I know this sounds so small but one picture was behind the closet door and every time you would open the door it would knock the picture and make it crooked (one of my pet peeves!). Finally I took it down and moved it over just a bit (how simple was that!). This time we hung it just on a nail because before when it was hanging on a picture hanger you could see 1/2 the hanger (not cute), as well as another picture that had the same issue. But just those small changes got us motivated.

One of the first things we are going to do is change the front door a bit. Right now we have two long way rectangle windows in our front door. On the inside of the door there is a curtain that covers the windows...nice for privacy but the curtain AND the curtain rods have seen better days. We're going to do something like this:

There is film you can buy to cover the windows to make them frosty for privacy. This way we can take down the tired curtain and still have privacy. Then we'll repaint the inside of the door. Small, yet something that will make a nice difference.

The next thing we're going to do is change the flag pole bracket or just take ours down and repaint it. Right now ours has rusted nails and the rust has bled onto the bracket. Soon it will look like this (all white with no rust):

Another rather advanced (for us) plan is to change out the lighting in our kitchen. Right now we have two ceilings lights like this:

Not cute! I want something like this over my sink:


And something like this for the other fixture:

I really hope that it's not too hard...we'll see!

We're also going to paint our kitchen walls and cabinets. I saw a good tutorial here about repainting the kitchen cabinets. We painted the wall Fun Yellow by Sherwin Williams and man is it yellow. I love yellow and have always wanted a yellow kitchen but it needs to be a softer yellow. The cabinets are already a creamy white and we'll keep them that way, but they are chipped and just need a little TLC.

So, there are just a few things we want to do in the next few weeks (believe me, the list is much longer than this. With that, over the next few weeks I'll be showing you our process of falling in love with our home, again.

Are you in love with your home?