Home Improvement

Hey guys!  How goes it?  I feel like this has been kind of a long work week, despite it being only four days.  Is it Friday yet??

Lately, when Greg has been home, he's been newly motivated to do stuff around the house, so I thought I'd show you a few things we've done at the house.

Let me preface this with the fact that I feel like our house has been in a holding pattern (ha) for a while. After moving in a little over 5 years ago, we initially did a few things, but then Greg got furloughed, and progress kind of came to a screeching halt.  We didn't want to do much while Greg was furloughed and money was tight.  Although, as you'll see, none of things I'm going to show you are really expensive things, I think we just kind of shelved doing anything with the house for a while. 

Probably one of the more major things we did was to get new blinds for our sunroom.  We love the light in there (it's where I usually take food pictures), but not having blinds up in there for the past 5 years has limited our privacy since we have neighbors fairly close by.  We got these brownish colored roller shades from Lowe's a few weeks ago.  They are Levolor brand, and you can get them cut to size.  Greg is pretty handy, so he installed them in the windows himself once we got them all.  We ended up having to get ours from two different Lowe's since each only had a few, but we found them all and really like them.  I think we might eventually need some valances or some kind of window treatments above, but for now, they're nice!

Next to the blinds you can see a picture.  That's another thing Greg has been doing- hanging up pictures that we probably should have hung a while ago.

Here's one he put up in my office.  I took this picture in Hawaii and we had it blown up and framed a couple years ago.  It's been sitting, unhung for a while!

We also put up a couple pictures that Greg's Dad took and had framed, in various places around the house.

This one is on our second floor outside our bedroom.  Closer look:

And one other one we put near our entry way.

Another little thing we did in the sunroom was to put little shades on our chandelier.  These were another Lowe's purchase.  The fixture wasn't bad as it was (just naked with no shades), but this kind of makes it look a little bit more put together.  Also, it's hard to tell from this picture, but they actually match the new shades.

Another thing I had Greg hang was my Runner medal hanger, which I've had for over a year, since Greg gave it to me for Christmas of 2010!  We put it up in my office and I just have my three half marathon and one full marathon medals on it for now.  :)

Obviously we didn't do anything too major, but hey, it's the most we've done in about 4 years, so I'm psyched to see any progress!

Some things we want/need to do:

• Install a backsplash in our kitchen
• Paint more rooms (we have one bedroom, a half bath, and an accent wall painted, and the rest of our house is WHITE!)
• Possibly redo our floors to all hardwood downstairs.
• Organize/decorate our basement.
• Landscaping
• Get nice office furniture
• Redo our deck and make it bigger

Right now all of these things are kind of...not happening, but hopefully eventually we'll do some of them!

How's your home improvement situation?