Nice!!! Smart to add a few pavers, it looks like you did a pretty professional job, too. Have you laid pavers before?
Mr. Imma has worked hard to build some storage space in the garage and it looks much better with all the stuff neatly on the shelves. He got some cheap metal shelving units from the hardware store.Tomorrow my cousin’s guy is coming over to hopefully give us a price for the stairs. I’m afraid it’s going to be expensive but at least it will be done.
Fingers crossed he’s willing to do the stairs project!
It looks awesome!!!
Thanks, y’all!
@Immaculata I have done flagstones before, many years ago. Decades! It was easier on my body, but because they were natural stone, more complicated to get a level walking suface. That path was about 4’ x 20 (1.2 x 5 meters)! I definitely didn’t do best practice here, but also not at all worst practive. I just needed it done before it gets any winterier. I hope you get on well with your cousin’s guy and he want to do the job!
He can do the job, he can do it before the end of the year and it’s actually pretty affordable (he hasn’t sent his official quote but he says it will be a 3-figure sum) and he’s going to add a shelf to our built-in bookcase in the living room too.
He had some smart ideas to improve the design I had in my head, so it’s going to be slightly different than what I had in mind, but it’s great to be working with an expert who can give advice (it will be less steep this way). Plus I can finish the room now, it’s no problem for him if the floor is already in! So I hope to be able to finish the paint soon, and then I can go and pick the floor, convince Mr. Imma to lay it 
and start planning the rest of the furniture.
This is great!
Wow, that’s great news!
Yes!!! I’m so excited already lol. I had been preparing myself mentally for months of waiting and a very high quote, the idea of having this room done by the end of the year is very exciting.
We’ve been decluttering the garage and also came across enough leftover flooring from the living room that we think we can use for the landing. The cost savings would be a bonus but most importantly we really like this floor. We hadn’t actually checked how much we have left over, it’s more than we thought.
We have a little pantry / semi-basement under the stairs (not sure if this is a thing in American homes as well, but it’s right next to the kitchen, unheated and maybe a foot lower than the main floor). We used to have sheet vinyl flooring there but the builders took it (grrr). We’re on bare concrete there now and it just isn’t nice, and not clean. I was thinking of maybe putting some leftover bathroom tiles in there. On one hand, who has a fancy floor in their pantry? On the other hand, why not, when we’ve got the tiles, and it makes the pantry easier to clean and also pretty.
@Edel did I remember correctly, did you insulate your pantry to make it even colder?
Today is IKEA furniture building day! I think we will try to get everything together except the 2 bookcases that will be by the windows.
It’s looking sooooooooo good! Weird angle snd lighting because I forgot to take a picture before we closed the curtain and turned off the lights.
It looks so nice! I can’t believe how fast you’ve managed to complete this project.
It’s funny because to me it feels like it’s taking forever! It’s already been 2 months and there is still so much left to do.
The next project will be trying to attach a painted hardboard backing to the kallax to keep dirt, etc off of my art supplies since it’s right next to the front door. We got a piece of white painted hardboard last night so will need to cut it down to size. Then I’m going to try attaching contact paper to the unfinished side because I don’t want the dark brown facing in towards the shelves and making it darker. The inside doesn’t need to look pretty since it will be mostly hidden, it just needs to be brighter. Then we need to figure out if we can apply edge banding to the hardboard or if it will be easier to just paint the edges.
The giant tool chest might be my favorite thing ever. It’s so nice to have the tall workspace for putting things together. Plus all the storage.
It’s looking fantastic!!
@photojenn It’s looking sooooo goooood! I am definitely getting a vicarious thrill from your progress!
Hoo boy, y’all. I spent about 5 hours outside yesterday in the 37F/2.7C getting one side of the stair rails up… to this point. They still need the cables and the base covers. Hopefully later this week, I will have the time/weather/inclination for doing that. Having a puppy takes a big chunk of time for this kind of thing. Well, all kinds of things.
It hardly looks like 5 hours of labor, right? The other side shouldn’t take as long since the results of a lot of measuring, planning, figuring can just be duplicated. I also had a break through with cutting the metal pieces more accurately which is a huge relief. Too bad I am, like, 93% done with the metal cutting. Sigh!
Yes we did, our pantry was a small room that we created when remodeling. And all of the stud walls were insulated with 100mm polyurethane foam insulation. Definitely insulate it where you can, it makes a big difference.
Update on the bedroom redo. The window seat has been done for a bit, I love how cozy it is with all the rescued and recovered pillows. I did make end pillows but decided not to use them. They will reappear in the guest/foster kitten room to solve an issue when we are fostering.
I papered the walls and then painted to cover up paneling and rough plywood walls.
Now for the ceiling and walls. I papered the paneling on the opposite side of the room. I need to prime and paint. The paper does a great job of covering the grooves, but the wall still has its issues, and it is a vast improvement.
The paneling on the knee walls goes up to about a foot from the top and had a piece of trim which when removed revealed a change in level. So we are mudding and also mudding the paneling grooves. I was going to paper the slanted walls and then texture them like the ceiling, but I think I can skip the paper and just texture now. We have several coats of mudding to go. And, there is another side to reapeat the process on before we are finished. One wall at a time.
The lower wall and the rest of the walls are painted Opal by Benjamin Moore and is almost white by day and decidedly pink at night. Not completely happy with that, but it will do for now. I’ll add the trim back on at the top of the lower wall, wainscott style.
Jim and I have been working on this house for little over a year and a half, and we’ve accomplished a lot of things, but there are still so many things on the To Do List, and many of them are wayyyy down on the list. The powder room is one of the items way down on the list. The previous owners tried to ‘update’ this 80’s house on a shoestring budget. They repainted the kitchen, powder room, and entryway from the garage all with this awful grey paint.
And when I saw awful paint, I don’t just mean the color. It’s the absolute cheapest, worst paint I’ve seen used in a family home. They bought the house in Jan 2020, and we bought it in Jan 2023, so they had to have painted it in those two years. (We’ve seen the listing pics for when they bought it, and it was not grey then, so this had to be them.) The paint is badly slapped on (random brush streaks across the stained trim, spills on the tile floor, etc), and it is chipping everywhere. It’s ultra flat, and paired with the grey tone, it almost looks like concrete. And remember when I said this is an 80’s house? That means the tile floor that runs through the kitchen, entry, laundry room and powder room (and all the bathroom fixtures like toilets) are a warm almond in color. In fact the floor is almond AND Country Blue. The color you’d see on wallpaper featuring geese wearing bonnets.
They seem to have wanted to try to tie the warm floors to their new cool toned color scheme, so they repainted the vanity/cupboard and the baseboards and dark slate grey-blue. Then they replaced the sink on top with a cheap faux-granite counter, and installed a flat black faucet. To match the faucet, they took down the weird gold 60’s towel bar and toilet paper holder, and spray painted them flat black to match, and put them back up. They stripped some of the screws, so the towel holder is loose on one end, and it can’t be tightened back up. I like black just fine as a metal option, but let me assure you, your toilet paper holder shouldn’t be black. Especially when it has nooks and crannies that collect paper lint. (I literally just cleaned this with a handful of Q-tips to get all the lint out. It will be linty again by evening.)
Overall, I just find this room so depressing. There’s no window, and it’s very small, but has (mostly) high ceilings, so you kinda feel like you’re peeing in a pepper pot. Or at the bottom of a well. Or in a prison…
Also, after all this time living here, it’s the only room in the house that still smells like someone else’s home. I don’t know why, but when I’m in there with the door shut, it becomes very apparent that it smells like someone else’s house.
Plus, it is the first thing we see as we walk into the house from the garage, where we park. So I’ve decided I’ve had enough of this sad little grey poop closet. I can’t afford to actually renovate it right now. We’re having the exterior painted, and the holidays are coming up so fast. And I don’t want to spend much money on a room that I really do want to change up in the future. (I really want to replace that vanity and builder’s grade mirror!) So I’ve set myself a budget of $100 to just cheer it up a bit in time for Christmas.
I bumped into the wreath in my garage while getting out some holiday decorations. It’s a plain faux boxwood, with no trimmings, so it can bring some greenery/life to the room, and will work for the holidays, and beyond. Plus, free! Next, the hand towels in there were from our last house. They were a grey-beige that looked nice against turquoise wallpaper, but not as good against grey & cream. Plus they’re many years old and a bit stained. So a small stack of plain black hand towels from Walmart. I got 6, so I can hang two side-by-side, so that came to $18. While I wouldn’t have picked any of this for my first choice, the new black towels do at least look sharp against the grey walls.
Next, a nice smelling, but not overpowering candle, in a black matte glass jar, for $10 at Walmart. Final item I’ve added (so far) is a framed notecard of a photo taken on UIUC’s campus, by a local artist. I admired her work at an art show last year, and when I saw her again this year, I picked up a few note cards. This one features gothic windows, and a snow covered pine, with some red ivy in the background. I had the frame in my stash, and the card was $5.
Final new additions (so far), a small black metal tray for $8, and a Christmas ornament for $2, both from Walmart. I added the black velvet bow to hide the wire loop meant to hang the ornament. Current total: $43.
Since doing this a few days ago, I also picked up a pair of cream hand towels, embroidered with a wreath and “Merry Christmas” on them, and a pretty green bottle of fancy hand soap, in an evergreen scent. I’ll wait till Thanksgiving to add those in, and in the mean time, keep my eyes open for something else to fill space on that tray. Maybe a small plant or a bud vase with a sprig of holly…
And in case you were wondering, now that the candle has been in there about a week now, it no longer smells as much like someone else’s home when I’m in there peeing…
Creating a pantry from scratch is a great idea! I don’t know why they stopped building homes with pantries, they’re so useful.
Ours is under the stairs / partially under the floor, and our internal walls are single solid brick. What I’m thinking of is mainly insulating the underside of the stairs and the wall towards the living room. The floor sits straight on the sand and is very cold.
I know our builder accidentally poured concrete in the basement, we demanded he remove it on a Saturday, and he did, most of it, but from the height of the shelves in the basement I can see the floor used to be lower (we can barely fit a can now beneath the lowest shelf and we used to keep 1,5 liter cartons and bottles there). It has 0 priority but at some point I might remove those 4-6 inches of concrete from the floor, add insulated panels to the underside of the staircase, then use the leftover bathroom tiles for the floor.
@marionberries that looks great! And @MistressJennie I like the new wreath! I see what the new owners tried to do, update the room on a low budget, but that also makes the room look a bit “jumbled together”. When we bought this house in 2015 on a very low budget, the dark brown early 1980s tiles everywhere also annoyed me a lot (especially as the grout had worn out between the tiles and dirt had settled in everywhere). What we did is we covered it with cheap sheet vinyl. It wasn’t super durable, by the time we started the renovation in 2022 it was worn through in many places, but with the new floor the kitchen suddenly looked much less outdated.
Also, the geese wearing bonnets, I absolutely loved those as a kid 
My parents had this weird late 70s / early 80s style house with all of this big heavy brown furniture, avocado kitchen and filet crochet absolutely everywhere, while all my friends’ moms had square white tiles, white walls and geese with bonnets everywhere.
That window seat looks so inviting!!
