10 house projects we’re tackling this year

I know it’s May, but we have just had so many projects going on, I haven’t found the time to list them all out! I will be doing a blog post on each one of these when they’re all finished.

1. The casita

We are in the final stages of this one! It has taken awhile and we are soo excited to finally use it!

Here are all the details of the casita from an earlier post.

2. Dormers

This one is also well underway! In the photo below, the one on the right is what they look like now. They were smaller before (shown on the left), and that was my mistake. I showed them a photo of what we wanted without actually drawing it on the roof to scale, and since we have a huuuuge flat roof, they looked TINY!

Lesson learned: always draw it out!

We are doing this because our elevations were just SO boring before. Now that we are adding the casita to the front, the left side of the house just felt so…bleh. So this will add some charm and curb appeal!

3. My Office

I’ll also be switching around my office a little. Since the front courtyard is right outside my office, I want to convert the current window into a door – I was thinking dutch door, but Finley loves looking out the window now. I also love opening the window while I work in the winter, and am nervous about bugs getting through the top half of a dutch door…so I have to figure something out soon.

I will also be adding a built-in desk with cabinets and shelves, as well as doing box trim, painting, and replacing the fan with something more modern and Alexa-enabled.

Here is some inspo for the built-ins and desk:

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4. Aquaponics garden

We’ve wanted to expand our garden for a long time because of many reasons. A few of them being that:

1. we don’t like the fact that we are buying genetically modified foods
2. the quality of foods from mass-farming is low, and how they are transported (plastics and phthlalates) is unknown
3. the availability of food is unstable, and price is increasing

So we are expanding it with an aquaponics system that Danny is building! It will have fish in the bottom to feed the food, and we will be able to eat the fish every once in a while. We are thinking trout, bass, or tilapia (or all of the above?). The system will be solar powered, and we will be able to grow about 5-10 things at once.

5. Garage

Our garage has been a MESS for almost a year. Between furnishing our first Airbnb about a year ago, starting work on the casita and buying stuff for that, and furnishing the second Airbnb…it has been completely full.

Once the casita is done, it will open it up almost completely and we will get to organizing!

We will be adding the following:

• work bench and slat boards
• bike racks
• gym area
• standing safe
• ventilation system
• epoxied floor

6. Front Entry + Landscaping

Our front entry is just plain concrete right now and missing some “pizzaz”. When the casita gets done, we will also have to landscape around it. So I figured this would be the perfect time to do them all at once.

I am thinking of doing stamped concrete herringbone in a light wash color for our entry (photo below).

We will also redo our little brick wall in the front yard with some rose bushes, and put up some sort of fencing and a small gate to keep Finley in so he can hang out in the courtyard outside between our two offices.

7. Kitchen

I know you will all say I’m crazy because our kitchen is fine (you can check out our kitchen reno blog post here to see how it is right now), but we weren’t the ones that designed the layout and after living in this house for three years, we have found some functional issues to it:

1. We can’t access the trash pullout and one of the cabinets under the sink when the dishwasher is open.
2. I can’t reach the 2nd and 3rd shelf in a set of corner cabinets because the peninsula is blocking it, so those cabinets are currently halfway unused.
3. There is a storage cabinet on the side where the island seating is. When the door to the patio is open, this is inaccessible. And vise versa – when you’re getting something from the cabinets, you can’t open the patio door. This presents a problem if someone leaves the drawer open and walks away, anyone who is outside can’t get back into the house.
4. The peninsula only allows for one point of entry/exit into the kitchen, making it a pretty congested area. We can have 3 people MAX in the kitchen right now, and I’d prefer to have the ability for 4-5 to work and grab things from the fridge or cabinets seamlessly.

So we are switching it around. We are using ALL the same cabinets, just moving a few base cabinets around for functionality and getting rid of the storage cabinet in order to create an island that will provide two pathways into the kitchen.

We are hiring a cabinet installer for the labor. It will require some electric and tile work as well. It will require new slabs and will give us the opportunity to extend our island overhang, so I’m thinking of this two-tone cottage-y, Nancy Myers vibe (remember my Nancy Myers inspo from this post?), we were hoping that we could use our existing slab for the back perimeter, but there were a few things about it that made it impossible.

Here is a little drawing of the new plans. The only things that will be moving are the diswasher and trash pull-out, and moving the big sets of drawers:

I also want to spray our pot rack copper and brass for a more cottage-y look! I love this pot rack SO much, I hated it when we bought the house but Danny showed me inspiration so we kept it and it really grew on me. Now I’m not sure if I can live without one ever again.

I ran through it all in this IG story highlight here.

8. Finish baseboards, interior doors and add more in the bathroom and hall closets

We redid our interior doors a few months ago, but now we just have a pocket door and two hallway closet doors to redo. We also still need to finish our baseboards after three years! We don’t have any in the laundry room, guest room, or my office.

9. Master Extension + Patio

So this one may or may not happen this year, but I put it on the list just in case.

When we first bought this house, we initially wanted to extend the master bedroom and bathroom out a little, but we didn’t have the money.

When we were looking for homes, French doors off of the master bedroom to a private patio was on the very TOP on my “wants” list…it was a borderline “must” but it wasn’t important for Danny, so we compromised.

Our bedroom now is also configured less than ideally. It’s pretty large, but not large enough to put the bed on the wall I want it to be on (bad feng shui!), so our headboard covers the window and we don’t have functionality of that window. The window is also leaking from poor installation, so this project will fix that.

Extending the master will give us more space to put a chair in the bedroom and a bassinet someday hopefully soon 🙂 We will also put in French doors, and a pergola-covered patio off the bedroom and bathroom. The patio will be similar to the below image and the exterior will match our new casita’s board and batten look.

As for our bathroom… it’s fine now and I still love it after we renovated it 3 years ago when we first bought it. We just don’t have a tub, and the functionality of the shower is way less than ideal. There were some things that I overlooked because it was my first time doing this. We were on a tight budget then and paid pretty low-penny for the tile labor, and it shows.

We will only be redoing part of the shower and extending it to include a tub, so doing the extension will allow us to fix those problems! I also want to include French doors or a floor-to-ceiling window off the master bathroom behind the tub onto the private master patio, similar to the below image.

10. Outdoor BBQ Area

If all goes to plan with all of the above and we have some time and money left over, I would love to put in an outdoor kitchen.

When we have people over, the inside kitchen can get a little crowded with me cooking inside and Danny coming in to wash things off, etc. We have a space for the new BBQ area that is outside off of our patio (still close to the action) and that is close to the kitchen window, so we can pass things back and forth to each other through the window.

My idea for this is to include a sink, a built-in grill, a space for our smoker, and a pizza oven. Still deciding on the look, but I liked this photo: