One Year

Guys. It's been ONE year that we've been in our house!!! Can you believe it?! 

One year ago yesterday we started moving in but we actually reached the one year mark of owning our home on September 12th. Let's recap some of the changes that have happened in the last year of home ownership, shall we?

I shared the news that we had officially bought our house and I shared when we moved. 

Our first project (before even moving in) was painting all of the kitchen cabinets.

We brought Sophie home.

We went to Ikea and did a few small projects with Ikea organizers. and purchased some Ikea furniture. We bought some new kitchen appliances from Home Depot.

We decorated for Christmas, bought some new decor, and figured out how to deal with having no pantry.

I made extensive to-do lists for our house interior and the exterior.

I straightened up our office.

We updated our wall decor and bought some cool wall art for our kitchen. 

We installed new blinds- finally some privacy!

I organized some kitchen drawers (check back on Wednesday to see inside all our kitchen drawers and cupboards!)

Some small house updates were made, did some yard work, learned all about gardening, and Tim built a walkway all by himself!

Once that was completed I created some new front gardens. I managed to keep everything alive that I planted! I have been loving having gardens this summer and can't wait to add on next year!

Can you believe we completed all that stuff in our first year here? Tim is currently working on a project right now and I will drop a little teaser picture right here....

Any guesses what we are up to?

Cheers to another year of projects in our first home!

New Solar Lights

 You guys, I finally ordered some solar lights to light up our front walkway! OneFrugalChick on Instagram posted a deal for Amazon for these solar lights and I was able to snag them for only $13 a 6-pack! I ended up needing 18 lights total so buying three packs worked out perfectly. Although I wish they were more of a white light instead of yellow I am thrilled with how they look for such a cheap price! I had been previously looking at Walmart for clearances out lights but they still weren't getting clearanced out. I was so happy to find these because I knew I wanted to get some in the garden before summer ends. 

The other night I noticed that the lights were starting to turn on one by one at twilight (ayo Twilight fans) so I headed outside to snap some pictures. You can see that some of the lights haven't turned on yet but I love the gentle glow they give off!

Also, the walkway is looking great! A round of applause for Tim on that one!

I think at this point I was just waiting for two or three lights to turn on. They are just enough to give off light if you are coming up our walkway. I'm picturing pumpkins lining the walkway this fall, leading kids up to the door for Halloween. If there is Halloween this year, who knows at this point!

One more light to go! If you head to my instagram (balancingonmytoes) in my home story I have a little video of walking down the walkway towards the house. You can hear the nighttime sounds that we get here in Rhode Island. I love the sound of summer nights here, it's so peaceful with all the wildlife sounds. I love where I live!

When all the lights were finally on I was so happy! It just looks so nice!

These lights are plastic, not glass. I know that may make them "cheaper" but I personally like that they can get bumped around and knocked over and aren't going to shatter. Mostly I prefer things that aren't too precious.  I worry less about Sophie running around like a bull in a china shop when things aren't breakable.

Look at that precious little face in the window! Also, this just reminds me of how far we've come. There were very few gardens, no walkway, no evergreens. We've come so far in such a short time!

Just ignore my heart eyes over here. I'm a little obsessed.

The design on these lights is so pretty too. Look at the glow it sends across the walkway. 

Okay, that's all for my new solar lights! What sort of outdoor lighting do you have at your house? I would love to add some solar lights in the backyard too, but we are still working on our plans for the backyard so we will see what we end up with back there. Tim recently finished part of a project he's been working on and it looks so good, I cannot wait to share it with you all.

Also, I am going to work on my plans for this front garden for next year....and what other plants and plans I have for the yard next spring. Oh, the projects just keep on coming to me!

Our Kitchen

Hey everyone!

Today we are talking about our kitchen! If you've been reading along you might have noticed that I'm slowly sharing with you each room of our house. Our kitchen is used daily and along with the living room is the place we spend the most time.

When we first moved in we immediately painted the cabinets and then bought new appliances. Here's what it currently looks like:

Our island is where we sit to eat all of our meals. There isn't room for a kitchen table in our house currently so we spend our meals at the counter. In our apartment we sat on the couch so at least this is a step up!

Eventually we would like to replace the countertops and floors. I could see us also redoing the entire kitchen if we decide to make this our forever home. For right now it works just fine but seeing a quartz countertop would be so nice :)

I love the appliances we picked. Tim was the person who actually pointed them out. I was so set on getting stainless steel but I never thought about the black stainless and I honestly like it better. It looks so good with the white cabinets. We have loved our LG appliances so far and I would definitely pick them again in a future home!

All of our KitchenAid supplies and other teal decor is my favorite! How nice would it all look with a grayish quartz countertop on both the regular counter and the island?!

This is the main door we come in and out every day. I really love how homey it feels. As many improvements as I can come up with, I love this being our first home! I know we will probably outgrow it someday and need to make a decision whether to add on or move but I do love coming through that door into our home every day. Especially when a little furry face greets me :)

What is your kitchen like? Do you have any big plans for it?

DIY House Projects: Completed Front Walkway

Today I'm sharing our completed front walkway! I can't stop gushing about my husband. I am in awe with the amazing job he did!! I never knew he was so talented at home projects but this walkway is just incredible. 

Remember where we started?

It was just an empty lawn and when we stepped off the front steps it was muddy and gross.

Then we had the moat...

Now, we have this......

Isn't it beautiful?!

I love the pattern and cannot believe what a great job he did!

He did such an amazing job and I'm so proud to have an amazing and talented husband.

My plan is to create gardens to surround this walkway with gardens and I can't wait to get this next part of the project done!

Also, do you see that little fluff ball in the window? :)

What do you think of the walkway? Have you ever built something like this before?

DIY House Projects: Walkway Progress

After an unintentional week off, I'm back! Guys, this is the beginning of week 9 of me working from home. I can't believe that I've actually been working from home all this time, I never imagined. I did assume I would get so much done if I worked from home each day but I never thought I wouldn't be able to walk outside without a dog attached to me. Leaving her inside means barking, yelping and pawing at the windows so unfortunately if Tim isn't home I'm not able to get outside to get any outside work done. On the weekends Tim has been working on the walkway so I wanted to share the progress with you guys today!

Please note that I am not able to help Tim with this project because he is a perfectionist and I have no patience. If I did the walkway it would come out much less perfect because I wouldn't be taking the time to make things perfect. Lucky for me with this perfectionist husband of mine it will look perfect :)

Tim spent this past Saturday getting all the stakes in and measuring out where the walkway should line up. He wanted to make sure that the walkway sloped away from the house so we won't get any water pooling near the house. 

That perfectionist hubby of mine spent so much time leveling everything out and making sure all his measurements were perfect. I would've probably just said that it looks good and been done with it, which is why I'm not helping :)

Once everything was all lined up it was time to fill in the gravel!

Sophie and I supervised the process. Tim was seriously kicking butt this past weekend!

Progress with the gravel!

We borrowed the tool seen above from my parents and it really packs everything in. See the difference between the left side and the right side?

This was almost the end point!

After all the gravel is in then Tim will lay the pavers and use sand to keep them in place. I am so excited we are getting to the end point of this walkway project and I'm sure that Tim is ecstatic as well but he's also probably wondering what is next for him :)

Sophie is checking out what her dad is doing! Also this is why I have to keep her on a leash while we are doing anything because she will stick her face right in whatever you are doing, making a project like this difficult!

But it doesn't stop her from watching like a true fan!

Now are you ready for what the walkway looks like as of today?

....

The crushed gravel is in!! 

Guys. I'm pretty sure the next time I update you it will be completed! I will be sharing before and after pictures of how this changes our front yard, I'm so excited!

Once the walkway is complete, I plan on making the front garden surround them. If you look at the picture above I am going to pull the garden all the way up to the walkway and plan on getting boxwoods to line the walkway on both sides. The garden that you can see in the back I plan to wrap all the way around the walkway. I also want to get solar lights for the sides of the walkway.

I can just picture mini pumpkins lining the walkway during fall :)

So those are the plans! Do you have any ideas that I haven't mentioned? I would love to hear them!

Food Storage When You Don't Have A Pantry

I feel like almost everyone in America has a pantry in their kitchen. Unfortunately we don't and that was a bummer when we fell in love with our house. The good news is I can share how we are creating more spaces for food storage and how we make it work in our house. Let me know if you have a pantry in the comments!

We have a double cupboard we have dedicated to food storage. It originally had three shelves inside but I decided not to put one back in after we painted our kitchen cabinets. I thought this was a great idea but in reality it made more sense to have all three shelves for more storage so I ended up putting it back in this past weekend. 

Let's start by cleaning up and cleaning out! I pulled everything out of the cabinet to throw away anything expired and organize what we wanted to keep.

We have so much candy right now. There is still leftover candy from Halloween and we accumulated more candy over Christmas. I guess we will be sharing with guests for quite some time!

At this point I had emptied out the bottom shelf and put all the contents on the counter. See how much room the bottom shelf had? It was a little ridiculous and I felt like we were just piling things on top of each other and it was just creating a huge mess!

Here's the after! It's certainly not as Pinterest perfect as many pantries I see on The Home Edit Instagram page but it is functional and works for now! With having three shelves there is less room for stacking and that will hopefully keep us a little more organized!

Our basement door is right next to this cabinet so I use the back of the door for a little more storage. 

We purchased this unit from The Container Store back when we lived in our apartment. It worked great in our pantry there and also is doing a great job on our basement door.

It works really well for canned goods and other condiment containers that are unopened.

The last place we are storing food is on shelves on our basement stairs. 

Tim and my dad installed these three shelves from Home Depot and I am so thankful for this extra storage space.

This area is great for rice and other unopened grains.

We also use it to store pasta, unopened chips, potatoes, and coffee.

The built-in shelf underneath holds all alcohol, which we have a ton of and I'm not sure how we accumulated all of it!

So that's how we store all our food without a pantry. It may not be Pinterest worthy but it certainly woks for us while we don't have a pantry! 

Let me know if you have a pantry and how you store all your food!

Have a great day everybody!

Ultimate House To Do List: Exterior Edition

On Monday I shared our interior ultimate house to do list and today we are chatting about our exterior list. As you saw on Monday there are a ton of things we want to do inside the house but I wanted to share what we hope to do outside our home. Our house sits on a little over an acre and we have a LOT of yard. Years ago this lot was covered in trees and the previous owner cut down almost all of them. We have a huge front yard which is nice in some ways but we definitely have plans for our yard to make it a little bit nicer.

Our Exterior To Do List

• New Grass: Luckily my husband sells turf for a living and we might be able to get this done fairly inexpensively. 
• Front Walkway: There is no walkway from our driveway to our front door and having one would be so nice. Right now you go down the front steps directly into the grass. I would love to have a nice walkway with gardens on either side.
• Sugar Maple Tree: I plan to plant a sugar maple tree in the front yard because they are absolutely gorgeous in the fall and I desperately want one!
• Gardens: I want to completely change the front gardens and create a garden along the side of the house. 

I would love to have evergreens here so it would be green year round. Right now the plants look great in the summer but everything is so dead and dull in the winter. Having the evergreens would give it a nicer look year round.

• Window boxes: I think window boxes would look great on the front of our house! I have seen simple directions on how to make them yourself so it's something I am thinking about taking on as a project. 
• Move the Fire Pit: Right now the fire pit is exactly in the center of our backyard. I would like to buy a fire pit kit from Home Depot and put it together closer to the back of our yard, away from the house and more out of the way. I have dreams of a fire pit surrounded by small rocks and Adirondack chairs....

• Fenced In Backyard: We would love to fence in our backyard for Sophie! This would make letting her out much easier since we could let her run around on her own.
• Install Lattice Under Deck: Sophie loves going under the deck. We bought lattice but haven't installed it yet. 
• Refinish Deck: Our deck desperately needs to be refinished. Our plan is to do this in the spring. 

• Buy A Shed: Having a shed would be great! We need one that has a ramp for our lawn mower and I would love to store shovels and gardening tools out there.
• Buy A Patio Set and Outdoor Rug: I'm dreaming of a cute little set sitting on the deck! I am going to keep my eyes peeled for sales.
• Buy A Grill: Done! It's boxed up still in our basement, but we have it! Also, thanks to my parents Tim received a ton of grilling tools. 

Right now that is our to do list for our house! We will definitely be working on some of these this spring and I can't wait to share with you how it turns out. 

Do you have any major house goals right now? What landscaping ideas do you have for your home?

Our Ultimate House To Do List: Interior Edition

Hey everyone!

Today we are chatting about our ultimate house to do list. If you are new around here, my husband and I bought our first home back in September and we are slowly turning it into our customized home! So far we've done things like painting the kitchen cabinets, buying all new appliances, organizing, bringing home a new family member, bought wall art, and have done some minimal decorating.

We've been here four months and we haven't gotten as much done as I thought we would in this time but quite honestly life gets in the way. I always used to judge people who took forever to do things in their homes but I get it now.  I would much rather hang out with my husband and dog after work instead of doing a project. It doesn't help that it gets dark at 4:30 right now and by the time I get home it's already pitch black.  That to me equals zero motivation.

So let's get started with the to do list! I'm going to separate it by rooms that we currently have in our house and at the end I will share what we hope to add onto the house one day if we choose to make this our forever home.

Kitchen

• All new appliances: done! We purchased them from Home Depot and absolutely love the ones we chose. I also am still living in bliss since we didn't have a dishwasher before and now have one.  We have this set in black stainless and highly recommend it!
• Paint cabinets: also done and was way more of a pain in the butt then we initially thought it would be. We now have a gorgeous white kitchen and I couldn't be happier with how the cabinets came out.

• Add trim underneath dishwasher: It looks incomplete under the dishwasher so I definitely want to get some trim under there.
• Replace kitchen counters: I have my eye on some quartz countertops to replace the counter as well as the island counter. They are two different colors now and I definitely want them to match. 

• Complete touch-ups in kitchen: The area next to the stove needs to be painted, the area below the microwave and the side of a cabinet we had to life a little bit in order to fit the microwave and fridge in.

It's not a huge area, but certainly one that needs to be fixed!

• Replace kitchen sink with a large farmhouse sink.
• Crown molding above the cabinets.
• New flooring

I dislike the color of this floor, I just think it looks dirty all the time. I wouldn't mind matching wood floors throughout the entire house...but another tile floor could be okay too. 

• Shades for windows (you'll see this on the list for every room...)
• Wall hangings: I am far behind on decorating and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with the big wall in our kitchen, but so far have hung up a few things. I'm thinking maybe shelves, but I'm holding off for a bit. 
• Organize all drawers and cabinets.
• Line all drawers with contact paper.

Big Kitchen Ideas: Eventually I would love to have a pantry. Right now we are using two small cabinets and they are a total disaster. However, this may be something we won't get without adding an addition onto the house. If we had a pantry I think we would have plenty of space for food and other storage and this kitchen could be our forever kitchen.

Living Room

• New coffee table: I just ordered this last week. Just waiting for it to come in and then we will sell the old one. The new one is a little bit smaller which I think will work better in this space.
• Replace ceiling fan: All of our other ceiling fans are white and this one is just old looking. It would work with someone who likes "country" themed things but I am definitely not that person. I prefer more modern, simple and sleek. We will definitely be replacing this at some point.

• Wall Hangings: Again, we need to hang things on the wall. This huge wall behind our couch just looks lame. I have something I want to hang here, I just need to get Tim to help me!

• Shades on the windows (like I said, this will appear on every list!)
• Rug: Done and I love how it looks!
• Mount TV
• Add decor: It is seriously lacking in here and that's mostly because we weren't able to trust Sophie but I'm thinking if we had shelves on the wall I would be able to decorate a little more.
• Organize closet: The closet in this room is okay but could definitely handle being renovated to make it a little more customized. I also would like to go through all our coats and donate some but that's another story.

Hallway

• Wall hangings: I have plans to frame our wedding guestbook at the end of the hall but just need to get it custom framed. Normal frames aren't thick enough. I also need to figure out what I want to do in the hallway.

• Replace light fixture: No rush on this because I really don't care about it, but the light fixture is really small and I'm sure we could find something nicer!

Office

• Rug: I need to find a big area rug for this room.
• Shades for the window.
• Curtains
• Serious organization of the closet.

We honestly aren't planning too much for the office and I'll explain why when we talk about future additions.

Master Bedroom

• Shades for the windows.
• Curtains for the windows.
• Area rug

Again, not too big of a list because of possible future additions.

Guest Room

• Shades for the windows
• Curtains for the windows
• Area rug

Bathroom

• Shades for the window
• Possibly curtains?
• Replace shower/bath
• Replace toilet
• Replace vanity

• New flooring 
• Organization in closet.
• Patch holes in closet and around shower head: When a plumber came he had to cut around the shower head and now it needs patching and repainting. The other hole already existed when we moved in and needs to be patched and painted. 

Basement

• New washer and dryer: They were both set to be delivered this past weekend. Unfortunately the washer had a huge dent in it and we had to refuse delivery on it. We did get our dryer though and are just waiting for the new washer to come!

(Sorry it's so hard to see.. it's so damn dark in the basement! But it's the same black stainless LG like we have in the kitchen! Here is the set I purchased from Home Depot)

• Finish basement (big dreams here, but we would love to have a finished basement, or at least a semi-finished basement)
• Create a storage area for all decor: I would love to have storage shelves for all our decor to keep it organized
• Stockpile area: Sort of completed but I would love it to look a little more organized.

Big Interior House Ideas:

If we decide to stay here and make this our forever home we will definitely have to add some rooms on. We hope to have kids someday and if that is a possibly we will definitely be over capacity at this house! Even though we have three bedrooms I currently have all of my clothes in the guest room closet, clearly we won't be able to fit kids here too!

So here are the rooms/areas we will need to add on/renovate in order to make this our forever home.

• Garage: I would love to have a two car garage! This is a dream but definitely a possibility in the future.
• Master Suite: We would love to create a master suite with a bathroom and a huge master closet that we could both fit our clothes in. 
• Upstairs/ Bedrooms/ Bonus Room: I definitely think that adding another level onto our home would create a perfect area for future kids rooms and a bonus/playroom. This would be a huge renovation but one that I think would make the most impact.
• Dining Room: We don't have a dining table because we have no room for one. We would potentially knock down the wall between the living room and the office to create one. 
• Main floor laundry/ Mudroom: This would be a dream room off the garage. I would love to have the laundry on the main floor and would love to have a mudroom.
• Pantry: I would potentially put a pantry in the mudroom so it would be right off the kitchen and give us some more storage space.

So those are our big house renovation dreams right now. I know that other things can always come up  and we might need to do other house repairs and I don't think we will get all this done anytime soon. I am excited to get some of the projects done in the near future and will always share them with you here! 

Stay tuned for the exterior edition of this list which will be coming up next!