Now that drywall is back up and sanded down, we are ready to move onto flooring. So excited that our fixer upper is starting to look like a livable house again!

Wood Floors: We were blessed with some very cool original white oak parquet floors in our fixer upper. At first, Jason wasn’t sold on the idea of keeping them but these were one of things I wanted to keep from the original design of this house. This is a huge saving since they cover about 3000 sqft of the original floor plan. That is when Jason jumped on board with keeping them. They definitely need some love, but there is no way we can tear these up. All they need is some much needed sanding, some fill in pieces where needed, a cool tone brownish stain and they will be beautiful!

Tile: Two of our bathrooms were blessed with carpet. What contractor or designer ever thought that putting carpet in a bathroom is a great idea? SO GROSS – please stop doing it! Tile or wood is a must in these areas – always. I do tend to lean towards tiling bathrooms and I am pretty boring with my choices in these areas. I like clean colors and lines – timeless is what I always say to myself or designers when I am looking at samples. Everything I leaned towards are whites, grey and black. Boring, I know. Here are a few looks that I went…

Tile can also make a statement in a room. As I mentioned before, I normally tend to stray towards classic and clean tile choices that can withhold decorating changes but I did choose a couple of trendy chooses for our fixer upper. My trendy choices were for our laundry room and the mudroom.

I was able to find some very cool and very cost effective choices from Floor & Decor and Tile Shop. If you have never gone to Floor & Decor you are missing out. Everything is in stock and ready to take home with you that day and their selection was huge! If you head to Tile Shop in Tinley Park, ask for Laura. She was a tremendous help.

Find of the week:

Love ya, Lisa

I can’t believe how much trouble I’ve had picking out which countertops we wanted in our kitchen. I went to too many warehouses walking up and down isles looking at countless amount of slabs. Everyone has a preference when it comes to countertops. And let me tell you, there are a ton to choose from. Granite, Quartz, Quartzite, Marble, Dolomite, Limestone, Soapstone, Butcher Block and many more. Here is a cheat sheet I received at one warehouse on countertops surface comparisons. It was a great reference!

I definitely had a theme of what I liked. ANYTHING MARBLE! Why marble? Marble has so much movement in it and I love the uniqueness of each slab. It is so beautiful but not practical for a kitchen.

So what did we go with for our kitchen… Super White Calacatta Dolomite. A beautiful light grey and white coloring with movement. So fun and pretty. Here it is…

My suggestions to anyone who is looking to remodel their kitchen is to go directly to a natural stone warehouse and look at all of their slabs. Don’t waste your time looking at the small sample that your builder has on hand. It will look nothing like the actual slab you’ll receive. Also, DON’T look at pictures on the internet. The colors will be different than what your natural eye will see. Lastly, visit multiple warehouse. Each of them will have multiple color variations of each stone. Trust me, you’ll know right away what you like and dislike. 😉

We are getting so close to finally seeing our fixer upper come to vision. This entire week will be focused on drywall getting finished and a couple windows getting switched out in the basement. It was a beautiful site walking into our house this morning and seeing white walls everywhere! It is starting to look like a house again. 😍

Love ya, Lisa

Happy Belated Thanksgiving! We decided to take a family vacation to get some warmth and sun this Thanksgiving with Jason’s sister’s family and it was great. The Florida Keys did not disappoint – even with our kids tagging along for the trip.

Back to our fixer upper – Before we left, our contractor let us know he was finishing up with the electric on the main floor, continue to work on HVAC, new insulation installed and start on the drywall. I am super excited for drywall to go up. Our fixer upper is coming to life.

House Item Re-purposed: I’ve mentioned that I want to reuse some products from the original house and this is one I quickly did.

We are not using the current shutters on the house so why not use one for our holiday cards holder. The shutters are already painted a reddish color and I attached some winter foliage.

Love ya, Lisa

Moving right along… Now onto electric. One of the many things that is nice about doing a fixer upper, is that you can really make it your own. Has anyone moved into their house and went to turn on a light and right away hated how the configuration of the lights worked or wondered why is that light switch there to begin with. Jason and I have had this happened in multiple homes.

Now that we are more knowledgeable and know what we want, we took it to the next level. Jason and I walked around with our contractor and the electrician and decided where every light switch, can light, chandeliers, fan and outlets were going. Not only placement but how it each light switch was going to function. Somewhat overwhelming but kind of cool.

Do you remember me saying that I walked into a shit show after vacation with our ceiling all over the floor. Thank god it was like that. While walking into our kitchen and looking up we were able to view an amazing sight of our attic and roof line. Right away we knew we had to make a change and vault our kitchen ceiling. Slight change but a dramatic change. Super excited for this one!

Love ya, Lisa

Have you missed the updates? While Jason and I were on vacation the non-fun but extremely important stuff was being worked on – the plumbing. But first vacation photos…

While it was nice to take a week off from making decisions on our fixer upper, I kind of missed stopping by and seeing the progression. So, the first thing I did when we returned was head on over to see what got done. When I opened the door, it looked like a tornado went through the entire house. Majority of the ceiling was now all over the floor and I was able to look straight up into the attic. Did I panic? Not really – I hoped it was planned. Thank god, it was!

I continued to walk around the house to check out the plumbing. Jason and I decided to bring the 1950’s plumbing to 2019 standards. Our plumber also had to reconfigure all of our showers, bathroom sinks, move toilets, cap off old existing pipes that led to no where and install plumbing into our laundry room.

Moving right along… the plumbing is complete, we are moving onto electric. Which is the reason why our ceiling was all over the floor.

Love Ya, Lisa

Back in 1950, majority of homes didn’t have a separate powder room. There was a main bathroom that everyone shared and the sinks and tubs were very colorful. Teals, pinks and yellows were a “high fashion” look that was sought after. Not so much today.

Luckily, our fixer upper did have an extremely small powder room located between our kitchen and family room. During demo, Jason and I were discussing this room and the door with our contractor. I hated that the door opened into the hallway. The door would always have to be shut. Zero air flow going into this room. We were discussing options: pocket door, barn door or possibly moving the door. As we were all standing in our over-sized family room, the solution was right under our feet. Lets take some space from the family room to give to the bathroom. Viola! A bigger, but bite size powder room.

Love ya, Lisa

For those of you who read my first post, you know how much we fell in love with our backyard. It was the icing on the cake. I was able to envision many things taking place in our future backyard. One of them being family photos.

This past Sunday evening, I dragged (yes – I said dragged) my family out to our backyard to take some photos with my tripod and camera. We have gotten good with the 10 second timer feature 😉. Jason and the kids hate family photos! Since I have been the one taking our photos over the past three years, it seem to be less painful and not as much yelling since we go at our own pace and Jason doesn’t have to pay.

Here are some of my favorites…

I need to get a better photo editing program since I can only do the basics with mine. Any suggestions? The wrinkles are getting worse so I either need to get Botox or an better editing program to fix this issue 😂.

Love ya, Lisa

Onto the next step in our fixer upper – framing. Not a ton of framing was needed since my goal was more of taking down walls then putting walls up. Walls we added, we adjusted the size of the powder room. A much needed laundry room in the basement (more on that in a later post), but the biggest part of the framing took place in the Master Suite area. Sadly, I struggled the most with this entire area.

They say you have to give and take when you buy an old house and I had to do that with our bathroom and closet. Our last house had a huge Master Suite. Jason and I felt that there was wasted space but I loved my oversize closet and the idea of going too much smaller wasn’t an option. That was one thing that sold me on building our old house. Moving on since I sold that house rather quickly and it is all memories now. Let’s talk about our fixer upper!

Our contractor recommended that we demo the entire wing, which was a great idea. We couldn’t figure out an exact layout with all the walls up and not seeing the entire space available. Once everything was open, I took out blue painters tape and started to lay tape down. I started with building a hallway which leads into the Master Suite. My Mom gave us the idea of taking 4 feet off our living room for that hallway – Perfect! Then, I moved into the closet and marked off that space – Done. Lets move into the bathroom. We knew the size of the walk-in shower we wanted plus we were trying not to move the toilet since our floors are concrete (that is a huge expense to move). Blue tape down in those areas. We are not putting a bathtub in so all the left over space was for a vanity – Complete. At first, Jason and I wanted separate vanities since I didn’t want his stuff in my area and he didn’t want my stuff in his area but in a marriage you have to learn to share so now we are sharing a good size double sink vanity. Here is what it look like framed.

Onto the laundry room. We had to build our laundry room in our basement for two reasons. First, I wanted a good size room and not a laundry closet. Second, I wanted it to have access from the outside and I did not want it in our mudroom. We have a single car garage located on the lower level side of our house which has an entrance into the basement. This spot seemed like a reasonable choice.

So what’s next now. Boring plumbing and electrical work but now I get to pick out all the fun interior design stuff! Don’t worry, I’ll bring you along with me to all of my shopping.

Love ya, Lisa

I love to shop but shopping for windows are not fun!! Windows are one of those items in a house you take for granted until you have shitty windows.

We built our last house with a builder and they just put windows on our house. The only question that was asked were grilles or no grilles. During that build, Jason and I were 24ish, living in Vegas while building a semi-custom home in Mokena. So what does a girl do who has no idea about windows, I just let the sales lady pick them out for me. Let’s just say I rolled with the flow back then. Now, I am a little bit more wiser, pickier (yes Jason I admitted that I am picky) and concerned with the future value of our fixer upper.

Since our fixer upper was built in 1950 and still has the original casement windows on it, it is time to change them out. All of them. When I received my first quote, I wanted to vomit. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH WOOD WINDOWS COST! Lets just say they are fucking expensive. Well, it has to be done. My window buying tip to anyone who needs windows is to get multiple quotes and make sure you are comparing apples to apples. There are a ton of different type of windows out there and a lot of different companies. Be careful and do your homework.

So what did we decide… Since we are trying to preserve the farmhouse look of the house, we are going with double-hung, no grilles, wood windows. I decided on not having grilles on the windows for two reasons. The first was the outside color (black) and second is because of our view. We want to be able to see the view of the outside without any obstructions.

BTW, in a couple of days I will have a ton of old windows available for sale for crafting projects. Anyone interested?

Love ya! Lisa

Talk about a clean slate! Before I show you the photo of our blank canvas, let me take you on a quick walk thru of our potential master suite.

Jason and I first turned down the hallway which lead to the master bedroom and at first we were greeted with a groovy room from the 70’s. Let’s maybe call it a den. I’m sure the extreme orange and brown shag carpet and interesting salon style shutters were in style at some point but we had no words – just laughs.

After laughing and lots of jokes we decided to keep going and was greeted with two small closets. Now, most of you know I have a shopping problem – not Jason. These little closets will not do. Not even for Jason.

After the closets, we walked into the bedroom and looked out the windows and once again saw the view. AMAZING! But in the corner of the room we saw an iron spiral staircase. Right away we had to see where the staircase lead to. As we slowly walked down the stairs we came to an office. Jason does tend to work a lot at home, which has never bothered me, but the easy access to his office from the bedroom. PASS! Immediately, the staircase has to go. Are we going to reuse it? Possibly but my design brain isn’t there yet.

After being side tracked, we headed back up the stairs so we could find the master bathroom. To our surprise the bathroom was updated but it was the size of a powder room with no shower. At this point, we knew we had to demo the entire area, start with a big rectangle and design the space into three areas: walk-in closet, bedroom and a bathroom.

That is where we are today. A big open space and a lot of possibilities. Now it’s time to put pencil to graph paper and start designing.

Love ya, Lisa