As much as I love our new home, it didn’t have everything on our wish list. Our realtor told us if you can find a house with 50% of what you want, you’re doing good. I think we did better than that!

Design wise, there’s a lot I want to change (are you really surprised??).  But my biggest dislike in our house that isn’t an easy fix has to be the front stairs. I hate how close the last step is to the front door. Logan’s biggest dislike is the visible headers in the living/dining room.

Both things we can fix, but at a high cost. So we’re living with them now and making changes to the house that are easier to tackle.

We knew we wanted to have a few things done pre-move-in to make things easier. The three things we decided to tackle were the floors downstairs, the texture on the walls, and the kitchen island removal.

The floors downstairs were real wood, but stained a high-gloss orangey color. We talked about replacing due to having dogs and wet kids traipsing through the house, but they were in great condition, so we opted for just sanding them down and re-staining.

Here’s what they looked like before:

There was also one bedroom downstairs that had a totally different pine flooring which we did take out and replace to match the rest of  the downstairs.

Since we were still living in North Carolina during the pre-reno, we had to choose a stain color via Facetime. My sister and contractor were patient though and after a last minute addition to the stain choices, we made a decision!

And here’s what they looked like after! We went with the shade Provincial on the floors and are very happy with how they turned out. Such a difference!

Next up was the kitchen island which was connected to the ceiling and needed to go. We had it removed and then the floors patched and stained to match the rest of the downstairs.

Before:

After:

And last, but certainly not least, the walls. We went back and forth a few times on whether or not to spend the money to have them smoothed, but I knew it had to be done. I’ve seen texture on walls before and then there was this:

Our contractor said I must not be from Florida because most walls here do have texture on them. But I assured him I was raised in Florida and had never seen texture so thick in all my life!  Did I mention it also covered the ceilings?!?  All I could imagine were the dust bunnies starting a band and hanging out on a rocky ledge (aka our walls) to play, while all the other dust bunnies gathered to listen on their own ledge. NOT HAPPENING! Not to mention the color on the walls had a sheen to it, further accentuating the texture.

So we paid the high price and had them smoothed down and I couldn’t be happier with our decision. Once the walls were smoothed, we painted them with SW Snowbound, in an eggshell finish. SO MUCH BETTER!

For our bedroom, I opted for a soft blue called SW Sleepy Blue on the walls and SW Languid Blue for the trim.

The previous owner loved farmhouse decor, so just about all of the light fixtures needed to be replaced. The contractors who smoothed the walls took down most of the lights, so we told them not to put them back up. Most of these sold on FB Marketplace in a flash!

And that’s it for the first round of renos! There’s so much more I can’t wait to tackle, but all in good time…and more money! 😜