our lake house renovation
This story is such an odd one to tell – and one I never intended to. Our lake house is just a tiny, old thing in the woods, but we LOVE it and it’s home. It was built in the 80s and hasn’t had much of anything besides paint in the way of upgrades. Unfortunately, practically the whole thing was covered in carpet (even the bathrooms – ew) and it was a very nasty shade of tan. Oh and everything else was tan/brown too – walls, toilets, vanities, countertops. We gave it our best, but there’s only so much you can do with paint. It never mattered much to us though because we spend so much of our time outside on the dock or the screened in porch while we’re there.
But my mom’s very favorite thing about Seb is how handy he is and when she realized what we were capable of doing, she decided she wanted to make some upgrades to the lake house. She wanted to start on the bathrooms – specifically the guest bath – with a new toilet and maybe a new vanity. Ever read the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie? If we were going to do some upgrades to the bathroom we might as well do the shower too and if we’re demoing the bathroom we might as well do the floors at the same time and if we’re doing floors in the bathroom then we might as well get flooring for the whole house and if we’re doing flooring throughout the house then we might was well get some new kitchen cabinets and if we’re getting new cabinets we might as well change the layout of the kitchen and if we’re changing the kitchen layout then we might as well rethink the layout in the living room. Oh and somewhere in there we decided to throw in the master bath for good measure. Y’all, I’m not kidding it was the greatest snowball/brainstorm of all time and LONG overdue. It’s going to be a brand-new house and I can’t wait! It already looks so much different than before we ripped up carpets (somehow that was just in January – where did the time go?).
I’m kicking myself for not getting before pictures because it’s literally going to be the greatest transformation of all time, but I never intended to put it on the blog because it was just a little bathroom upgrade. Now I can’t not share it, so I’ve included one peak at the old carpet, a few snaps after the carpet was gone, and a diagram of the previous layout.
You can see that the kitchen counters used to turn which created a footprint for the kitchen, but we’re losing that jut-out and instead running the cabinets all the way to the door to the porch. This really opens the space up to the living room which is great because we’re changing the seating plan there, too. We’ll also do floating shelves instead of upper cabinets since we’re adding more storage space below (and we don’t need much up there anyway).
As of right now, we’ve got flooring laid in about 75% of the house, one bathroom demo’d, and cabinets ready to set. Once we realized we’d be moving and needing to put time into our new house, we started working as fast as possible on the lake. Plus, we want to be able to enjoy it once it’s warm. Well, at least I do. Seb would rather have a project to do than spend time in the sun. He’d also rather have veggies as a side than french fries, so I think we can all agree he’s in the minority 😉
Here’s a look at what we’ve done so far:
Ripped up carpet
Demo’d kitchen
Demo’d guest bath
Replaced subfloors in guest bath
Flooring laid in living room, most of kitchen, and all bedrooms
Here’s what’s left to do:
Finish flooring in kitchen + laundry
Demo master bath
Floor both bathrooms
Floor closets
Trim out all floors
Install countertops
Paint kitchen + add shelves
Install vanities + toilets
Maybe that seems like a lot, but I feel like it will only take us a few more weekends for the bulk of it to get finished. We can always finish up things like trim, closet flooring, etc. when we have spare time over the summer. And we’re hiring out the installation of new showers because ain’t nobody got time or patience for that. The amount of change we’re seeing for the money is amazing and I can’t wait to show off the finished product! Get ready!
