updating the driveway

We had a 3-day weekend for Easter and nice weather so it was a win win situation to do some yard work! The previous weekend we spent raking all of the dead leaves into bags, which we realized was not a good idea. We found out that our neighborhood will come to pick up the leaves if you leave them in a pile in front of your yard. So we will be dumping them next for next Monday's pickup! The weather cooperated for the most part with some showers in the middle of the day. You can see by the bright sunny skies to the gray hues it turned later. Poor Liam in the rain, this is why he's so awesome.

We also found out that our truck needs a real hitch.
The former owners, or even the ones before them, attached the hitch to the bumper, which we bent last weekend when we were trailering the stump grinder. We took it to our local shop and it was recommended not to trailer because our bumper would be ripped off! Oh god. So we were able to get the help of friends with trucks to trailer stuff for us. It's so nice to have friends!

Before it looked like the pseudo driveway there, we had a pine tree and two bushes that created our driveway. You can get a glimpse of it here from when we started the renovations. Whenever it rained, we had a huge mud pile and the truck would get stuck. We went from 1-car to 2-car mud pit. So we wanted to make it better and here we are with this past weekend!

Now we have a driveway!
Semi finished. I saw semi because we need more rocks to have it completely flush with the sidewalk. Also, the yard is now in shambles with soil and rocks scattered throughout. This week it will rain and we will be gone for the weekend in New Jersey. The last few days, Liam has been fixing the shed roof, which was leaking. Liam was enjoying all the heavy equipment he got to use during this excavating. Look at how different it is! So much of our greenery removed to clean it all up. I wish I had a better picture of the house before we did all of the removals.

I love being able to park our cars here without sinking into the mud. We also have a large driveway on the other side of the house where his dad parks and we park our other car. Yes, we have 3 vehicles, sedan, SUV, and a truck- we're all set! I can not wait until we clean up the grass and put some surroundings around the driveway and create garden beds.

Projects on top of projects on top of more projects now that the weather is getting nicer! Yay for moving toward completion! From anyone who has done home renovations, it's never complete haha.

the kitchen! reveal day

If you have been reading for the last few weeks (or months), we have been renovating our kitchen and we are about 97% complete. The important thing is that I can now cook in my kitchen! I have cooked almost everyday and I absolutely love it. I love my sink, my butcher block countertops, and my IKEA island. Also, the gas stove is always a plus.

But I'm sure you don't care much about my cooking and want to see the final product! I'm learning how to use my camera better and taking photos of the house, one day I'll be as good as Chris Loves Julia and Yellow Brick Home. For now, let's get started:

There are a few cosmetic things we need to finish up but right now things are fully functioning in order for us to cook and that's what really matters. The blue tape resembles where we are going to build our shelves in the future. There will be two sets of shelves but not exactly where the tape is showing it. We're too lazy to take the tape down and we will revisit this in the spring time when it's warmer out.

We plan on keeping the holiday cards up for a while, we really enjoy seeing all of our friends on the fridge. We have some work to do on placement of things but it will come together when we have the open shelves. More shelves will go along the wall by the stove and we want to hang some artwork as well (by "we," I really mean me).

It looks fantastic. It's  exactly what my heart dreamed! The only thing I want right now I know I  won't get rigtht away is the subway tile backsplash. We are in the middle of deciding on a matte or glossy finish tile, we received a whole case of matte finished tile for free, it won't cover everything so we would need to buy more or buy everything in the glossy finish. It's 22 cents a tile so it's not out of budget but mostly free tiles is difficult to pass up... not sure what the verdict will be!

I love my farm house sink, it's so large and clean and beautiful. Most people see the sink and just love it too. How could you not? The knobs go perfectly with everything too, my modern look. The soft closing drawers are the special touch, the cherry on top honestly.


We are both so so so happy with how it turned out. Especially because we built it. WE BUILT A KITCHEN. From this to now. I love it. The proud feeling of this kitchen is going to last for so long and thanks to everyone who rooted for us while we went through it. I am going to go sit at my island to meal plan and stare the hard work we accomplished.

moving along: kitchen

It has been almost a month since we last updated about how we were doing on the kitchen and it has been a steady progression. Those fixer upper shows never show you how difficult it is to plan and get over those hurdles. I understand now why people outsource and hire contractors to mud and sand drywall- it's the worst.

We decided this past weekend we would take the time to really prep and get a lot done. And guess what? We did! Liam was putting mud on the walls all last week to prep for sanding, which by the way is THE WORST. Like really the worst part about renovating is the sanding and how much dust it creates. We were smart and responsible this time, we had respirators so we wouldn't be breathing in the dust and put Fifa downstairs with his dad so she wouldn't be exposed. The masks were on point! I could breathe! Liam still needs goggles, but he's stubborn.

Thanks orbital sander for helping us out. Friday night we started around 9pm and finished around 3am, exhausted. I followed him around vacuuming with the ShopVac to try and save us from some of the dust.

Saturday, we primed the walls. Sunday we did a second coat in the morning and then painted! The ceiling and the walls! You can notice the wall has a different shade of white, we decided not to paint behind the cabinets because it was more work and more paint so we stopped where the cabinets would be. It is SO bright here! The lights bounce light off of these walls and I'm so excited for it to come together. The color we used was Distant Gray by Benjamin Moore but we color matched it with Home Depot's BEHR.

The room is so bright!
I can't wait until we can see some of the cabinetry. We still need to figure out what to do with those beams and what/how to wrap them, also what type of wood and where to get it for our shelves. I need to order the drawer pulls and a shade for the window, with all the big things happening I keep forgetting about all of the finishing touches.

Next weekend we start assembling and mounting the cabinets! I can't wait!! We almost have a kitchen guys and I can't wait to finally cook in it. No more bagels and cereal for dinner! But thanks to all of our friends who feed us and let us use their kitchens as our own :)

warming up the kitchen

It's hard to believe we're almost there! Almost there meaning we almost have walls up in the kitchen, not having a fully functioning kitchen; don't get too excited everyone. Liam keeps reassuring me that it's going to look beautiful, I know it will but sometimes it gets hard living without a kitchen! Two and a half months with only a microwave and a toaster oven, I can't wait. Can you say cereal and pizza rolls for dinner? We will not be going out to eat for a long time when this is all completed.

We put up insulation in the floor, walls, and ceiling to keep us warm and cozy in this fluctuating Fall. Seventy degrees one day, 27 the next.

See that beam? It's for looks, no real structural need for it. If you look below, we have another one that actually is helping to hold up some of the floor joists. It was not a load bearing wall but we did it as an extra for peace of mind, so then we mirrored it on the other side. We will wrap that in some nice wood and stain it. It should look like these awesome wood beams!

We insulated by the bathroom wall here and closed off that window where it used to be apart of the bathroom. Lots and lots of insulation in order to keep that heat in during these crazy New York winters, I am hoping my second NY winter is as easy as my first. I don't think I will get that lucky again.

Now, the stairs!

It's so open! We are deciding on stair rails for the space and yes, it can lead to heating the downstairs and upstairs but it is so much more open. It looks so much better than before when it was an awkward door leading who knows where. We have made it more practical and better on the eyes!

This is what it was before:

We are in the process of putting up the drywall right now, by the end of the weekend we should have mud up! It will take time to dry so during the week the mudding and sanding process can begin! We are moving along quite nicely with a timeline of December. The next two weekends we will be in NJ for a Rutgers vs. Penn State game and Thanksgiving! YAY!

planning the kitchen

I felt like Joanna Gaines when we were planning the layouts of our house, except I didn't have the fancy 3D layouts she did. I had Excel, of course not to scale but that's not the point. Above shows the layout of our bathroom and kitchen before we started demo in September. It was a small kitchen that was engulfed in metal cabinets and the bathroom was bigger than what we needed.

Most of the planning has been on our toes planning. We tear down a wall and think "hey! we should do this instead! We planned made the bathroom smaller so the kitchen could be wider, we removed the hallway closet that was never used, and tore down the wall to the third floor to create a more open space. The bathroom off of the kitchen isn't the ideal but with what we have right now, it works and it's so pretty!

Now this showcases what we have planned for our kitchen:

It's a little bit bigger AND it has a place for us to eat at the IKEA island that I have wanted for so long! We will be using the bar stools I bought for my old apartment, which is great because it will be able to slide underneath when we're not using it. I bought two hanging globes to sit over it for extra lighting and we added five recessed lights around the ceiling. One sconce will sit over the farm house double-bay sink. All of the cabinets are pull drawers so that we are able to see everything inside them.

The fridge will be new and we moved the stove to the opposite wall. The microwave is recessed into a cabinet next to the fridge, hopefully it will also be white but clean looking! In order to save money we opted out of upper cabinets and decided to do all open shelving. It keeps it more open and clean, as well as allowing for less clutter.

As for the end of this weekend, we ripped up the remaining subfloor and put some new stuff down. Liam wired all of the recessed lighting and I was so excited! I made sure to FaceTime my mom to show her, that's how excited I was to see it! This kitchen is going to be beautiful and I can't wait to show it all to you! Have a good Sunday night everyone, I will be plopped in front of the TV watching my Cowboys!

kitchen mood board

We have been on a short break from getting the kitchen redone, six weeks to do the bathroom and move took a lot of energy from us both, but since it was critical to us living there, we pushed ourselves. Now, as much as I love cooking and a great kitchen, we both needed a break. So the past couple of nights Liam has been catching up on school, we've gotten to sit down and watch TV on the couch together, and go to sleep between the normal hours of 10pm-12am.

The past few nights we have been trying to figure out what we want in the kitchen and what we don't want. We, of course, have a differing of opinions but I let him have his bronze everything in the bathroom so now it's my turn (although there were bronze drawer pulls at Lowe's I liked, oops). We created a mood board for the bathroom, so we had to do one for the kitchen! All of the kitchen cabinets, countertop, sink, and faucet have been picked up from IKEA, Sheila helped us with that trip and all of those boxes have been patiently waiting in the storage unit. This gives you an idea of the direction we plan on going towards.

The kitchen isn't huge, we gained some space by moving the bathroom wall over to make the kitchen large, something that worked in my favor! We are going with a very bright white kitchen, a lot of what is on my Pinterest board. I love the modern look of open wood shelves, white cabinets, and butcher block counter tops. It has been my dream kitchen to do butcher block with a subway tile backsplash. Liam has some experience with laying the LVT so this will be another experience! We made sure last night that I had the ability to reach the cabinets, but we are still disagreeing on the where and type of some of the shelving. Most of our appliances are white, if we could have gotten them stainless, I would have but it was not in the budget and we already had white appliances.

Decent sized kitchen island with stool so we have somewhere to eat and Liam can still do homework while I cook us up something nice! Hanging globe lights with recessed lighting and hopefully a chalkboard menu so I can see what we want for the week :) Let's hope this kitchen looks as good as it does in my head!

Have a great weekend everyone!

we built a bathroom

Guys! I know you have been waiting for this moment for a long time because guess what? I have been waiting a longer more painful time for it to come together. Are we finished? Not quite yet, but we have a working toilet, bathtub, lights!

Our appliances arrived on Friday, unfortunately (but actually fortunate) there was no stacking kit for the washer-dryer so we could not bring it upstairs. This turned out to be okay since we were not really ready for it yet with no floor trim and no caulk on the tile. I was really hoping for a completed bathroom but I will take the working toilet, we can wake up in the middle of the night and not have to walk outside to his dad's apartment to use the bathroom. Also, if I had to go, it meant he had to wake up because I was not going downstairs alone at 2am! He loves me.

Now the walls, the walls [enter heart emoji face].

Liam was a bit skeptical on my color choice since it sounded dark. Black Pepper, but I was pretty confident that it would look great... and it does! It's so crisp and beautiful, we have beautiful walls in our new bathroom. Look at it, see how pretty they look.

Okay, so there's the walls, let's move on to the floors [enter double heart emoji face].

It is sooooooo pretty! You know it's pretty when someone mistakes it for real ceramic marble tile. Liam's stepdad came to check out everything when we were about to install the tile he said we could not use the hole saw because it would crack the tile! Surprised? It's luxury vinyl tile! It's grout-able and so so nice looking. We are stoked with how it came out and could not be happier with the choice we made.

Can you guys believe how much we have accomplished in five weeks? This makes me so happy! It almost makes up for how terrible Rutgers did this past weekend, it definitely makes it worth me not driving home to see us get demolished. Well, we're close and we're so happy. Liam installed LVT and a door for the first time this weekend so he's patting himself on the back. I built our TV stand and we now have cable so I can go back to watching football and my dream induced HGTV.

As you can see below, we are almost at our finished product. The empty space by the window is where the washer and dryer will go and we have to think about some storage next to the window for various laundry-bathroom items. How pretty does that floor look with grout in it? SO PRETTY. Oh yes, funny story: that hole for the dryer vent? Liam had updated it yesterday because I told him I was hearing noises in the bathroom (I was scared to go in there) and he thought I was crazy (still does). But when I heard it again he went into the bathroom and a bird as trying to get into the house! So he changed the vent trap, now it won't happen, phew!

I showered at my own place this morning! HOORAY! We need to hang the mirror, add a wall heater, update the light fixture, and reconfigure the plumbing to the vanity. We can't use the vanity yet, but that isn't as critical as the toilet and shower. The Project Manager last night wanted nothing to do with helping out.

Have a great week everyone!

reno week 5

Friday will be the five week mark for this renovation and although we have done a great job, we have not completed the bathroom. We are a little harder on ourselves than other people because everyone raves about how much we have accomplished and all we can see is how far behind we are in our timeline. As things got busier, we stopped using the timeline.

When we sit down and really think about what we've accomplished in the last five weeks, it is A LOT. Yes, we did not complete the bathroom before I moved in, but what did we accomplish?

1. Moved all of my things into storage while renovating
2. Cleaned my apartment (while shedding a few tears of exhaustion)
3. Tore down a bathroom and partially a kitchen down to the studs
4. Removed all the debris and excess junk
5. Added new plumbing
6. Updated the electrical
7. Painted two bedrooms
8. Put in new subfloor and insulation
9. Built a new wall, drywall, and mudded
10. Not killing each other

Yup, #10 is important. Liam is much more level headed than I am. We hit a lot of bumps in the road and roadblock. We visited Home Depot and Lowes at a minimum 30 times in the last five weeks. Thirty is probably a generous number, it was probably way more. The last photos showed how we finally built a wall, put insulation and a bathtub, and insulation. Welcome to what we have this week:





Look! It's ready for paint!

Soon, it will be painted ceilings and walls, than a floor! We have many more steps to go through but we're almost there. As one of my friends stated, so close, yet so far away. If you're wondering where we shower and use the bathroom because obvious we don't have one, his dad's apartment works downstairs and I have awesome friends who let me shower at their houses so I don't smell when I come to work.

It is going to be a very beautiful bathroom, it will be the best bathroom we have ever used since we built it. For me, that's a big deal. I built this! Really Liam built it and I supervised handing him tools, but WE BUILT THIS!


This is the project manager who keeps us in line when we get off track. She runs a tight shift.

reno update: bathroom progress

The weekend has passed and we still do not have a working bathroom.
We have to move into the apartment by Friday and we are not done but I am not freaking out (yet) because we busted our butts working this weekend. My feet hurt, my back is sore, and my shoulders can barely lift over my head. Who needs the gym when you have home renovations?

We worked from Friday to Sunday. All. Day. Long.
Friday was a 1am night, Saturday 4am, and Sunday 2am, plus we still had to get up for work this morning so when we say we're struggling, we're struggling. We are riding around on the struggle bus. It is so refreshing? Not sure if refreshing is the word for this but it is so comforting to have him by my side through all of this renovations. Liam is my stress ball and tells me it's going to be okay when sometimes I know he's not sure either. He is a work horse and knows so much more than I would have ever known.

I wish I could capture the photos in a better quality, at the moment we have been using my iPhone to take all of the pictures because it is the easiest and least expensive. My DSLR is too sensitive to dust so we don't want to expose it to the demo environment.

Thanks to everyone who has been following along, cheering us on, helping us with painting/plumbing/building, bringing us energy through ice  cream, and all the good vibes you're sending. Now here's the good stuff:

We had no floor, no wall, no anything.
We now have insulated floors, sub floors, a new wall, and insulation in the walls! Guess what? I installed that insulation!! Yup, little ol' me! Liam told me how to put it into the wall with staples, not that difficult and I went at it! You can't imagine how excited I am to say that I did that for us! Liam built the wall, pretty proud of him for that but look at my insulation!

Next up: dry wall and another laundry list of stuff we won't talk about right now.

reno update: what's going on?

We are one week away from move in day and I am sure you are all wondering, so how is it going? You are thinking we are moving my things into storage (two spiders were spotted and destroyed) and getting ready to put the finishing touches on the bathroom. The paint is done and everything is going smoothly, the floors have been picked and everything is wonderful.

You guys think so highly of us. Thank you.

If this is the image you had in your head, please do not be surprised when I explain that the house still looks like this:



And we are nowhere near being done with the bathroom, the essential part of moving into the house. There are bumps in the road, you know: life, work, school, life, travel. It has not been easy. I know everyone thought we were doing great and we were at the beginning but so many unforeseen things happen and we don't have a Chip or a Joanna to say "hey, can you shove out $3,000 more to fix this and don't worry, we have all the resources we need to get it done." This renovation has crushed my HGTV dreams and made them more realistic.


This also happened:



No worries, everyone is okay, he has a busted lip but it's fine. If my tiny little mom can fall through a ceiling and be okay, I am sure a guy like Liam can also be alright. The board he was holding actually caught him from falling through the ceiling, just put a huge hole in his dad's new apartment.


This past weekend we drove Sheila down to New Jersey for a football game and to pick up our IKEA kitchen cabinets! We made it all the way there and back with no problems until it started to rain 30 minutes from home. No problems though, everything made it back fairly dry.

Today is crunch day with Liam, myself, his mom, and stepdad helping finish the subfloor, possibly put up the walls and drywall, dump some stuff, and pack some stuff. It's going to be a LONG weekend but hopefully very productive!

choosing a paint color

Part of this whole DIY experience has been new to me.
Liam is a much more experienced DIYer since he has the two homes he has been working on for the past few years. My experience is followed by watching HGTV and my mom do things around our house in New Jersey. She would ask and say, you should learn this and I would casually wave her off like yeah yeah, I will. Spoiler alert: I never did. She drove with me four hours away when I moved here to help me put my IKEA furniture together (which I can do alone but would never want to) and to put up my curtain rods (this is something I could can not do). That is a whole different subject though, I'll learn it now that I've openly said it I am sure Liam will make me do it.

Anywayssss, we are here to talk about how we I decided on the new paint colors for the bedroom and spare bedroom/living room. Many people think we are trying to renovate the entire house, for the record we are not. We are only renovating the 1) bathroom, 2) kitchen, 3) stairwell, and eventually 4) the real living room area. The bedrooms have been completed, except for one detail I could not live with and that would be: the paint colors. He painted them last winter, I remember this because we had first started talking and he said he was painting his house. He had sent me photos of the said rooms and what the colors looked like, I even remember him coming out to a trivia night in the middle of painting because he wanted to hang out with me. It did not occur to me until I saw the colors in person that they were very, how do I put it? Nursery-like-colors. I refer to them as canary yellow and baby boy blue.

When I decided on paint colors it was after extensive Pinterest-ing, blog reading, and most importantly listening to podcasts. The Chris Loves Julia podcast is by far my favorite DIY thing to listen to, I will listen to episodes 2 or 3 times to remember everything and, it's just enjoyable to me. Episode 16: I Am On A Drug, It's Called Paint Sheen was a learning experience for both Liam and me so it was great to listen to together. This is how I chose the living room color, I loved how it looked in her photos and decided it was the one. Now this is not how they say you should choose because editing pictures, furniture, undertones, etc. it can all be different but it turned out great for us. The second color for the bedroom, I chose based on the woods and colors that would go best with this, Google was my friend here and that is how I decided (again, not always recommended).


The spare/living room:

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Color: color matched to Benjamin Moore Hazy Skies at Home Depot
Side note: that patch used to be a heater we removed because it was ugly and probably not functional. I have not repainted over that spot yet, work in progress.


The bedroom:

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Color: color matched to Benjamin Moore Gray Wisp at Home Depot


We have decided on the bathroom paint color, but still need the hallway/kitchen color. I like neutral grays if you haven't noticed already. I think I like the idea of pops of color with neutral walls, easier to match I think.

bathroom mood board

1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7

I like moodboards.

They show you ideas of what you want in a room and you can see if everything actually flows together. I never thought my Pinterest board would be full of different rooms and actually trying to piece them together, but here we are today. If you haven't noticed yet, I will continue to be surprised at the dilemma we are in and the renovations we have decided to undertake ourselves. If you don't like it, you might want to stop reading now! Or don't because I like people being nosy in my life or being interested in it.

When I showed this mood board to my friend K, she mentioned how it was very white. It's true, I love white done right. All of my dream bloggers do white and I am envious of how good they are at designing it all. So instead of doing it all white, I decided I wanted darker walls to contrast everything going on. Benjamin Moore Black Pepper. Thank you Young House Love for the inspiration of color because I don't think I would ever choose a dark color like Black Pepper. When you see photos, it is more of a dark blue but I still like it.

One added pop of color will be plants. Plants. Plants. Plants! I want the house to have plants to help clean the air and bring some natural elements into the space. I can not guarantee that these plants will last longer than a few months (who am I kidding, weeks), but I do still want some of these. String of pearl, snake plants, pothos plants, so many decision green thumbs!

Also, a bathmat. I want colors in it. I have not decided what rugs or light fixtures. I open the door in Pinterest and design blogs and I get sucked in to the point where I forget what I was looking for in the first place. It's a black whole of inspiration or distraction, whicheer you see fit.

Anyways, we are going to enjoy our renovation-free weekend. We are headed to New Jersey this weekend with Sheila, her first long trip. We will be picking up the cabinets, counter tops, and sink at IKEA this weekend. YAY! One step closer to mini-dream kitchen.

reno update: part 1

We started demoing Friday, September 2nd.


It has now been almost two full week and it looks COMPLETELY different. By completely different, I mean we gutted everything and it looks dark and dirty. I can see it though! Through my HGTV-Chip-and-Joanna-Gaines-Property-Brothers eyes! It will be worth it in the end when I am no longer wearing a respirator mask to stand in the kitchen and bathroom. We have done all the demolition ourselves and plan on putting it back together ourselves with a little help from our friends (I hope that tune is now stuck in your head like it is in mine). I am sure a lot of my friends are thinking, Sammy? No way she is doing any of this hands on demo stuff. I AM!

We are doing the kitchen, bathroom, stairs, and sometime in the future the main living area. No one can believe we are doing it all ourselves, everyone says does he know what he’s doing? Yes, yes he does. I am dating a handy man! It is exciting since this renovation will probably cost us $10,000 without labor, we are saving a ton of money which sounds strange when I say we’re spending $10k.

Enough with the boring stuff, I know you’re only here to see the actual before and after pictures so I’ll get right to it:

The kitchen is hideous with its cream colored metal cabinets and white ceramic sink. The layout is awkward, the fridge is opposite of the window wall and was too big for the space so a lot needs to be done to make this my "dream kitchen." So we got rid of it all. There were definitely mice some time in the past because when we took the cabinets down there was mouse poop. Although, we have recently seen some and I have a strict no mouse policy so we need to get a handle on that situation!







Bathroom and laundry in one room is not so terrible, but when it looks like it does here, it's pretty terrible. The tub is old and stained, as well as the toilet. The spare cabinets are also metal cabinets. We gutted it all and decided not to reuse any of it.





First round of demolition. Large items out of the room than flooring and tile.






We're making progress and we have about two weeks to finish the bathroom before I have to move out of my apartment so let the fun begin guys! If you want to come over and help you are more than welcome to visit. It also looks completely different from these moments and pictures but time is valuable and I'll continue to update!