Here's a little look at the repairs/renovations and rearranging done 2020 and 2021.
As Covid hit and people were home more, home improvement projects were pretty common. Stores like Home Depot and Lowes were always crazy busy. We ended up with some pandemic projects, but the catalyst was Callahan, not Covid ...
Callahan was getting married. This meant he was moving out. As he packed up his room (he and Kate had bought a cute little house in Kearns), he took his big basketball frame (a Copper Hills basketball jersey given to him when he graduated) off the wall, there was a big black mold spot, and water damage that had been hidden. The kitchen sink was right above, and one of the pipes had sprung a large leak. Grayson ripped out the all the yucky drywall, repaired the pipe and made sure it got dried out and disinfected.
You are likely familiar with the children's story "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" right? Home improvement projects are like that. You start with one thing, and it leads to another (check out "A Plethora of Projects and a Pair of Parodies" on the Westra blog). The drywall was replaced, and then the wall would need paint. While just the one wall needed to be painted, why not paint the whole room? If we are hiring painters, let's have them do the entire basement. Where do you stop painting? Best to just continue all the way upstairs, right? With the fresh paint, the old carpet looks awful, so let's look into new carpet as well. Then how about some new lights (handy to have a couple electricians in the family!)
Keaton said goodbye to his room upstairs, and moved into Callahan's old bedroom. New carpet and paint, and it's cooler, more private, completely dark with new curtains (the upstairs room was never completely dark). His bulletin board made the move, but wasn't recreated with everything on it, so I grabbed a picture to preserve it as it had been. The upstairs room became the "school" room. We pulled the corner desk out of storage for Cooper, and pulled Colton's desk in too. Double desks, and plenty of dedicated school space, which was a good thing, as both boys were online at this point.
Prepping everything for paint and carpet was a lot of work. All the walls needed to be bare for paint, all the floors for carpet. The gym became the storage spot (no paint or carpet in there) for lots of things, and it was a time to purge. Scrapbooking supplies, books, toys, games, clothes ... we ended up replacing Colton's desk for something smaller, getting rid of the old entertainment unit, the basketball shot game. Offered some thing to friends, neighbors, had to make appointments for DI donation drop-offs (and sometimes they were booked out for weeks!)
While we were switching things up, Colton's old twin bed got shipped out and he got a full, Cooper a queen. Keaton had purchased his own "purple" mattress a while back. We ended up moving the dresser from Coop's room to Colton's, so while Colton stayed put, there was some rearranging and a bit of a new feel for him as well. You can check out the great Room Rearrange of 2017 to get a glimpse of some of the past presentations and purges!.You can even look back to when the front room was the Noah Nursery when the boys were babies. The boys keep growing up, and things keep changing.
Upstairs, we didn't do any new flooring (yet), but did have the walls and the ceiling painted in the kitchen, front room, school room and hallway. So again, everything had to be pulled off the walls, all the furniture moved to the center of the room. My den didn't get any paint, but moving Colton's desk out of it into the new "school" room let me rearrange and set up a sewing spot. The office switch set-up from 2017 has been working out well.
I also repositioned our recycling (that took some getting used to as we'd go to the old spot out of habit), and made the coat closet a "cleaning closet" (and some extra storage for Grayson's gadgets). There was an old intercom system and phone plug that I just took off and covered up with cute Etsy crafts (the gadget there is a "Brilliant" light switch - high tech stuff, given to Gray as a perk of the job). Got a new, BIG clock (we'd lost our cute little apple clock in the great earthquake of March2020). We'd had a few big pictures/art around... they haven't made it back on the walls yet, not sure if they will.
Downstairs ...
We had the ping pong table ... a birthday gift for me back in 2011. It's gotten a lot of use, off and on, over the years. It could be folded up, as could the basketball shot game (Christmas 2019). We kept the ping pong table, but the basketball shot was given away. There was some talk of getting rid of the arcade games, but they are unique. The old entertainment center ... it was gone. We had a little miscommunication and both Grayson and Keaton ordered a new set-up, and both were delivered on the same day, about an hour apart. I was a bit confused. We were able to return one. We hadn't really planned on upgrading the "video game" television, but the upstairs tv died. We bought a replacement while contacting the company, who ended up replacing the defective one, which left us with an extra. The basement room is much less cluttered now. We debated some sort of seating, but as ping pong has been happening a lot, we simply got two wheeled chairs that can be moved out of the way when anyone wants to play (ping pong that is, the chairs wheeled back in when one wants to play Xbox or Playstation). It was pretty funny how many ping pong balls we found stuck behind the entertainment center when we moved it.
Paint and carpet weren't the only upgrades ...
When Cal and Kate got married, I asked if they'd be interested in our washer/dryer set rather than buying some themselves. Being a frugal couple, they were. We got a brand new set. Our fridge (the old one we moved downstairs when we got a new one for the kitchen) wasn't working well, but we'd grown dependent on the extra space - so new fridge for the basement. Not pictured ... but we replaced the microwave as well. We weren't sure how long a repair would take (with Covid and supply chain issues) - Grayson was able to get a new one and Keaton installed it. We did need to have the dishwasher repaired (October 2020, and the oven early in 2022, dang appliances!) At the end of 2021, we noticed our water heater was leaking. We were able to get that replaced quickly (perks of Grayson being in the construction business with lots of connections). My elliptical had issues, and we looked at new ones, but ended up finding the needed part and Grayson got it up and running again.
Grayson's garage got new garage door openers ... snazzy ones without the box on the garage ceiling.
That's a pretty complete recap of the renovations, rearranging and repairs.
Next up? The pantry ...
No comments:
Post a Comment