The countdown is on and getting shorter to our much-anticipated home renovation project! Just a couple short weeks until it's go time. As you can imagine, I've spend many an hour designing our new (to us) house, and I just can't wait to show you the plans for each space and take you behind the scenes as the designs come to life!
My husband's parents, who currently live in the home, will be moving in with us in a couple of weeks prior to the start of our project and will actually be swapping homes with us going forward. That may sound odd if you aren't from rural Midwest, but as younger generations take over farming operations this isn't such an uncommon thing to happen. We will be moving just a few miles from our current home, to the home farm where my husband grew up. He'll be the fifth generation of his family that has lived on this century farm, and it's so special for us to be able to raise our girls as the sixth on this farm as well.
Timeline
Demo will start sometime around mid-January and shouldn't take more than a week as we aren't making many major structural changes. To save some cost, Neil and I will help with some of the easier demo tasks like scraping popcorn ceiling, taking down cabinets, removing wallpaper, doors + trim, and light fixtures, etc. We will be removing a large portion of the load-bearing wall that runs down the middle of the house, which we'll save for our contractor to take down for obvious reasons. Otherwise most of the demo work is fairly cosmetic and should go pretty quickly and easily.
After demo, mechanical work such as plumbing, electric, and gas line installation should be completed, and then it'll be time to put everything back together!
Flooring, painting, cabinetry, and tiling are all scheduled for the month of February, and if all goes as planned with no major delays or hiccups, we hope to move in sometime in the month of March. There's likely to be plenty of finishing touches trickling into the spring once we've moved all our stuff in, but we are hoping to be settled in and done with projects by the time fieldwork starts in the spring!
Design Process
This has been one of the most fun design projects, but also one the most challenging (and time-consuming!). As any designer would likely agree, it is so much more difficult to design your own house! I haven’t quite figured out why...I suspect it’s a combination of the perfectionist in me, plus the fact that I truly have an appreciation for so many different styles, colors, materials, etc., and browse beautiful products and materials for a living, so narrowing down selections for our own home proved to be quite a challenge! But of course a fun one.
Style
It took me several months to discover what our true design style was, believe it or not. At the beginning of the planning stages, the rustic, industrial style I designed was almost polar opposite from what we landed on for style of our renovation (modern + edgy). I thought since we would be living on a farm, a rustic farmhouse aesthetic would make the most sense, but after putting together some designs and just feeling ho-hum about them, I began realizing that our design aesthetic was really something different.
The summer I was really beginning to design this remodel, I traveled to Chicago as well as the Waco and Dallas, TX areas. By soaking in amazing architecture and character in the interiors of those places, I started picking up on common elements that my eye kept getting drawn to and started figuring out my true design style.
After coming home, I was so inspired that I totally redesigned everything from scratch. Out with the distressed, rustic, industrial details and in with more crisp, clean modern lines and materials. Instead of a color palette consisting of browns, creams, reds, and other warm and more traditional farmhouse colors, I created a more edgy palette of high-contract, cooler colors paired with a mostly black, white, and gray base.
We (ok let's be honest...mostly I, with constructive feedback from Neil) have been planning this remodel for a few years now, and I truly think it took that long to figure out all of the details in each space! But by tweaking and swapping and sometimes overhauling entire designs of rooms, we are going into this remodel with full confidence that we know exactly how we want this house to look, feel, and function.
Current Status
We have boxed up and moved as much as we could so far over to the new house to make room for our new roommates to move in for a few months (any tips on living with in-laws?) and are pretty much ready to rock as soon as the holiday season is wrapped up. We truly are looking forward to this special time in our family - and I'm crazy excited to get started and to bring you along with me!
Be watching for the next blog posts starting early January where I'm going to unveil all the design plans and some 'BEFORE' pictures for each space that's getting overhauled. Be sure you don't miss out on anything behind-the-scenes of this reno by following me on Facebook, Instagram and definitely get signed up for my email newsletter as I'll be sharing product sources and links of each room along the way. You'll see before, progress, and after pictures + video, and lots of behind-the-design action during the course of this project!