Our Sixth House-iversary ~ Currently, Kelsie

Six years! There's no way we could have lived in our house for that long already, right?! Crazy to look back and see us grow and change from a couple of newlyweds to an almost family of four! This little house has been so good to us, and it has been such a joy truly making it ours. This year we are in the middle of tackling and planning a few home projects. Check out all that we're up to and all that we've done in the past six years in our sweet home!

The Deck/Patio Remodel

One of the things we've been wanting to tackle for a while now is re-doing our deck. We love that it's multiple levels and that we can enjoy being up on the deck or underneath it, hanging out under our outdoor lights. A couple of wooden support beams on the bottom level have been rotting out for a while now, and we've also had some cracked concrete down there, so we have been planning to fix that. We also previously had a step up off of the concrete onto a raised wooden level, and we were tired of the water sitting there and stripping off the stain on the wooden boards. So what began as an easy fix quickly turned into a pretty large project!

Over the summer, my dad and Aaron stripped all of the wooden boards off of the bottom level, broke up the old concrete, and made it a level area. They poured two separate concrete slabs, making it all one level now. They also built new posts, and are working on finishing the last two beams on the bottom level. Like most projects, one thing led to another new project, so we also had to strip off rotted siding on the house, and then replace all of that as well. Next up is to paint the new siding to match our house, and then move on to replacing new boards up on the top level of our deck (which has been down for the count this summer because it's been resting on temporary support beams). After that, we'll stain the new boards and touch everything up to match our original color. It is definitely still a work in progress, and it has taken longer than we planned because life gets busy, but it already looks so much better and I know that we will love the final result.

Eli's New Big Boy Room

Our other soon to be tackled project is creating a new "big boy" room for Eli. With our gender neutral nursery all done and ready to go, we plan to just move Eli over and then use the nursery again when the new baby comes in January. Eli will just move into the full bed that we have in our third upstairs bedroom, which is currently our "guest room" and the room that we used for Airbnb guests for three years. We plan to remove the wood trim, paint, replace with new white trim (which will match the new white trim in our recently remodeled master bedroom), and then hang up some new decor that is so totally Eli.

BEFORE:

We're hoping to get this done and ready around Thanksgiving Break or so, so that we can get Eli transitioned out of his crib and into his big boy bed. I'm a little nervous about it, but I know that he will probably be really excited and love his new freedom once he gets used to it. I also know we aren't buying another crib, so there's that! I'm thinking of a very pale gray/white color for the walls, and then accenting with navy, white, gold, and browns. We've already got some Royals decor and Aaron also painted a bulldozer for the room, so we've got a good amount of the decor already. We'll need to find a dresser, and I may switch out bookshelves, since the huge one in there isn't something I'd love to have within reach of our little climber. I'm excited to get it all finished and to share it with you all in the coming months!

For all of the other home decor projects we've tackled over the years, and for a little trip down memory lane, here are photos of years one through five in our house. You can also click the links below to take you to the posts from previous years where I shared the changes that we made to make our house a home!