We moved back into our house August 4, when we returned from our vacation with the Layers to Deep Creek Lake.
While the house certainly wasn’t ‘done,’ it was done enough to live in, and I felt like the timing of our transition back home made sense. We left my in-laws’ house a week before our vacation, which I thought was critical for the success of the vacation, and returned to our house after two weeks away. It seemed like the most efficient way to move back in. Plus, it was so exciting!
However, this was our kitchen when we arrived:
Missing cabinets, no appliances, no water… It was like camping in our house! One of our countertop pieces was cut incorrectly, so it had to be re-done, which delayed the install of the prep sink and upper cabinet in that back corner on the right. No sinks mean no faucets, which means no water.
BUT! We had water in the rest of the house, plus a fridge and freezer in the basement (Blessings abound!), so we were able to survive quite well on coffee made in the upstairs bathroom, easy breakfasts, and takeout for a week. Honestly, I was just so excited to be back in my own house, cleaning and organizing, to even care!
Speaking of organizing…our closet was a project and a half! You can only search through bags and boxes strewn about the floor for so long.
Previously, our closet had been a dark cave with a very low ceiling; the contractors added the window (above) and raised the ceiling to follow the peak of the roof. It feels so spacious now, even though the footprint didn’t change.
Below, you can see the little nook (painted blue) that was part of our original closet, which got opened up just a little and will need to be re-trimmed.
It took a few days and some garment racks to get our closet functional again. This isn’t a permanent solution, but we’re thrilled to have gotten our dressers in the closet, which was one of our goals with the new space. Eventually we’d like to DIY or have a closet company come and design something for us with built-in storage, but that’s low on the totem pole in terms of remaining projects around the house.
About a week later, after finishing up the countertop and sink install, we got water in the kitchen!
As if running water wasn’t exciting enough, next came appliances!
Yay for double doors…too bad we don’t yet have proper stairs and a porch.
Here’s the appliance Andrew and I have been waiting all this time for: the Wolf range! We’ve had our hearts set on this stove since the very beginning of the project six years ago. It was, perhaps, the one item that never changed throughout the entire design process. We knew we wanted a Wolf, that we wanted gas, the 36-inch, six burner style with the red knobs. She did not disappoint.
The rest of the appliances are Bosch, and I’m thrilled with them. We (obviously) can’t afford to go high-end on everything, and I feel like Bosch is a nice mid-range brand with excellent products that I can feel pretty sure will last a long time and perform well. The dishwasher in particular gets high marks for being quiet, and after having lived with it now for a few months (reminder, I’m writing this in March 2025), I can attest that it is SHOCKINGLY QUIET. You can stand next to it and not even know it’s running.
Pretty soon, our kitchen turned into this:
Once I had my sinks and cabinets in place, I could FINALLY start unpacking all the kitchen stuff that had been boxed up in the basement. I mentioned we had mice down there, right? EVERYTHING had to get scrubbed, so for days it seemed all I did was wash dishes and lay them all out on beach towels all over the island.
About halfway through the project, we committed to turning our previous TV room into our new dining room. In this post, I mentioned how we took out one of our back windows to move a wall to make a bigger ‘mudroom’ area at the back door, which then led us to order new windows for the back wall. The new windows took about another month to arrive.
Meanwhile, Andrew started tiling our laundry room floor, which didn’t move but did get reconfigured.
It took a couple weeks of doing laundry at a friend’s house (thanks, Wendy!), but it was finally done and ready for our new stackable washer dryer.
Just like our closet, the laundry room is an eventual DIY for us, as we’d like some storage and shelving and a place to hang clothes in there.
Last but certainly not least, our ‘porch room’ might be the most transformed. What used to be an ‘outdoor but enclosed porch’ (a.k.a the dumping ground for shoes) has turned into a beautiful, functional room of our home. Right now, it’s a playroom for Maelle, but we see it as a fluid space that will evolve over time as she grows. It was important for me from the beginning to have a comfortable chair in there, and we’re still trying to find the right one since it’s in a small corner. The leather chair in the photo has since moved back up to the homeschool room.
Now that we’ve moved back in, I’ve been cleaning and organizing and trying to make sense of all our stuff!
I’m hoping we’ll be able to start tackling some of the smaller DIY projects around here more easily now that we live here again….although I’m trying to keep my expectations low since regular life is busy enough!
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