Alphabet 2020: N and O

I have missed a couple of weeks of my Alphabet 2020 so this week I am combining N and O together.

Together it could be NO. NO going out, NO leaving the house without having a mask with us at all times, NO commute - so many NOs that I could do.

But instead, I am going to do a bit of a New and Old feature, talking about the work we have done around the house over the last couple of years.  I have mentioned a few things here on the blog but this will be the post where I put them all together.

When my now husband moved in, I am not sure if he bought his checklist of things to be renovated with him or if that has just evolved over time. I have made the joke that when he finishes renovating this house then we either need a new house to work on or he might need to find a new wife! He assures me that neither of these are true though. That's when he can turn his attention to his hobbies.

The very first thing on the the agenda was to tidy up the laundry, adding in a bench top that we can use for folding clothes and things, or at least that's the theory! And then we added solar panels.

The first major reno job that we did was the kitchen and it was completed just over two years ago, and I have to say I still love the way it looks, and the benchtops! I quite often stand at the stone benchtops and just caress it! I did a quite lengthy post about the reno process which you can read here, but here are just a couple of pictures.

One of the clever things that Bob the builder did was to take the kitchen cabinet you can see on the left and repurposed it for more storage in the laundry!

The next major job that we did was the deck. My intention was always to completely close the deck in. As you can see from the before photos it was kind of closed in and that was definitely what I thought would happen, until one day I had the brain wave to open it out. That was the time when I learnt that I need to have ensured that I had thought things through before I say anything because within a few days of suggesting it we were already ripping out shrubs and flower beds.

And what we ended up was this great outdoor space that gets used way more than the old deck ever did, and we even had it all decorated for our wedding celebration last year. And those plants on the edge of the deck. I hadn't realised just how much they have grown since we put those in.  We have subsequently removed the washing line and put in a fire pit which we love too.

Next job was the flooring. You can see in the before photos for kitchen the floor tiles were very 1970s so doing the flooring made all the difference!

Next stop was my son's bedroom. It's amazing what a difference moving a wardrobe makes because I would never have thought that we could have fitted a queen sized bed in that room the way it was configured before. Unfortunately,  it appears we didn't take before or after photos which is odd.

The next projects were the laundry/toilet

And then the bathroom which is a job that was very overdue. We are super pleased with how the bathroom has turned out. It feels so much bigger than it was, just by taking out a lot of the brown, and by moving the bath around.

So the parts of the house that are still old are the spare bedroom which we are currently using as an office, our bedroom and the ensuite. One of the biggest changes when we get to our ensuite will be the removal of a chocolate brown toilet suite - no I am not joking!

We also plan to change the heating/cooling in the whole house, the window coverings, replacing the front door which features lovely orange frosted glass, and now we need to clear the frontyard so that we can create another car parking space.  This is the before of that particular project. Who knows when we will finish the after!

The amazing thing about all of this is that my husband has done the vast majority of the work. He loves the research and planning, and then the ripping out and fixing up and the sense of satisfaction when the job is done.

So there we have the New and Old of our house. If I had to gauge I would suggest that we are more New than Old but there's still plenty to do. Guess that means the husband will be here a bit longer yet!