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After a long but oddly short 2020 year, Ana and I are excited for the new year ahead of us! To be honest January has been a slower month for us and we haven’t worked on any new home projects since finishing our master bath remodel (blog post coming, instagram has a sneak peak picture of it if you’re curious 🤫). We actually did a bit of rearranging of rooms and layouts, if you know our home layout, we swapped out our dining room and the fireplace family room (see pics below).

Current:

Previous:

We love the layout so far and think it’s here to stay, so we are eager to have our families over to try out the new layout and feel out the flow with >10 people at once. This new layout gives more space in the living room to play with the pups and gives us a nice lounge area that connects to our TV room. The blue seater couch is much too large for this space, but we are working with what we have for now. The dining room now feels more formal but also more spacious. With the fireplace room being 11.5ft long it made our previous 5ft table (my old family table from when I was growing up) feel dinky and it just didn’t work. However, we purchased a used crate and barrel table (from our lovely neighbors on the Nextdoor app – one of our favorite apps) that extends to 9.5ft with a leaf and now with the new table the space just works and feels intentional.

With the whole rearranging of the downstairs Ana and I started to ponder the idea of a big kitchen remodel with the infamous Ikea kitchen cabinets! We made a great layout with their software (super easy to use and very fun for Ana) that we think would work amazing.

The only barrier to entry for that would be our other “wants” in terms of a kitchen and the limitations that we have with our current setup. As we were thinking about the kitchen we realized that we could have so much more room to play with if we moved our backdoors further into the fireplace room in order to expand out the kitchen a bit more. This would give us room for more countertops and potentially an island. With moving the backdoor we would also replace our windows, because our windows are originals to the house (almost 30 years old) and they occasionally fall out of the track and hit our heads. So we sort of have fallen down a black hole and have these great ideas for future projects but one thing leads to the other and in the end I think we will be replacing our windows in the short term (more to come on that if you’re interested).

We did rearrange our office/gym space upstairs. With our previous setup, we had the gym equipment in my work office which just felt cluttered all of the time, so we took one of our guest bedrooms and swapped the bed for the gym equipment and now we have a dedicated room for working out which has helped us a ton trying to get back on track after the holidays.

The other fun change is that our sister and her husband let us borrow their spare humidifier so we moved all of our little plants onto our dresser and made a room dedicated to keeping them alive over the winter months. Half of our smaller plants are successful rooted propagations and we want to try our best to keep them alive over the next few months!

Other Fun Callouts

TV shows we’re watching: Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Search Party, The Undoing, Fleabag, Sabrina

TV shows we tried but didn’t continue: Dark (I couldn’t do subtitles/dubbing), the Masked Dancer (it’s just NOT the same as the Masked Singer 😭)

Other time consuming hobbies: Pokemon Card Craze, Stock Market Craze, Catan Cities and Knights (board game) and Iwari (new board game)