Category Archives: Current House

current-house-category, red autumn maple On this section, we show you the projects we’ve worked on and the ones we’re working on – sometimes more than one at the same time – on our current (and hopefully last) house. The goal is to share our progress and ideas, hear and learn from your opinions and have a friendly discussion about our different home improvement and do-it-yourself projects.

Building a DIY Storage Shed from Scratch

While framing the shed’s walls

Wow! Time really does fly! A little over a year ago, I posted the first part of this project. In that post, I explained how we built the foundation for this DIY Storage Shed (my apologies if you’ve been waiting for me to show the rest of the work before you start working on your own shed!).

To be honest, it didn’t take me a year to build it, it has just been taking us way too long to work on posts for the blog. There are way too many different things taking our time these days, from virtual school right after the quarantine started in March, to the birth of our beautiful daughter in April. Everything is taking longer in our home now.

The good thing is that it is done now, and we got all the landscaping tools, including the lawnmower, and the wheelbarrow out of the garage! There is also enough space in there for the table saw and other smaller tools. I’m just super happy to finally have those in their own storage shed, instead of taking space in the garage like they used to.

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Building a DIY Porch Swing Using Pallet Wood

The pallet used to build the porch swing

Building a DIY porch swing was something Carla asked me to do since the day (or soon after!) we moved to this house. But, we finished the garage, painted almost the whole house, built an office desk, finished part of the basement, remodeled our master closet, and completed many other projects, some of which are not even in the blog, and the swing just kept getting pushed back all the time.

One day, I just felt like using, at least, one of the few pallets we have sitting outside with the intention of completing some projects. It made sense to do something outside the house and finally build the swing after over four years of waiting.

When I told her what I was going to do, she was all smiles, coming up with color ideas and even said she was making a cushion for it! (Don’t miss it on Step 7!) Continue reading →

Walk-In Master Closet Remodel

Our walk-in master closet before the remodel

We had been wanting to “fix” our walk-in master closet since the day we moved to this house. We believe that whoever designed it thinks that people only use their closets to hang clothes. He or she forgot about shoes, towels, bed sheets and other everyday items, there was no space for them!

The shoes on the floor were a big problem. They looked disorganized and it was a pain to move them out of the way before vacuuming the carpet. The bed sheets and comforters were way up high in the top shelf, hard to reach and difficult to organize.

While working on many other projects, we kept thinking that we had to work in our master closet, we had different ideas, and layouts in mind to fix it. At the same time, we were overthinking the “inconvenience” of working in it. We kept asking ourselves, where do we put everything while we work in it?

One day, we said, enough! This has to change! So as part of our house’s organization efforts, we decided to get it done!

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Building DIY Floating Bookshelves for Our Kid’s Bedroom

The wood we used for the DIY floating Bookshelves

Organization takes priority in our house! When we notice something that needs organizing, it immediately goes to the top of our to-do list.

A good example was the books in our kid’s room. He loves reading and has been getting a lot of books. At first, the books were organized on top of his dresser, however, as he kept getting more and more, the top of the dresser was no longer the right place for them, it was starting to look a bit disorganized. It was also getting harder for him to find the books he wanted to read, and even harder to keep them organized after taking a few of them in and out of the stack.

As a result, we decided to build some DIY floating bookshelves for him.

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Decorating the Foyer with a DIY Floating Shelf

The wood used to build the shelf

First impressions… We all kind of want to make a great first impression. Not that I would care a lot about everyone’s opinion about me, but especially in situations when you like someone, it’s nice to feel you have left a good impression.

Translating that to house décor, we have been intentional when coming up with ideas, and taking care of details, to make our home an inviting and beautiful place to be.

That is the reason why it was irritating me that the very first impression in our house (our foyer) was basically nothing. We had put zero work into it, except for painting the walls, and it was definitely in our to-do list to take care of that. Continue reading →

Building the Foundation for a DIY Storage Shed

The area where we are building our shed

I never considered building a storage shed before. I always thought that if we kept the clutter down, we could live without one. On the other hand, I’ve never liked storing a bunch of landscaping tools in the garage. They look ugly and take a lot of space, In my opinion, there’s no easy way to store them so they look nice and organized in there.

What we have been doing until now is storing all the shovels, rakes and other small landscaping tools in one of our Kobalt tall cabinets. However, we still have a lawn mower and a wheelbarrow taking a lot of space. We need to take them out of there!

In agreement with what I said above, and because (in case you don’t know it yet) we love working on projects, we never considered getting one of those huge storage sheds they sell at Home Depot, Lowes and other stores. We are building our own!

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DIY Basement Finishes: Painting, Tiling & More

Spray painting the doors

When working on most projects, we are the most excited when we first start, full of energy and enthusiasm, and when we are almost done and can’t wait to see how our project will turn out. This basement was no different.

After a few weeks of hard work doing all the framing, electrical, plumbing, insulation & drywall, we were, once again, getting excited to finish it and see the end result. A break from all the work was also something I was looking forward to.

So as soon as the pros finished the drywall work, I got back to work on the rest of the project.

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DIY Basement Drywall

Hanging drywall in our basement

Right after finishing our basement’s framing and insulation, it was time for the third major phase of our project: hanging the basement’s bedroom and bathroom drywall. This phase was a DIY Basement Drywall project because I hanged all the drywall. But, at the same time, it was not DIY Basement Drywall project, because we paid someone else to tape, mud and texture it.

I was getting tired and ready to finish the project. If I had decided to tape, mud, and texture the drywall, it would have taken me a lot longer than it did to the guys we hired. Also, I do not have the tools (texture sprayer, for example) and didn’t see the need to get them because I will not be using them often enough to justify the purchase. Not to mention that I’m not a drywall guy, so I’m sure that they did a better job than I would have if I had tried to do it myself.

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DIY Basement Walls and Ceiling Insulation

Do you need to insulate basement walls below grade

Insulation in the new basement bathroom

As you learned in our previous post, the first part of our basement finishing project included a few phases. Some plumbing groundwork for the bathroom, the framing of the walls, a soffit, rough electrical, plumbing, and our rough-in inspection.

Right after passing that first inspection, we moved forward with the next phase: Insulation. Or in our case, DIY Basement Insulation.

For different reasons that we explain in this post, we insulated both, all the walls (including interior walls) and the ceiling. And, in less than a day of work, we were ready for our insulation inspection and to continue with the rest of the project.

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DIY Basement Finishing: Walls Framing

Part of our basement right before we started framing new walls

Finishing our basement was something we had been wanting to do for a long time. We had discussed different layouts, ideas and changed our minds many times since we moved into this house. One thing we knew for sure was that we didn’t want a bunch of bedrooms and bathrooms that we don’t need. We wanted as much open space as possible for a home gym and a big recreation room.

After converting one of our bedrooms into an office, and getting the other one set up for kids, we realized that, after all, it made sense to build an extra bedroom and a bathroom down there. Our family visits often, and after the two bedroom conversions, they had to stay in hotels in their last few visits.

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