Home Renovation Chaos – So It Begins!

As many of you know, we just had our fifth baby. FIFTH. Crazy town over here. I am not sure what’s crazier – five kids or our current home renovation chaos.

For a couple of years we had been talking about adding another bedroom to our house and making better use of our family space downstairs but when we knew Baby Cinco was on the way, a fire was lit under our butts. Home renovation chaos seemed totally acceptable to get us some much-needed space.

We knew if that we didn’t move ahead with this project before the baby arrived, we never would. My poor parents would continue to come visit and be stuck in bunkbeds – separate bunkbeds. The situation was getting desperate.

Knock It Down! 

For those of you who have done a big renovation, you will laugh out loud when I tell you that I thought this was a linear process that would probably take about a year. Draw some plans, find a builder, build. Done. Right? Wrong. So, so wrong. We love our builder. In fact, we met with him for the first time almost three years ago. He basically told me that I was a borderline hoarder. I appreciated the brutal honesty.

By the time we had circled back around to get a few bids on our project and meeting with him again, we had been working with an architect for almost an entire year. A year! And, truthfully, I had about reached my architect tolerance limit and was ready to cut bait and start knocking things down.

So far, this project could not have been smoother. Why not knock down a major portion of your house and start a six month home renovation nine months pregnant? Many people thought we were crazy. And we are. But I think our level of tolerance for chaos is probably a little higher than others. As my husband likes to point out, we are one child away from a reality TV show. Truth.

Keeping the kitchen basically untouched!

My biggest concern as we moved ahead with our plans was that my kitchen would primarily be left untouched so I could keep cooking. Since earlier last year, I had been working on a separate project to update the kitchen island (more on that later!) and that finally came to happen about halfway through the middle of our bigger renovation. I’ll save that story for later … it’s still a work in progress. We lost the use of the kitchen island for a few days but we were otherwise fine.

Here’s a little sneak peek at my kitchen island project … It seats 5 kids. FIVE! All of them. At the same time! Can you see where they took out the window and put a door into my new pantry??

As we near the homestretch of the inside portion of our project, the sanctity of my kitchen is becoming a little less stable. I lost my kitchen today to a fab team of painters. It looks AMAZING. So worth it. And I will lose my kitchen for 6 days while the floors are being refinished to match up with the addition. Six days. I can’t even wrap my mind around that yet. Stay tuned.

Choosing Paint Colors is Hard! Get help!

But, truly, so far, so good. I have almost made it to the other side of PAINT COLOR HELL. H – E – double hockey sticks. Choosing paint colors is not fun. Not fun at all. Let’s just say I confidently picked colors for seven rooms and the biggest one, the family room, was SO WRONG. Ugh. As in, my husband texted me a picture while I was at the beach with the kids and asked if I really intended to paint the room sunshine yellow.

Nope. Not what I was going for. Fingers crossed that my new, less yellow color looks great on the walls tomorrow. Can you see that tiny color square I have on the wall? What was I thinking? I have one more color to figure out and then I can move on to planning my pantry. A pantry!!! A PANTRY! I have never had a pantry before. (Click here to see our Pantry Sneak Peek!)

To help keep track of paint colors for future reference, I created a little chart in Google Sheets.

So… Now it’s your turn! How many of you have braved a big renovation before? Who has a pantry?? Help me! I would appreciate any and all tips and I promise a new recipe as soon as possible.

Here’s an update on our dining room renovation!