An Update on Our Home Renovations

We moved into our new home in August and dove head first into it with home renovations. Here’s an update from the past few months!

Last year we moved from Dallas to St. Louis for my husband’s job. I wrote all about it HERE if you missed it! We bought a beautiful home, but we immediately knew we wanted to do some renovations to update the home and make it more our style, if we planned to live here for many years.

We’ve had lots of questions about the renovation, so here’s an update on all of our completed and in-process home renovations!

Home Renovation Updates

KITCHEN: 

• Currently the kitchen is the biggest home project we’re undertaking. Construction started three weeks ago, and they said it should last eight.
• While the kitchen is fully gutted, we’ve been using the basement kitchen to cook. It thankfully has a fridge and sink and dishwasher, but no cooking appliances. So I purchased a HOT PLATE, and a LARGE TOASTER OVEN, and I’ve been using my Instant Pot and slow cooker a ton. We’ve made it work pretty well…I even made rolls inside the toaster oven last week! It’s been a little bit clunky to have the temporary kitchen, but it’s worked and I’m so grateful to have a place to use while the kitchen is out of commission for two months.
• You can see the BEFORE kitchen, a terribly blurry screenshot from a video of the gutted kitchen right now, and then a picture of our kitchen inspiration!

STAIRS and BANISTERS

• This was actually a pretty quick project! The hand railings were very traditional with swirly balusters and curved wood banisters. We wanted something much more transitional modern, so we ripped out the railings and replaced with sleek black wood banisters and straight balusters. Then we painted the stairs black and the risers white. Our back staircase has a strip of carpet down the middle, and in order to paint it, they had to pull out the carpet. While it was up, we decided we could replace it with something better than the brown shag carpet. So we bought a beautiful herringbone carpet stair runner and had that installed instead. It makes a huge difference, and I love that the carpet won’t show anything, even with lots of little boys running up and down.
• Below you can see our front entry with the original wall color and railings, and an updated progress picture with new railings, painted stairs, and a fun gallery wall we’re installing! The “current” photo is taken in the evening, so it’s hard to tell, but we painted over the gold walls and made them white.
• The third photo is the back staircase with the gorgeous new carpet and railings and paint. I showed the progress of that in THIS VIDEO if you want to see the before.

BOYS ROOMS:

• The boys rooms are basically finished. We have a few little changes we may make down the road, but we tried to get them settled as quickly as possible. The last things we were waiting on was new bedding, and I finally bought the younger two boys some Beddy’s bedspreads when they went on sale for Black Friday. They’re a zip up bedding that makes it super easy for them to make their beds, and makes the room look so nice and put together with very little effort.
• One last project I just recently finished was a wall mural in San’s room. He wanted a cabin themed room, so we went with the Beddy’s buffalo plaid bedding (my code MERRICK works for 20% off if you want to get one now) a dark brown faux leather couch, the animal heads from his previous room in Texas, and then a big mountain scene with fir trees on one wall. I’m still deciding if I want to do the mural on a second wall…I’m leaning toward yes, but we’ll see when I find the time.

MUDROOM + LAUNDRY ROOM

• This is part of the kitchen renovation project, since both the mudroom and laundry room are off of the kitchen. The original tile in the mudroom and laundry room was a textured, brown, tumbled travertine style of tile, and it just didn’t work with the changes we were making to the rest of the house. We found this spectacular gray rectangle tile and decided to do a herringbone pattern from the mudroom, down the hallway and into the bathrooms and laundry room. It’s being installed right now and it’s better than we imagined. It’s tying together the whole downstairs (it’s right next to the staircase with the herringbone carpet — perfect!) and is the perfect dark contrast to the white walls.
• You can see the before, post wallpaper and painting, and then current progress on the flooring below!
• I’ll share more details of the laundry room when it has more progress…right now it’s basically just a gutted room.

Things are happening quickly, and it’s so fun to watch our house transform into OUR HOME.

You can see more updates on Instagram at #BuildingTheWhiteHouse!

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