Our 2021 Renovation Wish List

8 PROJECTS WE’RE HOPING TO TACKLE THROUGH THE YEAR AHEAD.

This might just be my favourite post of the year to write. It’s the culmination of two of my greatest loves – interior design and making to-do lists! I wish I was joking here. 😉 Really though, there’s little I love more than dreaming up ideas for our home. Even those spaces that are “done” are never really out of mind – I’m always finding inspiration and ideas to make our home function better and feel more like us and I’ve always got a running list of things I’d like to do or change & projects I’d love to tackle. In fact, last year I shared 10 projects that are on our renovation wish list and I’m so excited to say that many of those will finally be gracing our to-do list this year.

Between finishing the basement, designing & building a deck (not to mention all of the extra work that came with that – read: digging up most of our yard) and who could forget the last minute addition of a new hot tub gazebo, well, let’s just say we took on far more than we could ever possibly get through last year (read more about all of the projects we took on through 2020 here). Which means that this year, we’ll not only have quite a few projects that we need to catch up on, but we’re also bound & determined to learn from our mistakes and plan a little more realistically for the year ahead (famous last words I’m sure, but we’re going to give it our best shot).

So, with far more ideas than time, here’s what’s actually making our renovation wish list for 2021…

CARSON’S ROOM

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Carson’s room was actually the first room we renovated when we bought this house 6 years ago (see the transformation here) and, aside from a fresh coat of paint with a bit more colour, we haven’t really done much to it since. I’ve got some big ideas to transition this space into something that can continue to grow with C including adding paneling around the rest of the room, bringing in some new furniture and and updating the colour to a slightly more greyish green.

THE STUDY

Finishing the basement has created a domino effect of musical rooms. As we relocate furniture around the house, we’re finding ourselves with all sorts of empty spaces that we’ll need to deal with this year. The one that’s been on my mind the most lately is our old back family room. I’d love to turn this space into a cozy “study”/ library – somewhere comfortable that we can kick back with a cocktail and a good book at the end of a long day. I’m picturing tons of shelving to house all of our books, a dry bar area for mixing up fancy cocktails and a very traditional, maybe even slightly art deco feel. Brady keeps calling it his “smoking room” (even though neither of us smokes), but that traditional, almost formal feel is exactly what I’m picturing in this space.

THE BUNK BED ROOM

The ripple effect of finishing the basement continues upstairs as well. For the past few years, Carson’s playroom has lived in one of the extra bedrooms we weren’t using upstairs (we have 5 total), but finishing the basement has given us a much better space for him to play. At almost 9 years old, C doesn’t need a ton of space to spread out with toys anymore. Instead, he’d rather play a board game, build some lego or work on a stack of drawings. And of course, his greatest love at the moment (and probably for many years to come) is playing video games, especially with his friends (connecting through Face Time and playing together online has become his new favourite way to hang out with his friends). All of this is so much better suited for our newly finished basement – he’s got his own little corner with shelves for all of his toys, a games table to spread out on, and of course, a cozy TV area to hang out in with his friends. It’s become a perfect hang out zone.

So, what does this mean for the old playroom? Well, after tossing around a few different ideas, we landed on making this a fun little sleepover space for C and his friends. We’re just getting into the age of sleepovers around here and after hosting his very first friend last Summer, we noticed there wasn’t really a great space for friends to actually spend the night without putting them into a separate room or setting up an air mattress on the floor, both of which are considerably less fun. So, with a bit of brainstorming, we came up with “the bunk bed room.” With not one, but two sets of bunk beds, there’ll be plenty of space for Carson and all of his friends to claim this room as their own. We’ve already set up the bunk beds in this space, but there’s still a lot to figure out in the bunk bed room. This is going to be such a fun room to design!

THE OFFICE/ GUEST ROOM

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This space is still a question mark for me. It’s been our home office for several years now, but with the back family room becoming a “study”, I’m thinking that space might make for a more comfortable place to work from home. If we can successfully relocate our home office (or at least create another usable space to work from home), then I’m thinking this could become another guest bedroom. With one guest bedroom already and the bunk bed room in the works, I’m not sure yet another guest bedroom space makes sense – maybe we’ll end up creating some other fun space in here instead. Though I’m not quite sure what exactly I want to do in here, I do know that we need to do something with this space, which is why I’ve added it to our 2021 to-do list.

BUILD A GARAGE

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Building a second garage in this back corner of our yard is at the very top of Brady’s priority list for 2021. And, with our yard all torn to bits from last year’s outdoor construction projects, I have to say, it’s pretty high up on mine too. When we decided to build our back deck last year (you can read more about that project here), it created a snowball effect of work out here (actually, the snowball started with talk of replacing our siding, but that’s a whole other story). Knowing we eventually wanted to build another garage out back, we needed to run all of the utilities out to that corner of our yard before we blocked access to them all with our new deck. So, last Summer, before starting any of our construction projects, Brady spent more than a month digging trenches and running utilities to what will become our new garage site. While he managed to get the deck built and our hot tub structure in place before the snow came last Fall, the rest of our yard a bit of a disaster really (luckily most of it is covered with snow at the moment). The next step to dealing with our torn apart yard is getting the new garage built. While I’m most looking forward to having my yard put back together again, Brady of course, is super excited to have a new garage space to take over – this garage build is definitely a top priority for 2021!

LANDSCAPING THE BACKYARD

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Speaking of top priorities this year – this disaster of a backyard is definitely high up on the list. While getting the new garage built is a big part of finishing up this backyard space, we’re also going to need to do a whole lot of landscaping. Though we’ve got several ideas about what we’d like to do back here, we’re actually feeling a bit lost with just how to make it all come to life, so we’ve been toying around with the idea of hiring a landscape designer to help us figure it all out. If you have any experience with hiring a landscape designer yourself, especially in the Edmonton area, we’d love to hear about it in the comments at the end of this post!

ADDING SOME MOULDING

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The idea of adding some extra moulding around our main floor & upstairs hallway has been swirling around our heads for a while now. Though we don’t have a clear idea of exactly what we want to do just yet, we do know that we’d love to beef up our baseboards a bit as well as add some sort of wainscotting or picture frame moulding all throughout our main living spaces.

FINISH UP OUR “FINISHED” BASEMENT

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Though we’ve been using this space for over a month now, there are still a few loose ends we need to tie up down here to truly call our basement finished. Our stairs need some sort of railing (which needs to be removable to allow for furniture to fit through), our built in column still needs some shelves and we’d love to add some sort of built in storage under the stairs. The list is small, but we don’t have a clear vision for the few things that are still left to finish in this space – I don’t want to rush things just for the sake of getting it done and so, in order to give ourselves time to figure it all out, we likely won’t be calling this space “done” any time soon. I am hoping that we can FINISH it sometime this year though.

Whew! I know 8 things doesn’t seem like a long list really, but these are all spaces that require multiple projects, with a whole lot of design elements still to figure out. I’m not sure how realistic this wish list really is in just one year, but we’re going to give it our best shot (after all, just look at what we were able to accomplish last year!). What are you hoping to tackle through the year ahead? Do you have any fun projects you’re planning for 2021?

Wishing you SUCH a lovely day my friends! 

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