It’s time for an update on our house! We’ve really only made one major upgrade in the past 3 months and it was putting blinds on our windows. Yes, we were living in this house from April – September with no blinds. I’m sure the neighbors loved that. What’s worse is that we had the blinds sitting in boxes, in our office, since May.

But all that matters now, is that they are up, didn’t break the bank, and we absolutely love them.

To catch you up:

Chris and I bought our first house this past April
it’s 1015sq ft, with 3 bedrooms, 1 full bath, and 3 closets – no garage or basement

definitely tight on space, but we lucked out with the size of our yard, location, and buying price

the house was built in the 1940’s
structurally, the house has good bones, but it needed MAJOR interior updating
the kitchen was the first thing we demo’d and completely remodeled with the a lot of help from my uncle
the 2nd major undertaking was ripping out the old windows + replacing with new windows, new trim and now blinds!

a few of the old windows were cracked, bowed, some would not open at all, most were not able to stay open and would slam shut, and they were also single-pane and drafty

I will do a more formal recap at some point soon, but here are the details on the windows.

Before paint + window replacement:

(5 of 27)

After window replacement + paint: [same room/angel as photo above]

(2 of 13)

[same room]

(7 of 17)

After new trim was put on: [same room]

(18 of 37)

new trim:

(13 of 37)

After blinds were installed by Chris:

Before window trim + blinds:

(4 of 17)

These are 2” wide, faux-wood blinds, from Walmart. We spent quite some time searching for blinds. There was no way we were getting custom blinds or real wood blinds, so we found these to be our best option.

They are wider than the actual window opening, and were mounted directly to the window frame. They overlap the window opening by about 1” on each side.

If I remember correctly, they were about $20/each.

For our bedroom, we found an extremely lucky deal at Bed, Bath + Beyond. We ended up finding room darkening, insulating shades, that were originally $70, marked down to $22! They had four left, and we had 4, 20% off coupons, which brought the price down to about $16 for each! Such a great find. We bought all four and put three in our bedroom and one in the office. No way we were buying those, if it wasn’t for crazy the deal.

There are still 5 more windows to buy blinds for [kitchen + 3rd bedroom], and we decided to use the faux-wood blinds for those. We love the way they look, and the price is right! Slowly but surely, we are making progress!

These are the other two bedroom windows. They look out onto our front porch, which is currently closed in and being used as storage.

Office window.

dog.

other dog.

Nothing new with them…

Recently I made a LONG list of everything we want to do with the house + yard. Right now we’re pretty much “on hold” with house projects, but I can’t wait until we can start crossing things off the list! It’s going to take a few years to complete for sure.

Maybe one day we’ll even hang things on the walls. Yeah, they are currently blank. All in time…

Ashley

Some of the house posts, if you want to catch up.