Before & After House Photos: 14 Months In!: a house log

Note: This post was born from an updated Before & After page that we heard people were having trouble finding (since it was not at the top of our journal feed). So here it is, forever immortalized as a chronological post. And now, since we will continue to update our Before & After page over time, we have this post frozen in time, which is pleasant to look back on. Wish we had done it around 6 months in and at the year mark too.

We downsized to this 1,400 square foot house in Northwest Florida on May of 2020 after a fast, furious, and long-distance three-month renovation. You can read more about how we found ourselves craving a pared-down lifestyle for our family here and here (that last one is a truly good synopsis of what led us to this exact spot). But onward to the before & after pictures!

NOTE: We created this Shop Our House page to assist you hunt down any furniture/accessories that you see in our house, along with our paint colors.

The Exterior

We kept all of the same cedar siding, black metal windows, exterior doors, and metal roofing…

… but updated the decking, railings, front steps, and gave everything a fresh coat of white paint! You can see this post for more photos & details on the exterior renovation.

Then we began layering in all the tropical landscaping and it evolved to this. We need to take more photos and do an updated journal post soon.

Here is the side of the house as it looked when we picked up it back in Feb of 2020:

And here it is all painted, with new horizontal railings on that second-floor deck. Removing the steeply pitched steps to the upper deck instantly made us feel safer (someone outside being able to access our second-floor windows & doors simply felt off). And even small changes like removing the guard rails that cut through those wide steps that you see (while maintaining the railings on the outside ends) made a big difference too!

There is more that we did to this area (fences, ferns, and a firepit – oh my!) but let us pop inside for a second and head back outside again later on in the tour.

The Kitchen

The kitchen involved some large renovations and some small projects to get it to its current state. This is what we were starting with:

We repaired the floors, took out the soffit, brought in additional lighting, and replaced the drywall (goodbye popcorn ceiling!). You can read more about those projects in this post and this post.

We gradually updated the room in a few affordable ways, like hanging new lighting & Hands-on shelves and painting the cabinets (you can also see a full tour of how our kitchen is organized). Then we scored an excellent deal on secondhand appliances & tweaked the room’s layout and later brought in an Ikea pantry that we built in around the fridge, which we moved to the opposite wall (journal post about that coming soon!).

By shifting the fridge to the other side of the room, you can in fact see that side window now! It used to be nearly entirely blocked from this vantage point by the fridge (scroll back up a few photos to see what I mean). Plus we gained an whole pantry full of storage around our newly relocated fridge. Win-win!

In order to enjoy a comfy little sitting area on this side of the room, we closed off that wide doorway that you see below. You can still enter that room via the door next to the loveseat in the next photo (it is our bedroom – so that extra-wide doorway was not necessary). You can read more about the sitting area here & we are planning an updated post all about the kitchen now that we brought in the pantry, so stay tuned.

This room is deceptively large, so along with having room for an eat-in kitchen table, we enjoy that we gained this casual bonus hangout spot (since our big family room with the TV is upstairs, we tend to gather in here when someone’s cooking or when friends drop in for a coffee or a drink). It is also strong to have when someone wants to hang out or read without hearing the TV upstairs). Having two common areas in the house that are not open to each other (meaning that the sound does not travel between them quite much and one kid can do homework while the other watches cartoons or does a big part project) is key to feeling like we are living large in a smaller footprint. If we had one larger adjoined space as our only shared area in the house, we’d feel a lot more cramped & on top of each other, I think!

The Stairs

The stairs that lead to our upstairs family room and second-floor deck had cool vertical planking and got plenty of natural light thanks to a window above them in the family room. But the wood treads had some finish issues after we had them redone, and it did not match our wood floors downstairs (more on that here).

We ended up adding a truly pleasant textured runner (and painting the treads to solve the finish issue), which gives our dog Burger some much-needed traction. It is an indoor/outdoor rug, so it is especially durable (more on that here). Do not mind this older shot of the kitchen before we brought in the pantry – we will take an updated photo eventually…

The Family Room

The only room upstairs is this large multi-purpose room that we use as a TV/movie room, home office, and kids’ crafting area (thanks to the pandemic it was a virtual-learning spot too). It is by far the largest room in our house (two 8 x 10 rugs can fit in here without touching!) so it is excellent to all get to enjoy it – and for it to perform so many functions for our family. Here is how it looked when we picked up the house. Note that scummy mildew along the top of the ceiling…

And here it is more lately after some plain floor refinishing and a fresh coat of paint (those big windows and cool paneling were already there!). You can see more of this room in this post – and see a few updates we later brought in in this post. We have also made some other changes up there, so we will have to take more photos and a video for an updated post.

Here is the other half of the room as it looked when we picked up the house. It was pouring rain when we took this picture, hence it being so dark (and those foggy windows):

Here it is more lately from the same angle. This is such a good demonstration of how adding furniture can assist so much with capturing a room’s scale! Does not the room look half as wide in the before shot above? And it appears to only have a sliver of space between the windows on the right-hand wall when there is truly over 70″ for a wide bookshelf with four spacious drawers. It is wild!

The Upper Deck

Right outside the living room is a large upstairs deck that we all use as an extension of our living area. It was hugely improved by replacing the rotting deck, railings, and rickety pergola.

This is what the deck looks like now, thanks to the magic of new decking, railings, nixing that chimney that popped up in the middle of where our big 8-person table now lives, and a whole lot of white paint. We have also brought in some more seating, a dining area, and some string lights to make this one of our go-to hangout spots! You can read all about the details of this space right here.

Another lively before & after shot of this upstairs deck is this one. I cannot tell you how much better it is without that large chimney jutting through the deck (when we picked up the house it was majorly leaking down into the bedroom below).

And here is the after shot from that vantage point now. This is one of our go-to spaces in the whole house – for sharing pizza with friends or having a family game night up in the trees. It is truly cozy and makes our house feel so much bigger thanks to this large outdoor room.

Our Bedroom

Here is our bedroom as it looked when we picked up the house. This house only had one bedroom with an actual door that you could close when we picked up it (it was originally listed as a one bedroom, one bathroom!), so we converted this striking light-filled space into our bedroom by closing a large extra doorway that led to the kitchen.

We refinished the floors, gave it some fresh paint, and then it simply took some comfortable things like curtains, furniture, and a cozy rug to make this feel like a welcoming retreat.

Here is a before and after view of the bed wall, since it is hard to see in the photo above…

We brought in a lot more storage to the room and rearranged things and closed off 2 of the 8 exterior doors (yes we truly had that many doors in here, which is why the two on the bed wall in the before picture above are now gone – but the room is still flooded with light). We also brought in a closet (storage, glorious storage!) which you can read about here. That update truly was a game-changer!

We have eventual plans to create an attached bathroom in an existing underutilized corner of the room (you can read more about that plan here). Sharing a bathroom has not been nearly as bad as we expected – so we are not in any rush.

Here is another before shot of our bedroom back when we picked up the house:

Here is the same angle now. It truly is a life hack to have a puzzle table by the fireplace if there is randomly room in your bedroom. It keeps the kitchen table clear for food – and provides a lively spot to sit and decompress whenever the mood strikes (John can be found here a lot more than I ever expected. He has become a true puzzle lover).

Speaking of the fireplace, we updated ours and shared those details in this post and this post. It is such a cozy feature to have in a bedroom.

*And now for a long-winded bedroom-related side note, because the most common question we get about our house is if we ever considered making the large upstairs family room into our bedroom. The short answer is that we did, but ended up nixing it for a number of reasons:

• 1) we all prefer to sleep on the same floor
• 2) that room upstairs is nearly twice as big (it is the single biggest room in our house!), and we’d much rather share it than take it all for ourselves
• 3) entertaining a bunch of people on the large upstairs deck would mean everyone would have to walk through our bedroom to access it
• 4) there is no plumbing upstairs, so adding an ensuite bathroom would be much pricier than the one we have planned for downstairs
• 5) we already mentioned this, but it bears repeating for anyone who is looking to downsize & worries they’ll feel too cramped. We have learned that it is SO HELPFUL in a smaller home if there are two common areas that are not right next to each other (someone can watch a movie upstairs or do a zoom call for work while someone else is downstairs at the kitchen table working undisturbed or reading in the sitting area). We have also found that when our friends & their kids drop in, the kids all run upstairs to play & we sit downstairs in the sitting area and chat & have drinks or a snack.

You can find more layout pointers for a small house (& other general downsizing info) right here in this post. Ok, but on with the tour!

The Bathroom

Our house only has one bathroom – and it did not even function when we picked up it! The sink and vanity had been torn out, there were leaks festering in the walls behind the drywall and the tile, and the toilet could not even be flushed due to the absence of a sewer line. Here is what it looked like back then:

Before we moved in, we had in short everything replaced (except for the window!) to make this space functional. I gotta say, as much as we like the lively floor tile, and the cheerful accessories, a toilet that flushes truly is the best part of any bathroom. You can see more of the room in this post.

The Laundry Closet

We converted a (weirdly double-sided) closet right off the front door into a laundry closet, which in fact reminds us a lot of the laundry nook that we had in our quite first house.

In addition to the new appliances, we built some pleasant deep shelves and brought in plenty of hooks to make it extra hardworking.

Our Daughter’s Bedroom

Some of our go-to transformations in this house are our kids’ bedrooms, since we were able to vault the ceilings in both rooms – making these spaces feel so much bigger and brighter than they used to feel.

Yup, this is the same room, from the same angle. Crazy the difference that ceiling change made, right? It was not structural (the roof already had that slope, so we essentially took out a drop drywall ceiling, brought in insulation, and simply followed the slope of the roof with the planked ceiling). You can click here to see more photos (and get a Hands-on channel headboard walkthrough). We have since changed up the side tables and brought in a desk so we will have to share updated photos soon.

You can also see this room in particular had a quite colorful past…

… which we embraced by hand-painting a large mural on the newly vaulted wall across from our daughter’s bed.

Our Son’s Room

We were also able to vault the ceilings in our son’s room to follow the slope of the roof, as well as adding more planking and beams to the ceiling, which adds character and some pleasant dimension. Here is the before:

And here is what it looks like these days:

This especially cozy room is one of our kids’ go-to spots to hang out together (ever since the beach house bunk room they’ve enjoyed quiet time together in a small space). We built in the bed by creating a plain Hands-on wraparound headboard, which they hang out on kind of like a daybed.

Here is another before shot that was taken with the camera swung more towards the right wall of the room:

And here is the same angle of the room as it looks now:

Every inch matters in smaller spaces like this, so the built-in bookshelf we made is truly functional too. That foot or so of floor space along that wall works so much harder for us now! You can also see that we brought in some horizontal planking along that side wall and painted it a bunch of lively colors. You can see how we did that whole project right here. We have also since brought in custom shelves to the closet and built in a desk – so again, we have to shoot new photos and share an updated post soon (new drinking game ever time I say that in this post…).

The Outdoor Shower

We were not quite sure what to make of this space when we picked up the house because it felt fairly grody with so much grime going on…

… but after some pressure washing, resealing the cedar with teak oil, and adding lights, plants, and new shower fixtures, it has in fact turned into one of our go-to spaces. The whole family prefers this shower to our indoor one! You can see more of it in this post and we simply kept adding more plants from there (so you will see that it is a lot more lush in this updated photo below):

While we are talking about the outdoor shower, the area that leads to it is kind of like a covered side porch, and this is what it began out looking like.

It has come a LONG WAY, thanks to removing the mildewed screening around it, replacing the rotten floor, rebuilding the railing with a modern horizontal design (like the one we brought in up on the second floor deck) and a whole lot of paint. And for anyone wondering what our secret is to avoiding mosquitoes without screens – it is that ceiling fan we brought in! They hate flying into moving air, so when we are out there we flip it on and they do not bother us. You can read more about our side porch update and how we built the hanging daybed.

We also have a covered porch on the other side of the house, which looked like this when we picked up the house:

Now looks like this, thanks to plenty of paint and a hanging swing that both kids enjoy to lounge on (ok, us too). You can read more about this space here.

We also brought in a fence to create more of a private courtyard and made a cozy little firepit zone from a formerly unused area that felt exposed to the street. This is the before:

And here is what it looks like now that there is a fence to define that area and make a pleasant little private courtyard:

Here is another angle from before we painted the house, redid the railings, and brought in the fence to create this new outdoor space of ours.

It used to simply be an area where we never spent any time, and now it gets so much use. We can access this through a gate in the fence near our front porch, or from the wall of glass doors in our bedroom, so it is truly pleasant to hang out at night and make s’mores with the kids – or sit outside with a cold beverage after they are tucked into bed.

And in one of our longest-running updates to date (it took about a year from when we applied for the permit to completion!), we also brought in a pool to this formerly weed-riddled part of our yard. Here is the best before picture I can find, which was taken right after we brought in that fence on the right, but before we painted anything:

And here is what it looks like now that we painted all the fences to match and brought in a pool with a retaining wall and three fountains that sound better than any white noise machine we have ever had (it is so soothing!). We also brought in a pool deck with some spots to lounge and planted plenty of leafy landscaping that’ll fill in a bunch over the next few years. Oh and adding some more big plants to that large bed behind the retaining wall is next on the list:

So that is our progress so far on this house, about a year and a few months into living here. We cannot wait to take some updated photos and share the other ways that this house evolves for our family over time. In the meantime, you can check out these related pages for even more info, details, project walkthroughs, etc:

• If you are wondering what paint color we have used or where we got a certain item of furniture (or a specific curtain or planter pot, etc), please check out the Shop Our House page for all of that info.
• To read about how we feel about so majorly downsizing, and what it has taught us, here is a post full of details.
• To see our house all decorated for the holidays, here is a post with plenty of photos.
• And to see before & afters of our last house, here is a page full of those. You can also see our beach house’s before & after page, as well as one that we made for the duplex that we renovated.

P.S. And to see the whole makeover of our house in chronological order, this category has you covered!