Home Projects for 2025

It’s the year of home projects at our house! Now that the kids are a little bit older and I have a little more mental space, I’m excited to start tackling some projects that we’ve been talking about doing for the last year+. The list is lengthy, but there’s a reason for that.

We bought our current home when I was pregnant with our first baby in early 2020. We didn’t know how many kids we’d have or where we’d ultimately want to end up in the Raleigh area, so we looked at this home as a “starter home”. It had more than enough space for our little family of 2 adults + 1 (almost) baby and we knew that we could have at least 1-2 more kids here. Fast forward 5 years and we have those three kids in less time than we expected! Towards the middle of last year, we started feeling like we were outgrowing this home a bit. There are things that we would love to have that we don’t or can’t have here, like a flat backyard for the kids to run and play! We started lightly house hunting…mostly out of curiosity to see what we could get within our budget. Plus, it’s so fun to go to open houses! After months of truly “just looking”, we found a home that we fell in love with. It had all the things we’d put on our list of “dreams”. We went to see it five times and started seriously considering making the next step towards moving. But, as we got closer to those legitimate first steps, like preparing our home to be put up for sale, there was just something not sitting right for both Mike and myself. It was confusing – we found the dream house in a great location…why aren’t we jumping at this opportunity?

We prayed, thought, and talked about it. A lot. And ultimately just felt like it wasn’t the right time. I’m not entirely sure why, but we both felt at peace listening to that inner whisper saying to pause on moving. While it was disappointing for a couple days (because you know I had already been decorating this other house in my head and imagining our life there), I very quickly got excited about all the things we could do to our current home to make it function better for us. I love a house project, so knowing that we would feel comfortable putting some money into our current house to make it fit within the current dream was very exciting! Plus, having more time to save money and really refine our wishlist for our next home is never a bad thing. We’ve given ourselves a timeline for when we can start considering house hunting again, so that is in the back of our heads. And maybe we will just stay in this house for a very long time, who knows!

So that’s how we got to this list of home projects. When we decided to pass on moving, we also decided to put some money into our home now to make it function better for our family. We decided to finally do the things that we’ve thought about doing because we’re committed to staying here for (at least) a few more years, so it makes sense!

Here’s what we’ve got on the list for house projects this year:

• Paint and style our entryway (almost done! Just waiting on the rug I ordered)
• Extending our laminate flooring into our guest room and primary bedroom (scheduled for early February!)
• Converting our guest room into a guest room/office for Mike (in process!)
• Doing our laundry room (it still just has one wire shelf and no cabinets!)
• Converting the nook in the playroom into a proper closet
• Turning my office into a space that I can film in
• Doing something with our backyard (this will be the biggest project, but something we’ve talked about all 5 years we’ve lived here! It’s time!)
• Painting (an easy project that can make a huge difference)
• Swapping out our kitchen island pendant and adding sconces to our porch window wall
• Refresh art/decor around the house (some things I’ve had and used for 7+ years — which there’s nothing wrong with, but I would love a refresh!)

There are some other smaller tasks I’d like to do, like doing a big pantry clean out and editing and re-roganizing my decor closet and linen closet. But I’m excited to be able to use my creativity and do something that I truly love to do with all these projects. And, of course, I’ll be taking you along as we work on everything!