What The House Looks Like Post Reno and another Thrift Find!

I promised some pictures now that the reno is done with only a few tiny things left to do.  Here we go - beautiful new quartz countertops, subway grey tile back-splash, and all new stainless steel appliances.  You can't see the dishwasher as it is on the other side of the breakfast bar.

The subway tile looks great with the counter and new appliances

To the right you can see where our utility/laundry/dog bathing/freezer area is.  We made no changes except added a few more shelves. It has a pocket door so if you are doing laundry and it gets too noisy you can close the door - or if Buddy tries escaping bath-time same thing, you can lock him in.

New flooring replacing offwhite lowgrade carpet, new 1880s treasure cupboard

I hated having carpet in the dining room - the laminate is Armstrong commercial grade that is hopefully made to stand up to both dog and humans.  I love the way it looks.  Our new/old display cabinet we bought in the fall looks great in the bump out.  As you can see, we have an open concept living space with tons of windows which make it difficult to get decent photos.

New living room sectional - our old area rug and footstool work with it

In the living room only the old sofa/loveseat combo went and we bought this sectional.  The area rug and footstool we have had for 12 plus years.  I am not entirely sure the rug and sofa go together but we are keeping the rug as have always loved it and it has lots of life left in it.

New metal air grates (old were plastic)

One of the smallest things about our reno that I love the most is changing out the plastic vent covers to metal.  We should have done that when we first bought the house but we replaced every single one including rooms which were not renoed.  We bought these at home depot in packs of 3, I think they were about $12 each but well worth it.  The flooring company was suggesting very expensive wood vent covers - I quickly vetoed that after we had a quick look at a few cheaper options.

One of 3 new lights and our new slate house number (old ones paint was coming off down siding)

We sprung for new house numbers with our three new exterior lights (2 front, 1 side).  All 3 old lights and house numbers were experiencing weather related issues.  Hopefully these will last longer than 7 years which is how old the house was.

New Back-splash and Countertops

We kept the old kitchen sink and hardware which were pretty decent but the new counter/back-splash goes pretty nicely with them.  I was poor at taking before shots so the only one you see is our old exterior light - very weather beaten.  The rest of these photos were taken from the realtor shots which I posted previously on the blog but you can see how much the house has changed.  It definitely reflects our taste now.

Old Exterior Light - weatherbeaten

Realtor Photo - Prior Owners furniture Living Room

Realtor Photo-Dining/Living area (prior owners stuff)

Kitchen Previously (Realtor photo from prior owner)

We had budgeted $20,000 for the reno and that is what it came in (minus the new furniture).  We purposefully bought a smaller house that cost $100,000 less than others we had looked at and put some wanted upgrades in.  If we didn't have the cash which we set aside when we bought it we wouldn't have done any of this - but better to do the upgrades now so we can enjoy it for the next 20 years versus doing renos just before you sell like most people do.  We put matching quartz countertops in both bathrooms but need to frame out the mirrors and do some painting in there - spring projects still to come.  I also want to put up drapes around the patio door since we took down the vertical blinds.  Our two living room lamps have seen better days - You can't tell but both shades are cracked due to teenage wrestling matches in our previous home (**or possibly teenager versus Dad, but he'll never tell).

The thrifting gods were good to me Saturday as I had heard my new favorite thrift store was running low on donations so I dropped off two grocery-bags full of clothes there and I found these - four 2 gallon glass storage containers with plastic tops for $4 each or $16 total.  I quickly scooped them up as have been looking for larger food-safe containers ever since I bought the 18kg (40 lbs) of rice in September.  I also bought 10kg (22lbs) of flour last week at Costco for $6.99 so needed extra room for that.  They fit in the bottom of one of the corner cupboard lazy susan's just perfectly and now all the extra rice and flour is tucked away. I shall never have food storage issues again!  According to the stickers on the bottom I believe they came from a restaurant supply place out of Vancouver.  It seems a bit extreme to buy in these large quantities but that is how I meet our monthly food budget - by getting the absolute lowest price on things we use often.

Have a great week everyone!