10 months ago, I wrote the first post on this blog that mentioned our upcoming renovation. We’d been saving up for five years at that point and had a decent idea of how much money we could borrow to supplement our cash to finance the work, but we hadn’t actually talked budgets with anyone yet.

Not for lack of trying, mind you - I’d reached out to a few design/build firms to get a sense of how much what we wanted to do would cost so we could have a savings goal, but none would give me an estimate without hiring them to draw up preliminary plans. So we decided on our own and, when we reached it last spring, I started vetting firms.

Just before we moved from our apartment into this house, we bought a very stylish Crate and Barrel Parsons dining table with black steel legs and a glass top from a friend ready for something new. It is, it turns out, not a great table when you have young kids; while the top is easy to wipe clean, every spill seeps and every crumb dives into gap between the top of the frame and the glass.

I can’t wait to pass it on to its next owner.

I’ve always wanted to be a candle person: you know, the kind who always has a flame flickering in a pretty jar on her kitchen counter and whose home smells recognizably welcoming.

But it turns out I don’t actually like most candle scents (in my own house, at least)…

… I decided to embrace the darkness when we first decorated in 2018: we painted the dining room Benjamin Moore’s Evening Dove, a charcoal-tinged navy. As Homes and Gardens observes, “Instead of trying to create the illusion of light (which is always going to be tricky), color experts recommend leaning into the low light and creating a cozy, dark, and cocooning space.” We get tons of compliments on it - and have had a few friends actually use it for their own homes after seeing it in ours, which is the most flattering thing ever - but I just found out that Jon wants to go lighter after we renovate.

… So there we have it: the plan for Claire’s big girl bedroom, repurposing items from around the house as much as possible but buying new where needed. Of course, this is predicated on the structural changes we want to make to the back of the house being included in phase one of the renovation - cross your fingers for us, please!