Island pendants, stairs, and more!

We were preeeeeeetty sick of working on the house after our last post (and we had a bunch of other stuff going on in our lives.) So we took a nice long break from doing anything for a while. We DID decorate the house for our first Christmas here, though!

 

Yes, that is a second, tiny Christmas tree in the family room.

For Christmas, we bought ourselves a few rugs. This white geometric one is so cozy in our bedroom:

And this superplush gray rug for the family room:

Then Lu and I (mostly Lu) installed these beautiful, simple pendants over our island. They go so well with the Sputnik light over our kitchen table. It’s so awesome to have these instead of three holes in the drywall over the island!

Also, our kitchen is famous – my mom got me these microfiber cloths for Christmas, and there’s a picture of a kitchen that looks so similar to ours on the back!

Lu also installed a Nest, which he had been drooling over since they came out. It’s great! We love being able to conserve as much heat as we can – and being able to turn up the heat when we’re on our way home, because it connects to our phones!

This cutie was pretty excited about patching the wall beautifully and installing his favorite new gadget!

We also bought this sweet new lamp for the family room – it matches the vases we have in the living room and makes us look like we have our shit together:

 

Lu made quick work of patching up the trim holes in the trim above our kitchen cabinets and the baseboards on the first floor. They’re all patched and painted and it really makes the first floor look a lot more finished! (Meanwhile, I painted 5 closet doors. I’ll spare you the pictures, even though painted white doors are terribly exciting.)

Lovely baseboards above and clean, smooth crown trim below!

A really big impact change was that we got the kickplates of our stairs painted. We were going to do it ourselves, but the fear of destroying the beautiful wood treads was greater than our desire to save money. Here’s a before shot of the stairs:

And here’s after they were painted!

The foyer is so much brighter now, and the white really makes the wood pop. I never would have thought to paint the kickplates, but Lu wanted it, and I’m glad that we went with his judgement on this.

We ordered our pantry doors (finally!) and they should arrive at the end of February. Cullom will be coming down then to install them and work on our master bathroom. We’ve still got a list about a mile long of things we want to do on the house, but it’s nice to see some of them get checked off. We’re not nearly as sick of doing house things as we were back in November. The little break has restored our drive, and we’re definitely back to being weekend reno warriors!