It’s arduous for me to consider that after 9.5 years of engaged on this home, I’m down to simply two extra rooms (not together with the longer term addition, in fact) that must be completed — the house health club and my studio. If issues go as deliberate, I’ll have all the rooms inside the home completed earlier than we hit that ten-year mark in August. It’s been fairly the journey! And having the ability to look again from the place this home began to the place it’s now, there are a number of DIY residence enchancment tasks that I feel gave me essentially the most bang for my buck. These are tasks that took a reasonably plain home and gave it a extra customized look, and this stuff will be integrated into any residence rework to create a extra customized residence.
Bigger and Taller Window & Door Casings
Once we purchased our home, it had very commonplace door and window casings with the skinny molding and 45-degree cuts on the corners. Right here’s a have a look at two of the bed room doorways within the hallway with their commonplace casings.
From the very starting, I made a decision that since I used to be going to be redoing each single window and door casing in the home, I wished to provide you with a design that might be beefier and prettier than that. And it was an enormous bonus that the brand new design didn’t require any 45-degree angle cuts! Each single board within the new door and window casing design required a straight 90-degree minimize.
It actually doesn’t get any simpler than this! Every door casing requires two 1″ x 4″ items, two 1″ x 2″ items, and one 1″ x 6″ piece. And that’s it!
Home windows require the one further piece underneath the window sill. And, in fact, should you don’t have a large window sill, that will must be changed to accommodate the width of the 2 1″ x 4″ items of the window casing. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless fairly easy!
If you need extra particulars on methods to create this model of window and door casing, you’ll find that information right here:
Including Cased Openings
It’s nonetheless amazes me to look again and see how our kitchen appeared after we purchased the home. It simply felt so tiny and closed in, primarily as a result of it was! 😀 The room has no home windows, so it will get no direct daylight. And despite the fact that it had three doorways into the room, it felt so closed in, type of like attempting to prepare dinner in a shoe field.
I made some fairly vital modifications in right here, and one of many first issues I did was take away many of the wall that separated the kitchen from the room subsequent to it, which the earlier homeowners referred to as the den, and what we name the breakfast room, and create a really massive cased opening between the 2 rooms.
The unique kitchen was additionally fully closed off to the entrance lounge, which is on the opposite facet of the wall to the fitting within the photograph under…
So after doing the 11-foot-wide cased opening, I felt assured that I might do that one as properly.
It’s actually exceptional what an enormous distinction these two cased openings made. The kitchen remains to be the identical small footprint that it was initially. It’s nonetheless the identical 9′ 9″ x 14′ 4″ kitchen that it’s at all times been. However now it feels about double that dimension. Simply having the ability to get some pure daylight into the room from the entrance lounge home windows and the breakfast room home windows made all of the distinction on the planet.
DIYing a cased opening can appear very daunting, particularly should you don’t perceive the construction of your house (i.e., whether or not or not that wall is a load bearing wall, and what must be carried out IF the wall is load bearing). If you happen to don’t know, please don’t begin pulling down partitions. Earlier than you begin reducing into partitions, get a trusted contractor to come back to your own home and inform you if the wall is load bearing.
Ours was load bearing, and I did DIY each cased openings myself (with assist from my brother on the large one), however earlier than I even thought-about taking up this mission myself, I had a trusted contractor come over and provides me detailed step-by-step directions on methods to do the entire mission from starting to finish. And I’m so glad I did it!
Constructing A Hearth (Even If It’s Not Actual!)
The very first time I walked into this home and noticed the entrance room, I knew there must be a fire between the 2 facet home windows. That house simply appeared excellent for one!
And, in fact, I knew I wished to DIY one thing. I didn’t want it to be an actual, wooden burning hearth. I simply wished it to be fairly and add some architectural element to the room.
It was an extended course of, and took me a number of tries to get the fireside to it’s ultimate (present) look, however I DIYed the entire thing from starting to finish.
You’ll be able to see my strategy of constructing this hearth (and tweaking the look, which went from craftsman model to conventional model over time) on the following hyperlinks:
Constructing A Wall (Separating One Massive Room Into Two Rooms)
Along with taking down a wall, making cased openings, and opening up rooms to one another, one other factor I did that I consider actually improved the perform of a part of our home was to construct a wall to show the lengthy room that the earlier homeowners referred to as a den into two separate rooms with very completely different features. That is what the again of the room appeared like in relation to the kitchen after we purchased the home…
And right here’s what it appear like now with a wall separating the room into two completely different areas, with the again space behind the wall as a walk-in pantry, and the world on the entrance of the room as a breakfast room (at present getting used as a sitting room, but it surely’ll ultimately return to being a breakfast room).
Constructing a wall is tremendous straightforward! Since there’s no wall there to start with, which means you don’t have to fret about something being load-bearing. You might need to get an electrician to come back out and add some new shops (should you can’t do this your self), however including a wall might add an enormous quantity of useful house to your house.
Including Fake Pocket Doorways
Generally including pocket doorways simply isn’t possible. In my case, I wished pocket doorways in the back of the music room, however that’s the again exterior wall of the home (the sunroom was added later), in order that wall is carrying an entire lot of weight.
There was no means I wished to chop into that wall and DIY some pocket door pockets contained in the partitions, or attempt to determine how what sort of load bearing beam can be wanted to span such a big opening.
So as an alternative, I left the wall as is, hung the doorways on the wall to perform as barn doorways, after which constructed bookcases flanking the doorways. These bookcases sit a number of inches away from the wall, and the house between the wall and the again of the bookcases create the “pocket” into which the doorways slide open.
So functionally, they’re pocket doorways, however they’re not true built-in pocket doorways the place the pockets are contained in the partitions. However I used to be capable of get the look and the perform of pocket doorways with out the large value of making a large opening requiring an enormous load bearing header in an exterior wall.
If you wish to see the DIY particulars of this mission, you’ll find these hyperlinks under:
I’ve carried out a ton of tasks on this home, and so they’ve all added as much as a really customized “Kristi” look. But when I had to decide on the 5 issues that I feel have added the most important bang for the buck, these 5 can be on the prime of the checklist.
Addicted 2 Adorning is the place I share my DIY and adorning journey as I rework and beautify the 1948 fixer higher that my husband, Matt, and I purchased in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do bodily work, so I do the vast majority of the work on the home on my own. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll be part of me on my DIY and adorning journey! If you wish to observe my tasks and progress, you’ll be able to subscribe under and have every new publish delivered to your e-mail inbox. That means you’ll by no means miss a factor!
