First of all, I want to apologize that pictures of the little house* are always so dark and fuzzy. It really is dark there: lots of wood and not many windows. But I always seem to be trying to get pictures on overcast days, which doesn't help matters.
I thought it was about time for another update. Since I last posted, we've put down flooring in two of the four rooms that need it! Having real floors in the house feels like such an improvement and an accomplishment that I can't even explain it. Whenever I walk down there to do something, I find myself just admiring the floors, ha. :) We're trying to save as much money as possible, so we decided to try to install the floors ourselves. Not going to lie, I was very hesitant at first but I'm so glad we did! So far we've saved at least $700 in installation costs.
We used floating vinyl planks in the bedroom, which click and lock together. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to install, though it was hard physically. (Crawling around for about six hours...I was sore for days afterwards.) But it was so satisfying to see the floor gradually coming together that it was hard to stop once you got going!
Because of how unlevel and imperfect and pieced together the subflooring is in the rest of the house, that flooring was only an option in the bedroom. This past week we put down the kitchen floor, which was adhesive vinyl planks. Again, I was wary of adhesive pieces of flooring, but it worked out really well. The kitchen was about half the size of the bedroom, so it went down quickly. (But while the bedroom is basically done, we still have several more things to do in the kitchen...replace the countertop, hang a cabinet, move back in the appliances and island, etc.) We're planning on using the exact same flooring in the living room that we used in the kitchen.
Besides those major updates, we've been doing some random painting and staining to spruce things up. I'm so proud of that bathroom cabinet. We almost just replaced it (because we're going to have to replace the sink anyway), but I'm glad we kept it. I painted it dark brown (it was light gray originally) and changed the knobs, and it looks brand new. (Look at the state of the subfloor in the bathroom! That's what we're dealing with. And that's after we had the rotten spots replaced, ha.) And I've been planting flowers. It doesn't even bother me that they'll be dead by the time we move in this fall, because they already just make the house look so cozy and homey.
So two floors out of four...we're halfway there! The living room will be a big job but hopefully it'll look amazing. It makes me so happy to see real progress on the little house, and it will be that more satisfying when it's finished and it's our home to know that we did so much of the work ourselves. (By the way, I do post pretty regular progress on Instagram. More often than here, unfortunately.)
Other things have been happening too. Wedding planning, obviously, since the big day is now less than 3 months away! (What???) I'm making little bits of progress here and there. Within the next couple of weeks I'm going to sew my niece's flower girl dress, which I'm excited about. Some knitting has been happening, though not much. I haven't touched my cardigan in probably a month, and I feel like I've been knitting on the same pair of socks for my entire life. :) But I'm trying to knit some more baby and children's hats for craft shows this fall. It probably wasn't the best idea to attempt that with everything else going on, but I can use the extra money (more this year than ever!) and I do enjoy selling at those.
*When the house is empty, my family always refers to it as "the little house." It's on the same property as my parents' house, so that makes it easier to differentiate between the two, ha. But when someone is living there, it's referred to as that person's house.