Our favorite diy, renovations and home updates- 2020 in hindsight

Wow! Like most of you, I am welcoming 2021 with my arms spread wide open! It was certainly a wild ride and a year filled with BIG changes for me personally-we made the move to the Lake House full time AND finished the renovations (try renovating an entire house during a quarantine!) at the Airbnb house which started a new business for us! Looking back I can’t believe how much we actually accomplished when I feel like all we did was binge watch Netflix! :) I’m looking at you, Tiger King.

We turned a distressed property into an Airbnb.

The move to the lake house happened in August after an unexpected layoff (hubby) and the company I had spent a decade working for closed permanently in May. We had both been working remotely from the lake all year so we felt we were prepared for the move but it was still a huge change for us (it is going very well and the job changes turned out to be a good thing). Once we were here full time we realized we needed a better space to entertain winter visitors (although we didn’t have any idea it would be a full year before we had any!) so we decided to renovate the basement.

We added a spot to play board games and cards.

We now have plenty of space for the pool table.

With the two big renovations, we had plenty of DIY’s on our plate last year. The two favorites on the blog were both from the Airbnb reno. The tiled entryway had the most views. It was TIME-consuming to get it laid out but our Airbnb guests love it! You can see more here.

The kitchen vent hood was the DIY that readers of the blog and on Instagram had the most comments and questions about.

Hmmm….now that I am recapping, we were very productive despite the lockdown! We also added landscaping to two of our rental houses, but I was sidetracked by these little guys (born 5 weeks apart) and too busy to get it photographed before the snow fell!

Both of my daughters had their first babies in 2020.

After taking the holidays off this week I am taking a few days to clean and organize as well as make a and plan for projects in 2021. I’d love to here about any upcoming projects you are looking forward to.

During the holidays we had a plumbing leak and this happened: