In the last 5 years, the project that has brought me the most joy in The Someday Home is definitely our back deck.

One of our main reasons for purchasing The Someday Home was the spacious lot that came with it. We sit on a decent strip of land (it actually used to be a cornfield), and when we first looked at the house, we envisioned our kids playing baseball in that backyard, all summer long. We were in love, except…

An obstacle we continually encounter is that this house was actually not built here- it was rolled in from a neighboring small town where we believe it was built 40-50 years ago. The fact that we have the capability to do such a thing is really awesome, however, it has been the source of some issues here.

Because it wasn’t built on this lot, the way it was set up didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Our front door faced the highway rather than our driveway, and we didn’t really have a back door to access our large backyard- a pretty big inconvenience for a family with a 2½-year-old and a baby on the way. We wanted to be able to access our backyard without hauling a toddler, newborn, and monster dog all the way around the house, so we knew something had to change. Enter our plans for a… you guessed it, deck.

Before

Unfortunately, I don’t have any great before shots of this room. It was too small to even get a very good camera angle!

Owen lovingly named this room “The Grandma Room” when we first moved in. It was an awkward little bedroom between the kitchen and the bathroom. Easily the smallest room in the house, this room took the award for the most entrances/exits at THREE. Yep. Three ways to get into/out of this room. It was ridiculously small and not very useful for anything, aside from housing the full-sized air mattress my mom slept on when she would come to visit. It did serve as my paint room/office for a brief stint, but we eventually decided to make it our dining room when we took down the wall between it and the kitchen, and then the other wall between it and the living room, to completely open up our floor plan. (Although the deck has been my favorite project so far, tearing out those walls was definitely the most transformative project. We took our home from awkward and divided to open and flowing).

I loved the idea of being able to look out at my backyard from large sliding glass doors as I drank my coffee, and to this day, it’s my favorite view in our house.

During

We started outside; as eager as I was to get my sliding doors in, we didn’t want to tear a massive hole in the house until we had a solid platform to stand on.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the actual process of this project, other than it was hot. 

Also, I remember being really nervous about tearing out our window and putting in our door. Luckily, Dad and Nate started that process while I was dropping Owen off at school, so I didn’t have time to freak out about it.

Yay! We have a deck!

The (mostly) finished deck! This project took place 3 years ago and I can’t imagine our house without it now. The big doors let in so much natural light, and we have easy access to our backyard. It was a lot of hard work, sweat, and swearing, but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

Have you taken on any big projects in your home? I would love to hear about them here in the comments, or over on my facebook page!