Well, y’all. The studio bathroom is pretty much finished. I still need to hang the artwork, deal with finishing out the awkward electrical outlet, and do a few paint touchups. It’s always those last few nagging detail projects that get me bogged down. I’ll try to get the pictures taken today, but I won’t make any promises. It might be Wednesday before I can show you the final bathroom.
Until then, let’s talk about the back of our house and our back patio. I don’t show this area of our house much (if ever) because, quite frankly, it’s ugly. Y’all know I’ve wanted to tear down the sunroom and build an addition back here for the last ten years. But here we are, in 2026, and we still have the sunroom.
When we had the new siding installed and painted, I had them stop at the sunroom because I didn’t want to waste money on a room that I thought would be gone by now. So not only is it ugly, but it also sticks out like a sore thumb because it’s a completely different color.
But now that we’ll be keeping the sunroom for a while longer, I’m thinking it might be time to go ahead and paint it. I still don’t want to put new siding on it. That will feel like a complete defeat to me, and I’m not willing to give up on my dream of an addition and give into defeat just yet. But a couple of gallons of paint? I can do that. And since I’m about to turn my attention to some outdoor projects for a while, this might be the perfect time to do that.
I’m also thinking about finally getting rid of this awkward fireplace planter combo. We’ve never used the fireplace, and I wouldn’t even feel safe using it with that tree so close to it. And the planters are falling apart and act as a weed factory right now. I’ve wanted to get rid of them for so long now, but I always thought I’d put off any projects back here until we get the addition built. But I’m tired of waiting.
I think with a coat of paint on the sunroom and those planters and fireplace removed, the back of our house could look…decent. It won’t look great as long as that sunroom is there, but decent is better than what it is now.
And removing that planter and fireplace would go a long way towards opening up that area visually and making the whole back yard look and feel more usable.
Right now, we don’t even use our back patio at all. Since the sunroom has been used as a storage room for so long, we basically avoid it altogether, which means that the patio isn’t easily accessible. So I use the patio for projects (I’ve painted many a cabinet door out there over the years), and that’s where I gather all of my old partially empty paint cans that can’t be thrown away in the regular trash and have to be taken in for recycling.
But now that the plan is to actually use the sunroom as a home gym (which will hopefully be temporary, but I have no idea how long that will be), that means that this patio will be more accessible to us. So I’m adding these things to my list of the outdoor projects that I’d like to tackle. I don’t think it’ll ever look great as long as that sunroom is still there, but I can imagine the area with the siding painted to match the rest of the house, the planters and fireplace gone, and the patio set up with a cute outdoor seating area that we can actually enjoy.
I think the time has come to stop putting off using our back yard until after we’ve built the addition. That has been my mindset all this time, but I really want to get our whole house, including the back yard, to where we can actually use and enjoy it without putting it off for a dream that seems to get more out of reach with each passing day. I don’t want to hang all of our hopes on something that may not happen for another few years…or may not happen at all. I want to finish our house, as it is now, and actually live in it.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
