Inspiration image via.

Something we’ve talked about a lot over the past few months has been our home renovation. Yes, we are renovating big time over here! Our bedroom is getting an addition that includes more space in the actual bedroom and waaaaay more space for a walk-in closet. Our dining room is expanding too! We are adding about 5 or 6 feet to it by relocating our laundry room (that used to back up to our dining room) to our master closet. We are also refinishing all the floors in the house, updating our kitchen cabinetry, and a partridge in a pear tree. Ha! The one thing we haven’t mentioned is the new covered patio area we are adding to our yard. The most exciting part is that we’ll have access to it from both the dining room and the bedroom. Woot woot!

Some progress photos…

French doors are in! ^^

We all know Phoenix gets incredibly hot. How hot is it?! It’s so hot that when you walk out of your house, it feels like you just entered an oven and then immediately got slapped in the face. I’m not kidding. It’s true! Buuuuut, people often forget that from late October until mid April, our weather is perfection. Just about every day is sunny, humidity-free, and prime for some patio sitting. We spend a lot of time having meals or sipping coffee on the outdoor patio areas of some of our favorite restaurants in town. We love being outside, and we love eating (DUH!), so it’s a pretty perfect combo. The more time we spent on these patios, the more we realized how important it was for us to create an outdoor space right off of our house that was inviting, comfortable and a place we could have a meal with friends and family.

Check out this awesome rendering our assistant Ali put together for us. We’ve been planning out the space together and think we nailed down what we really want to do with it. Kind of crazy to think the photos above will turn into this, but here’s what we’re adding:

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1 – FULLY COVERED PATIO
Phoenix has just about 300 sunny days per year, so shaded areas are key! While, we hate the fact that it does block some of the natural light that would enter our home, it’s just simply necessary here in Phoenix. Too much sun will make anyone go mad. 😉 We’re also throwing around the idea of the addition of misters — still waiting on a quote from our contractor for that one. We’re thinking it could make a huge difference.

2 – ACCESS FROM MAIN HOUSE
We’re soooo pumped to be adding French doors to both our dining room and bedroom for easy access to our patio. Since we moved into our house in 2016, our biggest wish was to be able to just step outside first thing in the morning from our room, and we can’t wait for that to be a reality.

3 – THE SOUND OF MUSIC
We have and love our Sonos speakers that are scattered around our house, so we decided we should mount a few on the patio too. I can’t think of anything better than mornings outside listening to our favorite jazz records each morning, so we’re super excited to have music out their whenever we need it…and boy, do we need it! 😉

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4 – LOUNGE HERE, EAT THERE
With the new patio space, we want to have a space to chill and a place to eat under the same roof. We’ll be doing a lot of both, so we want to create two different, but cohesive sections for us to enjoy with friends and family.

The patio area and main house are being worked on simultaneously and should be wrapped up (hopefully) by September/October. That will be perfect timing for this Phoenix weather to play along and give us that perfect weather we mentioned earlier. Until then, we’ll be peeking out our guest house window counting down the days… Ha!

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