This post was made in collaboration with Chase Freedom Unlimited, all opinions are my own.
This past month of home restoration has been the rollercoaster you all had warned us about. Colorful mold lurked under the wallpapered plaster walls, rot caused by a leaking pipe from the top floor ruined a quarter of our 120-year-old heart pine in the kitchen, and the biggest surprise, our fireplace is actually a fake and doesn’t have an exhaust so the dreams of reopening it in the parlor has been squashed.
As negative as this sounds, conversely, we’ve had a lot of fun using our Chase Freedom Unlimited card to shop for all the final touches of the house and we’re getting closer to our modern southern kitchen being ready in a few short weeks. We had a few “date nights in” where we scrolled through our favorite online retailers and dreamt up how certain light fixtures would look in each room. You may remember the poll we hosted on Instagram of what light sconces you liked best in the bathrooms; that’s where those picks came from! We’ve been using our cash back credit card to make all of our final purchases so that we have some extra funds to use for anything we forgot about along the way.
I believe the general rule of thumb is that every renovation takes twice as long and costs a third more than you anticipate spending. We’re nearing the twice as long part of that saying, but luckily, we’re staying close to our budget thanks to strategic shopping and reaping the rewards from our Chase Freedom Unlimited cash back credit card.
I explained in this post how we were shopping for our fixtures over the 4th of July holiday weekend, and that saved us a considerable chunk of change while buying the lights we wanted. We got even more savings on top of that by using our Chase Freedom Unlimited card, which gives us 1.5% cash back on every purchase.
While we still have a ways to go, we are looking forward to the next steps! The drywall should be going up soon, so we’ve started selecting paint colors for the house and the most important next step will be picking out a backsplash!
I’ll be sharing those updates in the next post!
