The Art of Renovation: A Personal and Inspiring Journey

As I reflect on my journey as a homeowner and renovator, I am reminded of the importance of creating spaces that inspire and empower individuals to be their best selves. For me, this journey began with the renovation of my children's bedrooms, where I aimed to create a haven that would not only match their unique personalities but also foster their creativity and growth.

My youngest son Samson, in particular, had a small room that was crying out for some TLC. He has a big personality, and I wanted his space to reflect that. My wife, who is incredibly artistic, took charge of creating the mural on the wall. Her freehand skills are truly impressive, and the result was breathtaking. When it came time to add more depth and dimension to the room, I stepped in and painted the baseboards and doors with a matching pink color. The contrast between the bold mural and the soft pastel walls created a visually stunning effect that Samson adored.

Another son, Jonah, aged 10 at the time, was involved in the design process as well. He had expressed a desire for blue as his main color, which I agreed to, but then encouraged him to choose an accent color that would complement it. The result was a vibrant yellow that added a burst of energy to the room. When he opened his closet doors, he was greeted by a bright mustard yellow that became a focal point in the space. While some might view this as a bold or even overwhelming choice, I couldn't help but admire the way it tied everything together.

As the renovation progressed, I found myself focusing on creating a sense of cohesion and flow throughout the room. This meant selecting furniture pieces that were both functional and aesthetically pleasing. My wife has always been drawn to mid-century modern styles, which resonated with me as well. When it came time to choose a statement piece for the room, I opted for a beautiful archway that would not only add visual interest but also create a sense of calm.

The transformation was nothing short of magical. As the renovation drew to a close, my family gathered around to admire our handiwork. We all agreed that this space had become an extension of ourselves – warm, inviting, and full of personality. The renovation process had been a journey of self-discovery as much as it was a creative outlet.

A Key Lesson in Budgeting

One of the most significant lessons I learned during this renovation was the importance of budgeting. With limited funds at my disposal, I had to prioritize and make choices that would not break the bank. This meant scouring for affordable materials, such as IKEA cabinets, which I painted with clearance paint found at Home Depot. By keeping costs low, I was able to update this entire space without sacrificing quality or style.

The Power of Paint

Paint is a versatile tool that can completely transform a room. Not only can it add color and vibrancy but also create a sense of continuity and cohesion. In Samson's bedroom, the faux board treatment with chalkboard paint added a fun and interactive element to his space. The results were well worth the $20 investment in a quart of chalk paint.

A Home that Reflects Our Family

As I look back on this renovation journey, I am reminded of the impact it has had on our family's life. This home is more than just walls and furniture; it's a reflection of our values, personality, and love for one another. It's a space where we can grow, learn, and create memories that will last a lifetime.

The renovation process may have been daunting at times, but the end result has been well worth the effort. As I continue to evolve this home and make it our own, I am reminded of the importance of embracing change and not being afraid to take risks. After all, as the Father of the Bride once said, "This house is warm in the winter, it's cool in the summer, and it looks spectacular with Christmas lights." This quote captures the essence of our home perfectly – a space that is full of love, warmth, and character.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi I'm Kyle Ortiz and this is my renovation Story come on in I've been diying for a long time but when I moved into this house I wanted to document that process and so I created an Instagram page and I started sharing all the projects that I do here at the house every project I did I recorded and everything that I shared people liked it and I started to grow this following I think it combined with not having a lot of money and kind of having the necessity to make a home that fit our growing family and then just kind of figuring out how to do it and over the last few years it's really kind of become my whole job it's become I left my normal job to do this full-time I'm all self-taught I learned how to do pretty much everything that I've done in this house and in previous houses from YouTube so there's this whole full circle moment where now I am teaching people online how to do projects in their homes when I have for the last you know 10 years been learning from people online how to do projects in their homes I'm a DIY dad and a full-time content creator I live here with my family my wife Amanda and our three children Jonah Emma and Samson Jonah is 10 Emma is seven and Samson is four I'm just like every Dad I'm trying to juggle being a husband and taking care of my kids and all the normal parts of life while I'm renovating this house one room at a time this is the the kitchen and this is probably my biggest like lowcost high impact renovation that I've done it was basically super brown it had like dark brown Cabinetry had this like stacked stone backsplash like the whole house looked like Olive Garden lots of dark wood lots of dark flooring it was just like a time capsule of 2013 like it looked like that year if it was personified not current at all the floors were a big part of that there were this really dark laminate that matched the espresso brown cabinets and then dark brown walls so I replaced all the flooring with this really nice engineered hardwood and I went through the entire lower level of the house and it just has brightened up the entire space so much when I moved into this house I probably had done floors like three times or four times but when I did these floors I really really perfected the way that I lay flooring and I probably could do it like as a job just saying I really love the floors actually they're my favorite the cabinets were in really really good shape they just had that horrible horrible stain that dark espresso stain so I just gave him a Fresh coat of paint green was the color that I liked and it's just the perfect green perfect green I love it paint is this like lowcost high impact way of changing a space and making it current so I've used paint in a bunch of different places in this house to make a big impact closet doors baseboards in different spaces a gallon of paint is like 4 40 bucks and I always say that you can never underestimate the power of a gallon of paint I did add some new hardware but even the hardware is from Amazon it's really inexpensive but other than that the cabinets are mainly how they work we didn't have the budget to change the cabinets we did not have the budget to change out the countertops I don't have that kind of money so we knew that those two things were going to have to stay so we had to stick with the countertops the way that they were and then to brighten up the entire space and to make it look more like our home R did the backsplash and built some floating shelves I decided to bring in some tile underneath to kind of make the space feel more customized I intentionally went with this stacked vertical look cuz I wanted to minimize the amount of cuts that I had to make on the wet saw and so I had to make like very few Cuts just around the the outlets and things like that every time I tile I say that I'm never going to tile again because of how much I hate tiling but it's so hard to not tile again because of how good it looks and how inexpensive it is if you pick like in stock tile this whole backsplash cost me $97 in material plus maybe 3 days of work that wall was a lot harder hexagon tile was one of those things that I just I wasn't prepared for how difficult it was going to be cuz instead of just having four sides to match up is it six you have six sides that you have to line up and getting them all to be correct was it was just a pain in the butt but now I love it it's one of my favorite parts of the kitchen it adds this really cool focal point in here and it accentuates like this giant window that we have which I just I love it's my favorite place to be the hexagon tile was a nightmare the whole thing was a nightmare cost-wise it was really inexpensive but the cost to my mental health was high so it was a lot of work so altoe I was able to do this entire renovation in8 weeks and it was $1,700 working full-time working on the evenings after I got off of work for the day and then working on the weekends 1,700 bucks all in tile drywall even the bracket for the shelves were all part of that total cost and um there was a lot of things I didn't know how to do um but I think that really speaks to doing things yourself low cost high impact it really makes a huge difference and I still love this room it's been 3 years and I still love this space and I think it was maybe the best $1,700 I have ever spent so before we head upstairs there's one thing that I wanted to show you right here we had this closet that was right here by the entryway and I'm pretty sure we put stuff in it when we moved in and then we didn't open it until like 3 months ago so I transformed it into this uh like functional drop zone for my kids so each kid has their own little cubby down here where they can put all their stuff it's just a really organized space and then I can take the baskets out and say take your basket upstairs and go put all your stuff away and then they have a space where they can hang up their backpacks and then I have a water bottle filler actually on the wall so that they can get water as they're on their way out the door they love that we have a bottle filler here and they actually use it all the time I'm always trying to find ways to make this home home as functional as it can be because I find that that makes my life smoother it makes my life more efficient so I just did it cuz I had to get it done and it probably would have cost me like $55,000 and I don't have $5,000 to spend on something like that so this is our family room I actually just completed this space pretty recently it was just a box just like every other room in this house just like a basic box never hung out in here and so I wanted to make this space a lot more conducive to hanging out and relaxing one of the main things that I did was add this like trim molding on the walls and it's actually really really simple to do I did do new baseboards new door casings just to kind of like bring it to match the downstairs cut it all up put it all on here and gave everything a Fresh coat of paint and it just looks a lot nicer than what the Builder put in it's like really chill and cool my kids think it's awesome and it's super comfortable I wanted to do something to that space to make it just look a little bit more elevated and it transformed this basic boring ing box into this very fun and relaxing place to watch TV hang out with the kids and just like relax it was $120 for the trim molding pieces and then all the baseboards and stuff was $60 I already had a gallon of paint that I needed so excluding the furniture this room was done for less than 200 bucks took me 4 days to get it done and it looks really great so this is the kids bathroom and it was just a standard basic bathroom and I wanted something that was going to be really fun and and exciting for the kids they kind of all agreed on the final colors and then I executed the design so there's a little pink there's a little blue there's some fun zebras and it's just like a fun exciting place I also did all new door casings I added this paneling around the perimeter here I did a tile backsplash I did two separate mirrors and then I found this vanity on Craigslist actually and then I readed all the tile flooring and then I put some wallpaper on the walls just to make it fun and bright it just has totally transformed that entire space we love it on the other side of this wall is the laundry room which I also renovated to make more functional for our family it looks completely different than it used to before there was no sink and I really really really wanted a sink my kids make giant messes so being able to soak things in a sink was really important to have and because the kids bathroom is right on the other side of this wall here I was able to just tap into the Plumbing that was there now there's a sink and then I got a stacked washer and dryer unit and that freed up this counter space here Butcher Block was pretty inexpensive and I was able to install that and use that as countertop and then beadboard instead of actual tile backsplash and then we have like a whole folding area over there which is really functional I wanted to do something that was like avocado green Harvest Gold Brady Bunch 1970s those kinds of Vibes I think it looks great and all this stuff is pretty cheap so this is my daughter's room and whenever it comes to designing a room for my kids I really want the room to be inspiring for them I want it to match their style things that they're interested in in this room specifically I really wanted my daughter to feel empowered creative she's a very creative person so I wanted her to feel like this is her space I want her to know that she can be anything and do anything and I want her room to be reflective of the way that she feels about herself I think the space you live in can kind of dictate your outlook on life so everything from the artwork to the colors that I picked in that room was all specifically picked to not only match her personality and her style but to be something that inspires her that made her feel empowered to be all the different things that she really can be I want her to feel like she can do anything so I wanted to go with pink but like more accented more mellow more relaxed I installed new baseboard I painted them the fun pink color to match the accent wall on her wall where her bed is I installed a like a faux board and Baton kind of a treatment and then I painted that entire thing and then I did this really cool chalkboard thing she's very artistic this is like $20 for a little quart of chalk paint and then I just painted the shape of a house and I trimmed it out with this uh 1x3 Pine I wanted them to not be encouraged to carry the chalk outside of the chalkboard and it works I always have a pretty tight budget there's a lot of spaces that I want to do there's still parts of this house that I haven't done yet and my kids are young and so as they grow older their tastes are going to change and so keeping things simple keeping the costs low to start in a way that their Styles can evolve without like making big changes mean that when it is time to change something or when they do want to change something it doesn't feel like a waste of time or a waste of money I can easily update this entire space in a weekend and that's one of my favorite parts of learning how to do all these all these things is being able to Make spaces that my kids love and that my family loves and at the end of the day if I spent $200 in this room and then 3 years go by and I want to change it or she wants me to change it spending another $200 or $300 is not that big of a deal and I can make that happen for her so I like doing it my youngest son Samson has the smallest room in the house he also has like the biggest personality so I want to get him in a room that was really fun to look at like visually fun for him to be in and so my wife is very artistic great with her freehand and so she freehanded the the mural on the wall and then I came in and I painted it and then I pulled one of the colors out of there and I pulled that into the baseboards and the doors and then I had these IKEA cabinets that we have had for 10 years now and they've been in every single kids's room and they ended up in his room I painted those with clearance cabinet paint that I found at Home Depot for like six bucks so I'm always trying to keep costs as low as possible so if I see a paint color that I like on clearance I'm going to grab it my other son Jonah is 10 years old and I said what colors do you want for your room like what colors do you like and he said blue was his main color that he wanted and I said okay and let's pick an accent color and he landed on yellow and the two look great and then that mustard color is inside his closet so when you open his closet doors you're hit with this really bright fun mustard yellow and it's just like one of those really custom parts of this house that people are probably going to hate when they move in here but I just love it and I don't care about the next person who lives here I really don't in my I still wanted there to be a focal point in the room for us and so I ended up painting this Arch and we love it it's really calming and it has like mid-century modern Vibes and I couldn't decide what headward I wanted so I just painted needed one and it looks like a nice comfortable Sunset I needed something that was going to Anchor the room and look nice but not break the bank so I spent $13 on one quart of paint to bring in warmth and make it look more like us paint is just an easy way to update a space this home is so special to me because it has quite literally changed my entire life and now baking this home special to us and showing other people how they can do the same thing at their homes as well that's defined me completely I have loved transforming this home and I don't know if I'll ever be done doing it really I think I'll always have a project to do around here there's this line from Father of the Bride I want to get a tattooed on me this house is warm in the winter it's cool in the summer and it looks spectacular with Christmas lights and that totally captures this house and I would go back and I would do it again and again and again because of how much of an impact it's made like this video And subscribe to HGTV for more renovation stories just like thishi I'm Kyle Ortiz and this is my renovation Story come on in I've been diying for a long time but when I moved into this house I wanted to document that process and so I created an Instagram page and I started sharing all the projects that I do here at the house every project I did I recorded and everything that I shared people liked it and I started to grow this following I think it combined with not having a lot of money and kind of having the necessity to make a home that fit our growing family and then just kind of figuring out how to do it and over the last few years it's really kind of become my whole job it's become I left my normal job to do this full-time I'm all self-taught I learned how to do pretty much everything that I've done in this house and in previous houses from YouTube so there's this whole full circle moment where now I am teaching people online how to do projects in their homes when I have for the last you know 10 years been learning from people online how to do projects in their homes I'm a DIY dad and a full-time content creator I live here with my family my wife Amanda and our three children Jonah Emma and Samson Jonah is 10 Emma is seven and Samson is four I'm just like every Dad I'm trying to juggle being a husband and taking care of my kids and all the normal parts of life while I'm renovating this house one room at a time this is the the kitchen and this is probably my biggest like lowcost high impact renovation that I've done it was basically super brown it had like dark brown Cabinetry had this like stacked stone backsplash like the whole house looked like Olive Garden lots of dark wood lots of dark flooring it was just like a time capsule of 2013 like it looked like that year if it was personified not current at all the floors were a big part of that there were this really dark laminate that matched the espresso brown cabinets and then dark brown walls so I replaced all the flooring with this really nice engineered hardwood and I went through the entire lower level of the house and it just has brightened up the entire space so much when I moved into this house I probably had done floors like three times or four times but when I did these floors I really really perfected the way that I lay flooring and I probably could do it like as a job just saying I really love the floors actually they're my favorite the cabinets were in really really good shape they just had that horrible horrible stain that dark espresso stain so I just gave him a Fresh coat of paint green was the color that I liked and it's just the perfect green perfect green I love it paint is this like lowcost high impact way of changing a space and making it current so I've used paint in a bunch of different places in this house to make a big impact closet doors baseboards in different spaces a gallon of paint is like 4 40 bucks and I always say that you can never underestimate the power of a gallon of paint I did add some new hardware but even the hardware is from Amazon it's really inexpensive but other than that the cabinets are mainly how they work we didn't have the budget to change the cabinets we did not have the budget to change out the countertops I don't have that kind of money so we knew that those two things were going to have to stay so we had to stick with the countertops the way that they were and then to brighten up the entire space and to make it look more like our home R did the backsplash and built some floating shelves I decided to bring in some tile underneath to kind of make the space feel more customized I intentionally went with this stacked vertical look cuz I wanted to minimize the amount of cuts that I had to make on the wet saw and so I had to make like very few Cuts just around the the outlets and things like that every time I tile I say that I'm never going to tile again because of how much I hate tiling but it's so hard to not tile again because of how good it looks and how inexpensive it is if you pick like in stock tile this whole backsplash cost me $97 in material plus maybe 3 days of work that wall was a lot harder hexagon tile was one of those things that I just I wasn't prepared for how difficult it was going to be cuz instead of just having four sides to match up is it six you have six sides that you have to line up and getting them all to be correct was it was just a pain in the butt but now I love it it's one of my favorite parts of the kitchen it adds this really cool focal point in here and it accentuates like this giant window that we have which I just I love it's my favorite place to be the hexagon tile was a nightmare the whole thing was a nightmare cost-wise it was really inexpensive but the cost to my mental health was high so it was a lot of work so altoe I was able to do this entire renovation in8 weeks and it was $1,700 working full-time working on the evenings after I got off of work for the day and then working on the weekends 1,700 bucks all in tile drywall even the bracket for the shelves were all part of that total cost and um there was a lot of things I didn't know how to do um but I think that really speaks to doing things yourself low cost high impact it really makes a huge difference and I still love this room it's been 3 years and I still love this space and I think it was maybe the best $1,700 I have ever spent so before we head upstairs there's one thing that I wanted to show you right here we had this closet that was right here by the entryway and I'm pretty sure we put stuff in it when we moved in and then we didn't open it until like 3 months ago so I transformed it into this uh like functional drop zone for my kids so each kid has their own little cubby down here where they can put all their stuff it's just a really organized space and then I can take the baskets out and say take your basket upstairs and go put all your stuff away and then they have a space where they can hang up their backpacks and then I have a water bottle filler actually on the wall so that they can get water as they're on their way out the door they love that we have a bottle filler here and they actually use it all the time I'm always trying to find ways to make this home home as functional as it can be because I find that that makes my life smoother it makes my life more efficient so I just did it cuz I had to get it done and it probably would have cost me like $55,000 and I don't have $5,000 to spend on something like that so this is our family room I actually just completed this space pretty recently it was just a box just like every other room in this house just like a basic box never hung out in here and so I wanted to make this space a lot more conducive to hanging out and relaxing one of the main things that I did was add this like trim molding on the walls and it's actually really really simple to do I did do new baseboards new door casings just to kind of like bring it to match the downstairs cut it all up put it all on here and gave everything a Fresh coat of paint and it just looks a lot nicer than what the Builder put in it's like really chill and cool my kids think it's awesome and it's super comfortable I wanted to do something to that space to make it just look a little bit more elevated and it transformed this basic boring ing box into this very fun and relaxing place to watch TV hang out with the kids and just like relax it was $120 for the trim molding pieces and then all the baseboards and stuff was $60 I already had a gallon of paint that I needed so excluding the furniture this room was done for less than 200 bucks took me 4 days to get it done and it looks really great so this is the kids bathroom and it was just a standard basic bathroom and I wanted something that was going to be really fun and and exciting for the kids they kind of all agreed on the final colors and then I executed the design so there's a little pink there's a little blue there's some fun zebras and it's just like a fun exciting place I also did all new door casings I added this paneling around the perimeter here I did a tile backsplash I did two separate mirrors and then I found this vanity on Craigslist actually and then I readed all the tile flooring and then I put some wallpaper on the walls just to make it fun and bright it just has totally transformed that entire space we love it on the other side of this wall is the laundry room which I also renovated to make more functional for our family it looks completely different than it used to before there was no sink and I really really really wanted a sink my kids make giant messes so being able to soak things in a sink was really important to have and because the kids bathroom is right on the other side of this wall here I was able to just tap into the Plumbing that was there now there's a sink and then I got a stacked washer and dryer unit and that freed up this counter space here Butcher Block was pretty inexpensive and I was able to install that and use that as countertop and then beadboard instead of actual tile backsplash and then we have like a whole folding area over there which is really functional I wanted to do something that was like avocado green Harvest Gold Brady Bunch 1970s those kinds of Vibes I think it looks great and all this stuff is pretty cheap so this is my daughter's room and whenever it comes to designing a room for my kids I really want the room to be inspiring for them I want it to match their style things that they're interested in in this room specifically I really wanted my daughter to feel empowered creative she's a very creative person so I wanted her to feel like this is her space I want her to know that she can be anything and do anything and I want her room to be reflective of the way that she feels about herself I think the space you live in can kind of dictate your outlook on life so everything from the artwork to the colors that I picked in that room was all specifically picked to not only match her personality and her style but to be something that inspires her that made her feel empowered to be all the different things that she really can be I want her to feel like she can do anything so I wanted to go with pink but like more accented more mellow more relaxed I installed new baseboard I painted them the fun pink color to match the accent wall on her wall where her bed is I installed a like a faux board and Baton kind of a treatment and then I painted that entire thing and then I did this really cool chalkboard thing she's very artistic this is like $20 for a little quart of chalk paint and then I just painted the shape of a house and I trimmed it out with this uh 1x3 Pine I wanted them to not be encouraged to carry the chalk outside of the chalkboard and it works I always have a pretty tight budget there's a lot of spaces that I want to do there's still parts of this house that I haven't done yet and my kids are young and so as they grow older their tastes are going to change and so keeping things simple keeping the costs low to start in a way that their Styles can evolve without like making big changes mean that when it is time to change something or when they do want to change something it doesn't feel like a waste of time or a waste of money I can easily update this entire space in a weekend and that's one of my favorite parts of learning how to do all these all these things is being able to Make spaces that my kids love and that my family loves and at the end of the day if I spent $200 in this room and then 3 years go by and I want to change it or she wants me to change it spending another $200 or $300 is not that big of a deal and I can make that happen for her so I like doing it my youngest son Samson has the smallest room in the house he also has like the biggest personality so I want to get him in a room that was really fun to look at like visually fun for him to be in and so my wife is very artistic great with her freehand and so she freehanded the the mural on the wall and then I came in and I painted it and then I pulled one of the colors out of there and I pulled that into the baseboards and the doors and then I had these IKEA cabinets that we have had for 10 years now and they've been in every single kids's room and they ended up in his room I painted those with clearance cabinet paint that I found at Home Depot for like six bucks so I'm always trying to keep costs as low as possible so if I see a paint color that I like on clearance I'm going to grab it my other son Jonah is 10 years old and I said what colors do you want for your room like what colors do you like and he said blue was his main color that he wanted and I said okay and let's pick an accent color and he landed on yellow and the two look great and then that mustard color is inside his closet so when you open his closet doors you're hit with this really bright fun mustard yellow and it's just like one of those really custom parts of this house that people are probably going to hate when they move in here but I just love it and I don't care about the next person who lives here I really don't in my I still wanted there to be a focal point in the room for us and so I ended up painting this Arch and we love it it's really calming and it has like mid-century modern Vibes and I couldn't decide what headward I wanted so I just painted needed one and it looks like a nice comfortable Sunset I needed something that was going to Anchor the room and look nice but not break the bank so I spent $13 on one quart of paint to bring in warmth and make it look more like us paint is just an easy way to update a space this home is so special to me because it has quite literally changed my entire life and now baking this home special to us and showing other people how they can do the same thing at their homes as well that's defined me completely I have loved transforming this home and I don't know if I'll ever be done doing it really I think I'll always have a project to do around here there's this line from Father of the Bride I want to get a tattooed on me this house is warm in the winter it's cool in the summer and it looks spectacular with Christmas lights and that totally captures this house and I would go back and I would do it again and again and again because of how much of an impact it's made like this video And subscribe to HGTV for more renovation stories just like this\n"