YAY for new floors

We have the main living space in our house back. But we’re sleeping there now.

 Saturday the hardwood floors got finished and Sunday we cleaned everything and moved all our furniture out of the bedrooms and into the dining room and family room because tomorrow the new carpet goes in!! Can’t wait.

Here are several pictures. The last one is of the family room before we moved our bed in there. Its kinda hectic right now, but its fine, we’ll be back in our room tomorrow night!

 

 

 

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Our first big renovation project and the BIG 30!

Today I’m 30.  I am not scared or nervous about what this decade has in store for me, but rather excited.  We’ll welcome our first born, we’re doing our first major renovation, and I’m sure there is much much more good to come! 

I feel like in your 30’s you are really able to come into your own.  You know yourself better, you’re hopefully making more money than you did in your 20’s, and you should be more content with yourself.  I feel that the older I get and I hope it just continues.

I have fantastic family and friends and my support system is amazing.  30 will be amazing!

Here I am, 30 years old, large and in charge!! Haha

 

Now, onto the renovation stuff!

This weekend was rough.  I probably shouldn’t have done as much as I did, but you know I can’t help myself. A baby belly won’t slow me down!!

We emptied the main areas of our house of all furniture and tore out all the damn carpet. I was disgusted.  I’m so happy they’re gone. To think that our child would have been crawling on them skeeves me out.  The tile by the front door is gone, and all the carpet tack strip and nails have been removed from the subfloor.  Thank goodness we’re having someone else do the install because I was exhausted by the end of demo day.   Again, I probably shouldn’t have done as much as I did.  My older sister questioned me and asked if I was actually ripping out carpets and of course I lied because she doesn’t even like it when I go to my workout classes.

Monday we had a snow day so the house projects rolled on!  We painted all the doors in the house and I also started painting the fireplace.  The surround is done, but I couldn’t do the mantle because we have to use a deglosser on it first so that the paint will stick to the finished wood.  Very toxic, Ben is doing it while I’m at work today. So tonight I’ll put on the new door hardware (going from brass to oil rubbed bronze) and I’ll paint the mantle.  Meanwhile Ben has to work on detailing the step up from our sunken family room up onto the kitchen/dining room level.  It used to have carpet on it, but now it will look like a normal step. Why the people that built the house didn’t do this is beyond me.

And here are some pictures!!

The family room after demo (notice the fireplace)

 

The dining room after demo

 

 

The fireplace in process….after hopefully to come tomorrow

 

 

nursery planning has officially begun

I’m dreaming of a beautiful nursery!!

I know what crib I’m using – this is coming from Ben’s parents

 

And then the dresser I just recently purchased…..

 

So I need to accessorize! And I need to recover that blue wing back chair you see above in the photo with the dresser.

There isn’t a ceiling light in the room so I’ve decided to get a floor lamp that can sit in between the dresser (which will double as a changing table) and the chair so I have plenty of light for changing and nursing and/or reading.  I really like the one shown below. Its traditional but the base isn’t chunky so it should fit in the space nicely.

The chair doesn’t have an ottoman so I thought it would be nice to get something to stick my feet up on or to sit on while playing on the floor with the little man.  This comes in a lot of colors but I’m thinking either this tan or possibly a dark blue. Tan would certainly fit anywhere in the house, but this room is going to need color that’s why I’m leaning in that direction.

And here are a couple of pictures of the buffalo check fabric that I want to use for the chair slipcover.  See it doesn’t have to be too country, it can look transitional!!

susie harris: buffalo gal

susie harris: buffalo gal

I think that’s it.  the sheets that I’m going to use are these from Pottery Barn Kids.

 

And the wall color in the room is already done and it’s a Benjamin Moore color – Vale Mist

Thoughts?

The nursery – phase 1

Phase 1 of the nursery was emptying it of a twin sized bed, a wall of bookshelves, and the closet. Once that was done I promptly filled it back up again.

The new dresser went in, and then I needed to move the chair in there to see how it fit.  Those two items are great right where I planned them!  The chair needs to get covered, but I know spatially it works. 

 

Then came the carpet samples, because that HAS to get done.

 

 

And now we have presents! A rocking horse, a crib mattress, and the list goes on.  Oh, and notice the 3 black trash bags? All baby boy clothes that my sister was getting rid of:)

 

This weekend I will empty the room again because all that stuff must go to get the new carpet. 

 

So we’re stuck at phase one.  Hopefully phase 2 isn’t that far behind.

My day is looking pretty bright

Even though its 34 degress here and we’re experiencing freezing rain.  My sister moves out today!!  She and my husband already loaded all her stuff into the box trailer and on Sunday they’re moving it into her spot!  She did say that she was planning on staying at her boyfriend’s house tonight and tomorrow night, so I think that means my husband and I officially have our house back to ourselves.

Gone are the days of this:

 

I cannot wait to get my hands on her room so I can clear it all out, replace the flooring, and have my nice guest room back. Ahhh.

Our new bedroom changes

Get your minds out of the gutter, I’m talking decorating, not you know what!

Ben and I recently purchased a flat screen TV to hang on the wall at the end of our bed which means that we now have an entire dresser top that hasn’t been decorated! Please ignore all the wires, hiding those is phase two of this project.

 

Here is the new TV, and hanging nicely on the wall! We did have some issues with finding the correct mount but in the end we ended up withthis and are very happy. And for a very reasonable price!

 

And now to the dresser top.  I have no desire to go buy anything to take on this decorating project, so all of these items are things we currently own and were stolen from other locations in the house.

This is what Ben wanted to do with the dresser…..and that got vetoed.

 

Here are several options I came up with. Which one do you like??

 

 

 

 

Also notice I have a serious love for books. Not only do I read them, I decorate with them. But because this is Ben’s dresser I incorporated his books into the décor! I’m not reading about fly fishing and tupac.

 

And while I’m showing you photos of our master bedroom, here is a much better photo of our new ceiling fan. Because the one I showed you here was a disgrace.

 

And our bed. Ignore my water glass, crooked photos, and messy pillows.  Clearly staging photos isn’t my thing.

 

The House To Do List

This is a list I started right after we moved into our house and I’m slowly ticking things off! Of course there was a lot of stuff that we did before we even moved in like painting, changing out cabinet hardware….

-          Paint front door and sidelights

-          Paint shutters
-          Get storm door
-          Paint kitchen cabinets
-          New flooring
-          paint garage door
-          clean deck – pressure wash and re-stain
-          back yard – clean out, re-grade, seed, plant trees
-          front yard – grading/new flower bed at road
-          driveway
-          move laundry to basement
-          crown molding in master bedroom
-          paint the hall bathroom
-          finish basement
-          figure something out with fireplace
-          paint interior doors
-          new door hardware
-         

next on the list we plan on getting done is the driveway and painting the interior doors/door hardware.  So yeah, one thing at a time! It doesn’t help we’re about to spend all our money on IVF. But it so worth it!

Painting a Garage Door

This weekend I tackled a project I’ve been wanting to do for some time now, but I had to wait for the weather to turn so that I could wash the garage door and paint it all in one day.

 So here is the before- I thought I had a better before picture of the house but I guess I don’t.

 

 

And here it is now!

 So what I did.  It was super easy and this is what I did with all my painting projects. Clean, dry, paint, and be patient!  The end result is so worth it.

My list

I have so much to do this weekend, fun stuff though! 

Tonight we’re having friends over for dinner.  I don’t have our deck furniture out yet though because I want to sand and spray paint it before I move it up to the deck…so spray painting is on my list for the weekend!

Also its my nieces first birthday.  I didn’t want to spend a lot of money and so my sister and I decided to split a gift to give her.  I think she’s going to like it for a long time to come!

I’m going to paint our garage door black.  Since we purchased the house we’ve been working hard to fix the curb appeal on our home.  Our siding is gray and the shutters and front door were different shades of blue, now they’re all black.  And I found several photos on pinterest of homes with black garage doors, so I’m going to get that done!

 

 

 

Wish me luck with my projects. Hope everyone has a good weekend!!

The crown molding is done!!

For my birthday last year I asked my husband to install crown molding in our master bedroom.  My birthday was in March and thank goodness he got it done with one month to spare!  It looks awesome and he was even painting it when I got home from work yesterday.  AMAZING. One last thing I need to worry about doing.  The only bad thing, I realized when I was lying in bed that he painted it with flat paint instead of the semi-gloss that is on the rest of our trim….would you change it?  I  can tell, but I’m not sure anyone else would especially if they weren’t looking for it.

This is our bedroom (pre crown molding)

Here is some of the crown molding right across from our bed

And Ben pulling down the tape last night (see the crown behind his head...those angle cuts were terrible to do!)

Next house projects on my list.  I want to stain our kitchen cabinets.  I have found several tutorials on pinterest and so now I just need to decide what color stain.  Most people I’ve seen have done a java stain which is really dark and I think I’d prefer something a little lighter and more rustic, not quite so contemporary looking.  Maybe a mahogany or walnut color stain.

And I also decided yesterday that as soon as it gets warm out I’m painting our garage door black.  Again pinterest came to save the day here, I found several photos and I think the black looks nice.  Here are the photos I found and liked. here, here, and here

Just trying to keep myself busy over here…