Happily Better After

One of my favorite blogs, Better After is giving away a Silhouette Cameo and it's flippin' amazing! I have to have one! Check out her blog which is also amazing! I go there at least once a day to see before and afters!

Quick Pics

Here is a quick post on the trim situation. We are painting all the trim in our house white. Ambitious! Here is the baby's room so far...

The room when we bought the house. Eek!

In progress

In Progress

That's all for now. Merry Christmas - Happy Holidays!

A lot has happened over the past few weekends!
I'm going to start with the LR/DR area that we I almost finished painting:

LR Before

LR During- Paint color Benjamin Moore (Color matched to Olympic ONE) in Sandyhook Gray

Still need to paint wooden trim to white

I ripped all the carpet, tack strips and thousands of staples off the steps

Need to sand all that icky glue off and paint risers. Oh - and we need a banister!

DR During- Paint is same as LR. The front door is still in the process of being painted, it's Valspar's Jazzclub Blue.

Notice we broke up the tile path as well. We are still keeping a bit in front of the door though.

Here is the process of the Front door:

Before. Sorry for the mess. Once spring comes we have a ton of outdoor work to do!

 

1st coat

1st coat with all white filled in

2nd coat (still wet here). Still needs a 3rd!

 That's it for the LR/DR. The kitchen walls were painted but we still need to do the trim and everything else.

sneak peek at color. Saybrook Sage

Our new fridge came! It's hanging out in the playroom until we tile the floors.

That's it for the kitchen. We did work in the main bathroom. We originally used the color in our master BR (which is a grey with purple undertones) and we added white to tint it a bit. We looked at the walls and then each other and decided a purple bathroom is a no go. Josh picked out Olympic Silver Dollar:

Still need to paint trim.

We got a new vanity top and faucet!

We are going to get a new mirror eventually.      

We also started painting the office, BR trim and family room (no pic yet sorry):

Office

White trim.

That pretty much sums it up for now. We won't get much done this Holiday weekend but have a wonderful Holiday and enjoy!

it's a !@#$ ing steal

I was flipping through a Crate and Barrel catalogue one day and came across this:

And it was like the angels were singing. I had to have this! I showed it to Josh and he also liked it very much. This is the Sloane Leaning Wine Bar Bookcase and it's only about $580 ($550 on sale). OUCH!

Then one day I was looking through a lakeside collection catalogue and saw this:

And it's only about $90 and I was like what the !@#$!!! So we are probably totally going to get this. It's a steal! I know it's not as good of quality and the C & B one is more stream lined, yadda-yadda-yadda, but it's much more budget friendly! I LOVE me a bargain!

Progress

Sorry I have been slacking. I am finally finished with finals! Now that I am on winter break I can get more done at the house. Here's whats been going on...

We ordered Sadie this ceiling fixture for her room:

It is so pretty but unfortunately it's way too large for her room. I totally didn't even check out the dimensions on it! Ooops! No biggie we love it so much we are going to rehang it in our dining room. I have a few ideas for a new inexpensive light for her room but more on that later.

We have most of our 1st floor all painted. Painted rooms include: Living room, dining room, hall way in front of half bath, kitchen, playroom, hallway, main bathroom, Sadie's bedroom and our bedroom. Rooms/spaces left to paint: All of upstairs (2 large areas), basement, family room in basement, mudroom in basement, office, front door and back doors and a large book case for the playroom. Wanna help?! (Ps. I will have pictures of the painted rooms soon).

We have our carpeting for the bedrooms and playroom on order and should be installed *crossyourfingers* first week of January. I better start packin' because my goal is to move by Jan 21st.

We decided to leave our half bath as is for now until we sell our first home. It's functional and with some major cleaning it will serve it's purpose for now. Here it is in all it's glory as of now:

Our kitchen is next on the list. Now that it's painted (pics to come soon) we need to remove the linoleum flooring and the 1/4" plywood in order to get ready for tiling! We have our new dishwasher sitting in the office waiting to be installed, fridge and washing machine (our 3 year old washing machine just died recently. Bummer) on order to be delivered this Thursday, over the range microwave is sitting at my dad's house and our new hot water heater is on it's way soon too. Here are some items we bought for our kitchen and some pics of the kitchen how it originally was:

Ohhh so glad that we painted over that. That bright green is as bad as Rudolph's bright red nose!

That dishwasher is gone, we've since replaced that hardware for something a little more modern.

I love that huge window and the eating nook!

Slate Sequoia Counter Tops

They look lovely with stainless and that counter wood is kind of close to oak. Why do I get the feeling I'm going to be painting our cabinets white one weekend...

Tile back splash, tile flooring and paint swatch.

Benjamin Moore Saybrook Sage

I'll be doing more work tomorrow and I'll take more pics and update in a few days! Good night!

Finals Finally

This week is finals so I am slacking on the blog. I'm kind of slacking on the studying too. We basically painted more rooms this past weekend so there isn't much to report. Once our flooring/carpeting is installed then we'll be rolling!

Last weekend

Thanks to Sadie's many awesome Grandparents for watching her, we were able to get more work done! Where to start...

Oh the tile "path":

Josh got the ugly tiles off only to find plywood literally covered with thousands of screws. I am not exaggerating. They also glued it to the hardwood floors as well. DISASTER!

Josh trying to get screws out.

Close up.

So we had my dad come the next day to help us get it. It took him a whole afternoon just to get some of it off.

This is where we are with this project for now.

I started taking the ugly carpet off the stairs:

That ugly carpet on the riser is glued so I still have some work to do with that.

Josh ripped out the rest of the carpeting:

Hallway. I painted it!

Baby room.

Josh fixed the awful patch job the previous owners left on the bathroom ceiling. Just needs painting:

Carpet in family room in basement is gone:

And I am almost done painting the playroom (we also put a door on it):

And this is what Sadie does while I bolg:

Awwww

We will be doing some major painting this weekend so that we can sand our floors and start the kitchen already!

Hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving

This year I ate tofurkey and no turkey! I've been trying to go vegetarian for awhile now and my Animal Ethics Philosophy class has really helped (along with my husband and that fact that our baby girl is also vegetarian). It helps when your husband can cook and make really yummy things! Guess what else he can do?! Pretty much anything. Here's what we did the past 2 weekends. I left the camera at the house for a week so this is going to be a loooong post. Sorry.

We pulled out the broken, smelly dishwasher and found this doozey. It leaked. Gross!: 

We are going to rip out all the linoleum and the 1/4" plywood throughout the kitchen and install our tile. The kitchen is going to be one of the last rooms we tackle since it seems to be the central zone where we keep all of our handyman supplies.

I painted the baby's room. Just have a little section to finish but here's our process:

This is the bedroom before. It took me 8 hours to peel and scrape that damn border off!

 

We bought Behr One (paint and primer in one) on the clearance rack at Home Depot. It was a dark gray (pictured below) so I added lots of white to a little gray and ended up with the exact color that I had in mind! (Thanks many years of color theory and art classes).

Original paint color. We just wanted to see it on the wall before hand. 

Mixed color. It's a light "elephant gray". We named our own color.

Done! We also got rid of the ugly yellow shades in the light fixture and got pretty clear glass ones but were moving it to the hallway in front of the half bath.

Just need to finish one section and rip out carpet.

 Next on our list was our bedroom. We found a color called warm gray flannel by Glidden but had it color matched at Lowes in Olympic One (primer & paint in one):

Master BR before with carpet removed. Ugly stencil border.

During w/ Warm Gray Flannel paint.

Done! My not-so-excellent picture taking skills added some non existent dots in the picture. Sorry!

Next on the list was the little closet to no where:

a wall! Just need to sand it and paint.

Here's a sneak peek:

I also painted the back hallway, Josh ripped out the carpet in the basement family room and I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting to mention. Next I'll be ripping off the carpet on the stairs and maybe ripping up the tile "path". Ok, the baby is going crazy so that's all.