House updates

Oh yeah, I still have house projects going on up in here. It's just been awhile since I accomplished anything on my To Do list, but now that I have it's time to show it off.

When I was severely pregnant (is that the right terminology?), I had way too much nervous nesting energy. And so I decided to tackle painting our stairs, knowing that I *might* not get a chance to finish everything before baby girl arrived. I was totally fine with that idea and secretly hoped that by beginning this fairly large project when I was 37 weeks pregnant, I'd send my body into labor. Didn't really happen though, because I got it all completed except for one final coat on the lower hallway woodwork. And so it was a win-win situation for me---I got to get rid of a lot of creative energy and our stairs have never looked better.

I always knew I wanted to paint the rises white because we paid to have the actual treads refinished, and they were SO pretty all spruced up. But you didn't even notice them because of all that dark woodwork surrounding the tread (yes, a matter of personal opinion, I know).  Plus, I hated the cream colored walls that were ALL over this house, and the stairway/hallways were the last of that dreaded cream to remain.

So I painted all of the walls my new favorite gray, Behr's 'Dolphin Fin' (same as our kitchen) and even just that made a huge difference. Then I got to work on the woodwork. Sanding, cleaning, filling in holes and cracks with spackle, priming, then painting 2 coats of paint. Sigh. Lots of work. But worth it. And this time I decided to go with Sherwin Williams for my wood paint instead of my previously used Benjamin Moore. LOVE the SW stuff, FYI. Their Adhesion Primer is water-based and is the bomb. And the Pro Classic semi-gloss paint for woodwork is also amazing. Wish I would have used this combo for all of the other woodwork in the house, too, but too late now!

Shall we look at pictures of my masterpiece, done while ri-donkulously pregnant?

Our Stairway:





And might as well show off my other shadow boxes on the upper hallway---birth of Cecelia, wedding, and birth of Truman. AKA 'the big events'. You'll see that we have each of our running races in a shadow box, too, going down the stairs. Those are great, too. But these three hold a little more weight, I'd say:)



renovations...





And then there is our full bathroom upstairs. The thorn in our sides. You see, we REALLY want to tear out all of the ugly speckled tile in there and possibly use plain white tiles or just plaster the walls instead. But apparently this will be a very messy, very annoying project that we just can't do right now (read: Nate doesn't want to tackle it just yet). And so we are making due with the hideous tile and trying to update around it.

Painting the walls was a must, and then our old neighbor made us a flush-mounted medicine cabinet for above the sink (which is a new console we bought and installed). We also tore off part of the shelving system above our laundry chute and my father-in-law added a nice edge to it. Then it was up to me and my mom to paint these new wooden items white, and to also paint the window and door white (go away, hideous yellow woodwork!!).

With the new paint colors and a fun shower curtain, it's really not all bad. I still wish the tile was a distant memory but maybe someday.

And now, pictures...

Our Full Bathroom:



renovations...











Another little project I haven't shown yet is this awesome wooden box Nate built for our mantel. Totally got the idea on Pinterest, of course!





I wanted something long and low to put under our TV and this is just perfect! I can envision putting ornaments, Poinsettias, and little Christmas trees in there for the holidays. And for the fall, maybe some pumpkins and pine cones and leaves or something. Ahhh, the possibilities are endless. Gotta love my handy husband. And those new giant sea-glass candle holders from World Market. Love those, too.

The other sort of big addition we made is that instead of buying new chairs for our sunroom, we decided to haul over our old love seat from the duplex. And I have no idea why we waited this long because it looks fine and is a great, comfy place to sit in there now. We were just using lounge chairs for the longest time and that sucked. This is much better, even though our poor love seat has seen better days and isn't our style anymore. Whateves. It works.



See that tab up there at the top of my blog? The one that says 'Our Home Renovations'? I updated it to show current snapshots of each room in our house. Sure, it's a lot more 'lived in' than the first round of pictures I took. I blame the newborn for that extra bit of clutter and baby gear and junk. But I kind of like the 'lived in' look now:) I also updated all of my 'before and after' pictures for each room in the house. Talk about mind-blowing---we sometimes forget how much work we've done to this place already. Love looking at the old photos to remind us of how we've made this home into our own style. I'm sure this tab will evolve over time to show even more home renovations and decorating changes, but it feels so good to have it updated to present day.

The only other projects that we have on our radar right now are:
-paint all of the windows white
-paint the front entry way
-paint and clean the back hallway to basement
-paint and hang french doors into sunroom

And my awesome Grandpa has made us our very own dining room table. I cannot wait to see it in a few weeks when my parents drive up here with the table in tow. He made it to go with the new dining room chairs I found on Craigslist and it has leaves to expand and fit 8 people around the table. Eeek! What a gift, right? Heirloom, for sure.

My mom has also made one more window treatment for this house of ours, making the grand total about 122:) But she is bringing one up for the stairway window and then I believe all windows will be properly dressed in our house. Can I get an 'Amen'? Well, the upper bathroom needs something at some point but I'm not sure what I want to do just yet. I just still want to redo that entire bathroom so I'm not very motivated to dress the window at this point.

So those are the updates I've been meaning to show for awhile now. It's nice to have a few projects here and there but there is no way I'd ever have the time or energy to do all that I did before Cecelia arrived. Thank goodness we did 90% of the projects before she came!

House renovations, more painting...

Yep, still painting over here. But it's almost done, HALLELUJAH, and it's time for another house update.

1. Our white woodwork!

I always brace myself a bit when talking about painting our woodwork white and Nate thinks I'm highly sensitive to it, since nobody really disapproves as strongly as I fear they will. As I said before, I know that keeping original dark woodwork is really important to some people and I respect our home's style and age. However, after living in a home from the 1920s for 4 years, knowing that all.this.wood is just NOT our style and doesn't fit our vision of our house, I knew I'd want white woodwork whenever we bought a house. It's brighter, more modern, and cleaner to me although I'm sure some disagree. And it was also a HUGE pain in the butt to convert it all, as expected, but oh so worth it. Pictures first, then details:













So we still have to paint all of the actual windows but we are waiting to do that until we can take the time to really care for these ancient babies. And it's a lot of work just to paint the frames on the outside since we don't want to paint them shut, and with old windows you have a lot of really different parts to consider. We plan to really clean them, caulk them, replace some weights and maybe some of the glass, too. So whenever that happens we will also paint the remaining parts of our windows. Also, we have yet to do any doors and for now, most of them are still off the hinges. And of course, the entire kitchen woodwork is still natural for now but that's nothing compared to the huge list of 'to paint' projects that began this process. And we DID keep the built in buffet and windows above it natural in our dining room, and I really do love it that way.

If you are at all curious on HOW we did this massive project in a few weeks, I'll briefly touch on that now. I kept track of how much time we spent on this woodwork painting project because I just knew it would be insane. I was right: 8 hours of just prep work, 12 hours to spray the primer and first coat of paint, 5 hours to caulk the cracks, and then 20 freaking hours for me to paint ONE final coat with a brush. That's 50 hours, folks. And a few fits of rage were thrown in there for fun.

To prep the wood we sanded it all down really well with sandpaper, then wiped it down with a damp cloth and then a tack cloth. Then Nate demanded to use his spray gun for the primer, since that isn't something I could do by hand anyway in my pregnant state, so we had to tape off all of the walls and cover the floors very well. Nate had his first breakdown with the sprayer when using the primer because it was a LOT harder than he thought to get in all the nooks and crannies with different angles on the gun. We waited 24 hours for all of that primer to dry and then Nate agreed to do the first coat of latex paint with the gun, too. Like I said, his two coats took 12 hours and my one coat by hand took 20 so you do the math. After the sprayed coat of latex was done, we realized we had to caulk the cracks in the woodwork or it'd look horrible. This caulking business was my LEAST favorite part by far. So tedious and annoying but it really did make a huge difference, just like all of the articles online said. You can see why we had to do it in these pictures:



So after that was done, I had to sand it down a bit again. And then I got to work on my brushed coat--and really, even with the expensive Benjamin Moore Advance paint we used, it needed a THIRD coat in places to really look nice. I'm a pro with cutting-in now, what can I say? I absolutely love how it all turned out and during Nate's day of 'I will not do this anymore because my sprayer hates primer and I might kill someone before painting this stuff by hand' attitude, I was really nervous we'd made the wrong decision. But once that primer and the first coat were on, my heart really skipped a beat when I came downstairs and I almost cried (again, for the third time that day) seeing it all come together. The white wood makes it feel like home to us. And I hope we never, ever have to do a 'full paint' project again. Touch ups over the years are fine, but man---that was rough.

2. Sunroom ceiling:

This wasn't too bad considering the woodwork debacle. But I really wanted the ceiling in here to make the crown molding pop. Can you even tell the ceiling is two shades lighter than the walls? I hope so. :)



3. The baby's nursery:

Remember how her woodwork was yellow, and I hated that with a passion? Converting it all to white, to match the rest of the upstairs bedrooms, was quite the task. It was my first taste at painting woodwork and so I knew what awaited me downstairs in the future. I think it took a total of 10 hours just to do her room, but maybe that included lots of daydreaming breaks as I pictured my baby girl coming home to this room:)





And I might as well throw this in here, too--- the rug that will be in her room looks like this:



And fabrics have been purchased for my mom to make a quilt, Roman shades, a bedskirt, and changing pad covers!!



I'm so excited to see it all come together I could barf. Still have to paint the crib a hot pink, find a rocker, and make a few art pieces but it's really not TOO far off anymore. Just seeing the room totally painted is a huge step and that rug makes it even prettier. Many more updates on her room will surely come along soon enough.

So yeah, lots of freaking painting. Have to do the woodwork in the kitchen, the kitchen walls, the half bathroom walls, and the upper full bathroom walls and trim. But honestly, I'm thinking most of this will have to get done once we move into the house. Because, um, we are moving NEXT FRIDAY if I haven't freaked out enough about that on this blog. Can't wait...slash...am scared we might die in the process.

House renovations, take two: Painting up a storm

My biggest project in our house thus far has definitely been painting. Nate hates to paint and so he's mostly focusing all of his time on the kitchen, which is fine by me because pulling down cabinet doors and fixing up wood holes sounds awful to me. I love to paint and volunteered to tackle the massive project of transforming our house with a little COLOR on the walls. Plus painting every other conceivable surface out there, but we'll get to that in a minute. I love picking paint colors even though it's pretty stressful for me, too. Nothing like painting the interior of a 1700 square foot house in just a few weeks to make a lady crazy, right? But we have to have the paint done before we move in---it just makes more sense to do it before furniture and people are in the way. Want to see what I've done so far?

MAIN ROOM transformation:

This was the room that had all cream colored walls, crown molding, and ceilings. Along with blue carpet. It's also basically huge which is great for when we live in the room, but not so fun while painting every surface of the room. At 24 feet by 13 feet, it's easily the largest room of the house and where I forsee us spending most of our time. Wanna see the true before picture again?

Bam.


I decided to go with Behr's 'Cloudy Day' for the wall color, and picked two shades lighter for our ceilings in there (which was basically 'Wave Crest' plus another 25% shot of white). Next came the fun part of removing ALL of the hideous window coverings including about 5 types of rods and screws and hinges on each window. This was not fun, guys. I wiped off all the walls and woodwork and got to town. I think it took me about 5 hours to paint these walls with some help from my mother-in-law on the edging (I prefer rolling it on, she likes edging, therefore we are a perfect pair.). The ceiling and crown molding paint jobs took another 5 hours. Ick. And so?

Main room walls during the painting day. Also, note that the ceilings are still white at this point and the crown molding still 'creamy'. Which, to me, is such a waste because the crown molding is SO pretty--why not make it pop out more?


Main room after walls and ceiling painted, but before crown molding turned cream into white:


And after the crown molding was transformed by the white. Isn't it insane how the ceiling looks a lot less blue with that white against it?


During the crown molding paint job:




All that is left to pain in here is the dark woodwork :::dodging the stone-throwing from the crowd again, as I type that phrase:::: I really do think it will be amazing with bright white wood everywhere though. It's very 'us' and I know it's going to suck big time to put in the hours for painting wood work. But I really do think it will be worth it!

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DINING ROOM transformation:

After a lot of debate, I decided to keep the dining room the same color as the family/main room. They flow together very nicely so it makes sense and plus, this dining room will be one that keeps some of it's dark woodwork (the built-in and the windows will remain) so I'm sure that will make the blue walls look totally different than the main room. I wanted to paint the ceilings in here, too, but it sucked so bad in the main room I just can't bring myself to break my neck in there again. Plus I ran out of paint although I thought I bought enough of the 'Wave Crest' ceiling shade for the two rooms. I take that as a sign from God that the ceilings might remain cream colored in there. We did paint the crown molding bright white though. 

Built-in buffet before paint and before I hacked away those ugly curtains:


And after the paint. Also shows a nice shot of our new floors! Never mind that the buffet is a huge storage area for us right now.


After blue goes on the walls, looking into the sunroom. But this doesn't show the crisp white crown molding just yet. It's there but no pictures to show it off.


Only remaining paint project in the dining room will be the baseboards and door frames. Plus those French doors that lead into the sunroom. Sigh. Lots of painting still ahead. I believe it took us about 3 hours to paint the walls and another 1.5 hours to do the crown molding. That stuff is no joke with all of those little twists and turns but I love it. :)
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SUNROOM transformation:

I haven't gotten any great pictures of our sunroom to show you just yet. Must work on that. But this is the room that I painted Behr's 'Peridot' green and I just sort of like it. I am hoping that with white woodwork I will love it though. I have yet to paint the crown molding a bright white and I think I will actually muster up the energy to paint the ceiling two shades lighter than the walls, which is Behr's 'White Willow' color. It's only 10x12 so it can't be THAT bad, right? 

Before painting walls, and before floors:


After painting the walls green, and after floors are refinished:


Painting this room, including the rolling and edging, only took us about 3 hours. Gotta love smaller rooms.The ongoing paint projects in here: crown molding, all woodwork, and ceiling (plus French doors).

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BEDROOM transformations:

I don't need to do much else besides the walls in these three bedrooms. I'm not going to bother with the ceilings, and I'll probably just leave the crown molding the off white color. The other woodwork is all white, except for the baby's room---for some unknown reason, they painted that entire room a pastel yellow that is really ugly, if you ask me. So I guess I will be painting her woodwork white in there. Luckily the other two bedrooms are already the color I'd choose for the woodwork, though.


Master bedroom:
I chose Behr's 'Honey Bird' yellow for our room. It's a bold choice, probably the brightest room of the house, but it's going to be SO awesome combined with our gray and white bedspread. There's nothing like a warm, inviting color in the master to make this a fun room. It took me about 3 hours to do this room.

Here is the true before, carpet and all:


During painting day:


After! The floors aren't stained/finished here, though. And I swear the real color is not such a bright 'highlighter yellow'. It's actually quite pretty in real life (aside from iPhone pictures).


Truman's room: 
This is turning out to be the room that is the thorn in my side right now. I wanted T's room to be a nice, pale gray. And I KNEW it would be hard to nail the right shade but I was still too cheap to actually buy samples first. As soon as I put Behr's 'Gentle Rain' color on  his walls, I panicked. I really thought it looked lavender and I was seriously thinking about returning the entire gallon and starting from scratch. But I kept plugging away because Nate and my mother-in-law (and everyone else that I've shown) swear it's a fine gray, not too purple. I'm still not 100% convinced, though, and I'm hoping that by adding T's bright colored accents in there I barely even notice my pet peeve wall color. Truman didn't yell 'PURPLE' when he saw it, either. So that's a great sign. It took me 3 hours to do this room (apparently that is how long it takes me to do most of these rooms)

Before:


During the painting episode:


After painting, floors only sanded but not stained in this shot:

It really does look purple in this pic, huh? In real life I don't even think it's *that* bad.

Baby's room:
This room also took me 3 hours to paint and I actually did it one night after Truman went to bed. I picked Behr's 'Wildwood Spring' which is a pretty robin's egg blue to me. I just really hate that I still have to paint her woodwork white because it almost looks white in this 'before' picture from online. I wonder if the owners repainted the whole thing after this picture was taken and went with the yellow instead. Should have asked me first !! :)

Before we moved in:


After I painted the walls, but before floors were stained, and before I bother to paint the woodwork WHITE and not this ugly yellow:

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So that's that. A ridiculous amount of painting on my part, huh? I just added it up and that looks like about 27 hours of straight painting and I'm not even done yet. I really do enjoy painting, thankfully, but man---it's a lot of work! Luckily, with my trusty mask and lots of fans I am still following doctor's orders and not killing my baby from fumes or anything.

Really not looking forward to prepping and painting all of the dark woodwork on the first floor. But I think I have convinced Nate to help with this large task. And I didn't mention the kitchen at all just yet, since that is it's own separate project and painting the walls won't come until much later. We also haven't touched either bathroom or any of the hallways with paint. Not sure I have enough energy to bother right now anyway.

Off to paint some more...