Taming the Blue

Happy Halloween. everyone!  Hope you all got lots of Trick-or-Treaters at your door, but still have plenty of candy left to hoard in that top cabinet where no one else will find it!  What?!  You know you do that too!

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First order of business on the new house definitely had to be the girls’ rooms.  They were part of the upstairs that hadn’t yet been updated and I think they had clearly been painted for two young boys a looong time ago.

Thing 1’s room was a study in primary colors: red walls, yellow ceilings, and blue blinds. 

 

Thing 2’s room was light blue on top and bright blue on the bottom with a wallpaper border around the center of the room with, I believe, palm trees and race cars.

 

Plus they both had the original, 23 year old carpet! Definitely time for an update.

The very first day we were in the house, I started patching the holes in the walls.  Every single door in the upstairs (and some downstairs) had a circular hole, shaped suspiciously like a door knob, in the wall behind it.  Definitely young boys used to live here!

Three days after we moved in, I was ready to paint.  My good friend (and new neighbor) volunteered herself and her mom to be my painting buddies, so we were able to knock out both rooms in one day (after, of course, one of my helpers removed the wall paper border and the other spent several hours cleaning the walls).  I was (pleasantly) surprised that each room took only one coat of primer and one coat of paint to cover those bright walls.

We’re planning on replacing the trim around the windows/doors and baseboard, so we didn’t have to be careful about not painting that, which really helped speed up the process.

*****

This house is 23 years old, so the floors are really getting squeeeeeky.  We had already scheduled the carpet installers to come in another week, but we decided to pull up the carpets right away to give us a chance to see what we could do about those squeaks.  Of course, this meant the girls had to live without carpet for a week, but I think the promise of super-soft carpet laid over nice quiet floors made it palatable.

My husband had done some research and found this product called Squeeeeek No More that did the job perfectly!  It’s basically special screws that you drill into your subfloor and joists, then you use a special tool to snap off the top of the screw to just a smidge under the subfloor, so nothing sticks up.  The kit also comes with a doo-hickey that stops your drill when you’ve set the screw deep enough.  You can use it on carpeted floors, as well as hardwood and laminate!

They didn’t ask me to say this, but these things were AWESOME!  Completely easy to use and they did just what the package said.  Plus, they were pretty fun to use too!   I had a great time bouncing around on the floors like a ballerina finding squeaks for my husband to obliterate. 

Most of the squeaks were very easy to deal with: they just required one or two screws to tighten up the subfloor, but one of the rooms had a ridiculously tenacious squeak RIGHT AS YOU WALKED IN THE DOOR that we could not get rid of.  I’d convince myself that it didn’t matter, that we could live with it.  Then, I’d walk back into the room and SQUUEEEAAAAKKKK!  There it would go again.  We must’ve sunk, at least, 20 screws into this area.  I was just about to finally give up (because we were almost out of screws), but decided to try one, last time.  I drilled in one more screw and, lo and behold, it worked!  No more squeak!  I can’t wait to use them throughout the rest of the rooms too!

*****

After that, we were FINALLY ready for new carpet.  When the day arrived, we moved everything out of the girls’ rooms and into the master bedroom.  I wish I had taken pictures of that because our room was packed!  The carpets went in and lickety-split, we had livable rooms for the girls!  We had decided not to get new carpet in our room, since that carpet was relatively new, but MAN are we sorry about that decision.  Now, you walk from the upstairs landing into our room and it’s a complete let-down for your feet.  That decision definitely needs to be revisited!

Anyway, I’ll give you a progress shot of the newly re-painted and re-carpeted rooms.  They’re definitely not done (most notably, the trim needs to be replaced with big, beefy casings – Oh, and new blinds are one the way!), but they’re muuuch better already.

 

One could even sleep in here!

What TODO, What TODO?!

In my last post we toured the new house.  In this post, we’ll walk through and make a list of what I hope to do in each room.  This house is mostly great as is, but it doesn’t really look like our home, so we’ll be making lots of changes (and using lots of paint!) to make this home feel more like us.

The Foyer

• Paint a new (more-me) color
• Change out the light fixture
• Get rid of the angled corners on the doorway into the piano room and, possibly, add a transom window up above (like this)
• Beef  up trim around doorways
• Remove the door from the coat closet behind the front door and widen it to become a bench seat/landing station (like this)
• Paint a fun color on the back of the door
• Different wainscoting treatment (?)
• Refinish wood floors in a darker color

 

Kitchen

Possibly some day, down the road, we’ll replace the cabinets and re-work the kitchen, since it’s not actually very functional the way it is, but for the foreseeable future, we’ll work on making it prettier and as functional as possible:

• Paint the cabinets white!
• Change out knobs and pulls
• Paint the walls
• Cut missing shelf for one lower cabinet, so we can actually use it!
• Build pull out drawers for cabinets
• Get rid of the angled corners in the doorway
• Beef up trim around doorways
• Refinish wood floors in a darker color

 

Pantry

(This isn’t even my mess – mine is much, much worse!)

• Paint walls
• Paint shelves
• Add baskets and containers to organize this mess!
• Replace door with 5-panel door

 

Family Room/Eating Nook

• Paint walls
• Change out knobs
• Beef up trim around windows and doors
• Replace light fixture in eating nook
• Tile over red brick (possibly just paint white in the short-term)
• Re-build mantel to be bigger and chunkier
• Replace carpet with hardwoods

 

Powder Room

 

• Paint walls
• Paint cabinet
• Replace knobs and drawer pulls
• Replace sink and faucet (the sink is very pretty, but it’s shallow and hard to wash your hands in!
• Replace door with a solid, 5-panel door
• Refinish wood floor

 

Dining Room

• Paint walls
• Beef up trim around doors and windows
• Replace light and ADD MORE lighting!
• Widen doorway and get rid of angled corners; possibly add transom window above (like this)
• Possibly a different wainscoting treatment (?)
• Replace carpet with hardwood

 

Piano Room

• Paint walls
• Beef up trim around doors and windows
• ADD ANY lighting!
• Replace carpet with hardwood
• Possibly a different wainscoting treatment (?)
• Possibly add built-in shelving (?)

 

Office

• Clean up this disaster area!
• Figure out a desk situation! and how to also make this a guest bedroom
• Paint
• Beef up trim around windows and doors
• Replace door with 5-panel door
• Replace carpet with hardwoods

 

Laundry Room

• Remove wallpaper border
• Paint walls
• Replace cabinets with either shelves or different cabinets
• Build folding counter over machines
• Replace flooring (possibly just with stick-on tiles – or maybe paint it!)
• Build drying rack
• Replace door with 5-panel door

 

Stairway

• Paint walls
• Replace carpet with wood treads and white risers
• Add white wainscoting to lighten up the area
• Create gallery wall
• Replace lighting with something bright and dramatic

 

Upstairs Landing (aka The Hall of Doors)

There are 6 (yes, that’s SIX) doors in this tiny landing!  It’s like something from The Ministry of Magic…or Twin Peaks!

• Paint walls
• Beef up trim around doors
• Replace bedroom and bathroom doors with 5-panel doors (possibly just paint them in the short-term)
• Remove skinny closet doors and turn them into shelves and drawers (like this)
• Replace carpet

 

Girls’ Bathroom

• Paint walls (bye bye fishies!)
• Beef up trim
• Paint cabinets
• Replace countertop (in short-term, try painting it)
• Repair broken tiles in shower
• Re-finish bathtub
• Replace flooring
• Add storage

 

Girls’ Bedrooms

• Paint walls
• Paint ceilings
• Replace carpet
• Beef up trim around windows and doors and floor
• Add crown molding
• Paint closet doors (eventually add trim to mimic 5-panel doors)
• Replace blinds

 

Master Bedroom

• Paint walls
• Replace carpet
• Beef up trim around windows and doors and floor
• Add crown molding
• Replace blinds
• Possibly build built-ins (?)

 

Master Bathroom

Short-term

• Paint walls
• Paint cabinets
• Add knobs and drawer pulls
• Fix faucets
• Beef up trim around windows and doors
• Trim out mirror (? – depending on how far out the long-term is)
• Replace door with solid, 5-panel door

Long-term

• Replace vanity with shorter one; replace counter-top and mirror
• Replace sinks and faucets
• Move toilet over to side of new, shorter vanity
• Make shower bigger, tiled, and door-less
• Replace flooring
• Re-tile bathtub surround

 

Seems like we have our work cut out for us!  Best get started!  First up: the girls’ bedrooms!

New House Tour

Welcome to our new home!  I thought I’d start with a tour of the new home before I jump into my first projects.   My husband was smart enough to snap a bunch of pictures with his camera just minutes before the movers came in with the first of the boxes and furniture.  I’m so grateful he had his head on straight that morning!

Let’s start at the front door – seems like a very good place to start…

(Note: this picture was actually taken at our inspection, so those pots and the chair belong to the previous owner.)

As you walk in, you’re greeted by a fairly large foyer and a view of the beautiful, stainless steel apron sink in the kitchen.  If the fact that the kitchen sink is the first thing you see when you enter my house isn’t enough for me to keep the dishes done, I don’t know what will be!  There’s actually a pocket door in that doorway to the kitchen, which could hide a messy view, but it’s super-heavy and (for some reason) unpainted, so I doubt it will get used much.

The kitchen is a fairly standard U-shape with a vaulted ceiling, so it feels very big when you walk in.  After living here for a month and a half, I’m not loving the functionality of the cabinets, but at least it looks pretty good.

To the left of the kitchen is a small eating nook that leads into the family room.

The nook also has a sliding door out to the back deck.

The family room has nice built-ins and a gas fireplace.  It’s a little bit smaller even than the rather small family room in our last house, so this will be a good place to practice decorating for small spaces, since it’s really the place that requires the most furniture (need a place for everyone’s butt when we’re having family movie night!).

Just opposite the eating nook is a small walk-in pantry and a powder room (wow!  this picture is really yellow…):

To the right of the kitchen is the dining room.  This room feels fairly small right now, but I think it’s actually a pretty decent size – the doorways are just small and confining.  The room itself sits above the backyard and is surrounded by trees, so when you’re sitting at the table, you feel like you’re dining in a tree house.  I love that!

Connected to the dining room – heading back towards the front of the house - is the formal living room, though in our house it’s really the piano room.  The piano fits absolutely perfectly in that front window and the room is just a little bit more workable than our last living room, which I’m really enjoying.

And from the living room, you get back to the foyer and can see the stairs leading up to the bedrooms.

The previous owners had been planning on selling this coming Spring and had been working on getting the house ready.  The had done a lot of work downstairs, but nothing upstairs yet, so the bedrooms hold lots of projects for my future.

Here’s the master bedroom.  It’s actually pretty big and can fit our treadmill (if it were to ever be set up again) AND a bed and some chairs.  I think we’ll really appreciate that.

The master bath…big but dated…but with a nice soaking tub surrounded by trees:

The two girls’ bedrooms need absolutely no work and are totally move-in ready (NOT!):

The girls also have a small bathroom upstairs that needs a fair bit of work and there is a laundry room downstairs that I can’t wait to get my hands on!  I can’t seem to find any pictures of those at the moment, though, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

That’s it (mostly – some day I’ll show you our beautiful yards too)!  Thanks for stopping by.

Next post, we’ll walk through again and make a list of all our hopes and plans for these spaces, which will, hopefully, keep me motivated and focused as I prioritize my future projects!

Another Year, Another House

WARNING: This post is decidedly short on pictures.  Read on for a brief-ish re-cap of my summer and stay tuned for more pictures in coming days… 

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It’s been well over a year since my last post and it was a year between it and the previous post.  Clearly I’m ambivalent about this blogging thing.

When I last wrote, we had just had hardwood floors installed throughout our main floor, up the stairs, and into the upstairs hallway.  They were beautiful and I adored them.  And I planned on adoring them for many years to come.  But this past June, an opportunity presented itself to move into a neighborhood that we’ve been wanting to live in for years.  We’d tried to move a few times before and it hadn’t worked out, so we figured it wasn’t in the cards, but this June, I was tired of wishing and wondering and so we decided to do it: we put on offer on what we lovingly called “The Ugly House”.  It was accepted and we put our house on the market on July 3rd.  By July 5th, our house had sold and we were ecstatic.  On July 6th, we had the inspection on “The Ugly House” and everything came crashing down around our ears.

The inspection came up with way too many issues beyond the obvious cosmetics we had prepared ourselves to deal with – the biggest being a sinking foundation.  The sellers weren’t willing to fix it, so we walked away from the house.   Unfortunately, we had already sold our house, so we were looking at leaving the house that we loved to move into an apartment with an uncertain outlook on when another house would come available in the neighborhood that we loved.

Let me tell you, July was a stressful month!  Fortunately, a lucky star must have been shining down on us because our friend (who already lived in the neighborhood and lives across the street from the house we were going to buy) used her not-inconsiderable networking prowess and found us a new house!  This new house was only a few doors more down the street and was decidedly NOT ugly.  The owners had been planning to move in the Spring, so they had updated the downstairs already.  They hadn’t yet gotten to the upstairs, but that gives us a nice mix of visitor-ready and DIY-ready rooms.  You can read more of the story at my new neighbors house here: http://becca-homeiswheremystorybegins.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-power-of-people-in-hood.html)

There was much more up and down during the purchase and August was also an exceedingly stressful month culminating in our closing date on our new house being pushed back a week.  So, we ended up moving out of our old house and into our friends’ house for a week.  You don’t often get to have a week-long slumber party as an adult, so that actually turned out to be pretty fun!  FINALLY, on September 4th (the first day of school), we were able to move into our new house.  Our girls left one house for their first day of school at their new schools and came home to a different house!  Welcome home!

It took me about a month to recover from what I lovingly think of as “The Summer of Hell”, but I’m nearly healed and have started in on my first projects.  I’m finding that I, at least, want to share these projects with my family and friends, so I’m going to make another attempt at keeping this blog updated.

Check back for more updates…

Breaking Radio Silence

Tap tap.  Is this thing on?  Is anyone there?

Over a year ago, I decided that blogging just wasn’t for me.  I really didn’t feel like I had anything new to add to the blogosphere and blogging was putting too much pressure on me to keep doing more projects.  I’d walk around my house looking around for something else to do and it left me feeling dissatisfied with my home – a feeling I definitely did NOT appreciate. 

After much deliberation, I decided to quit cold turkey and for the most part, I’ve been really happy with that decision.  Every once in a while, though, a friend will tell me I need to start blogging again or I wish I could share my latest project with someone besides my family.  Especially the last few months: we’ve had major goings on here since April.   Today, I received an email from someone who had seen my blog and it made me smile.  So, I’m dipping my toe back in the water just to see how it feels. 

If you look back at my last post (in February of 2010), you’ll see that I was excitedly planning my new hardwood floors.  Well, things didn’t go quite according to plan, but after two false starts, finally this year, we got them!  Getting ready for them was quite the ordeal and we’re still working on getting all the trim and other “me-too” projects finished so I still can’t quite say we’re done, but we’re very close.

So you don’t have to go back to the last post, here’s what our front entry looked like in February, 2010:

And here’s what it looks like right now (forgive the pictures, it’s evening and this room is not well lit):

When I saw that picture for the first time, I smiled.  I’m on a mission to remove the yellow from my house and clearly, I’m succeeding!  When we moved in, it seemed the whole house had a yellow tint to it: the maple floors, the floor-to-ceiling maple kitchen cabinets, all the cabinets in the rest of the house, and then I added to it by painting several rooms yellow.  Clearly I liked it then, but not anymore.  I’m in my blue period now.

You may have also noticed that the walls in the foreground are slightly different.  That’s one of the projects we took on when we knew the floors were coming.  I’ll post more pictures soon, but here’s a sneak peek:

Wainscoting!

OK, so far so good.  I’m not sure how this will play out and whether I’ll keep this up, but at least I’ll plan on sharing what I’ve been up to for the past three months!

Hardwood Here We Come!

I told you all about our recent experience with water damage and how we ended up doing most of the repair work ourselves because we were afraid insurance wouldn’t be covering it.  What I’ve neglected to mention is that, while our insurance didn’t cover the roof repair because it was a defect in the roof, they did cover the water damage restoration – they even paid US for the work we did repairing the drywall!

We’ve pretty much finished everything we needed to do to get back to normal.  The last piece of the puzzle was to replace the little bit of carpet padding that had been cut out and have the floors cleaned and re-stretched.  We got an estimate to do that and it was obscene!  I could not believe anybody could actually give a bid so high without batting an eye!  The insurance company was going to pay it, though, so I asked if we could just have the money to put towards replacing the carpet, rather than repairing the ratty old carpet that was there anyway.  They said yes and sent us a check which would have gone a good ways towards re-carpeting the whole room.

But now my imagination was taking off:  I don’t want carpet in that room anyway – I want hardwood!  And if we do the living/dining room, then of course we should do our family room and have the whole downstairs be wood.  But then, what would we do with the wood that already ran from the entry to the kitchen?  It’s a light maple that is yellowing as it ages and I’m really tired of it. 

Thus began our foray into the world of hardwood and Oh My Lord! are there a lot of options.  It’s completely overwhelming!  Hundreds of types of woods, Millions of stain colors, and Bajillions of finishes.  How does anyone ever make a decision?

So, I decided that the best option was to lay down unfinished maple in the new rooms and sand down the existing wood, then have everything stained the same darker color.  Genius!  But then, I remembered Sarah over at pewter + sage talking about her floor dilemmas.  It seems maple doesn’t actually take stain well and they had some problems with the first coat of stain and had to call in the cavalry to get it done right.  But those floors turned out beautifully!

(Source: pewter + sage)

I mean seriously – they make my heart sing just looking at them.  I decided I had to have them and called a flooring installer that we’d heard good reviews for.  He wasn’t so keen on my idea, but said he try a sample and see how it turned out.

Fine and dandy, but then we started realizing what having your floors refinished means: we’d have to leave our house for several days and we’d somehow have to get our grand piano out of the front room and into the play room, which would mean hiring someone to take the legs off and turn it sideways to get it through the door (this piano was my great aunt’s and is over 100 years old – no one paid in beer was going to be touching this thing!)  Suddenly, pre-finished wood was looking more appealing again.

But then I remembered that that opens up the possibilities again and my head exploded.

OK, not literally.

Floor guy brought over some samples yesterday.  I realized I probably don’t want to go as dark as the floor that I love in the picture above and that I probably want to go with something that looks fairly traditional.

So, as it stands now, we’re looking at a 3 1/4” maple in Brandy.  Looks something like this (only not hand-scraped):

Of course, we’re still probably a month out before we actually pull the trigger on this thing, so I’m sure I’ll change my mind.  This is a terrifying decision for me.  The money outlay is huge and if I get it wrong, I’m stuck with it for a looong time.  I’m trying to remind myself that it’s a hardwood floor and that they’re all beautiful (way better than my carpet for sure) and that they’ll be partially covered with rugs, so it will all be fine.  Just fine…

And oh yeah, I’ve been wanting to replace the tile on my fireplace for forever and we know it would be much better to do that before the new wood goes in around it, so now I have to find a tile that I love for my family room AND I have to retile that area before I can have my new floors.

So many things to do!  So many decisions to make!  My head may yet explode.

I Know What Kids Want

A few days ago, my friend Becca over at Home Is Where My Story Begins told me about an amusing conversation she had had with her 6 year old daughter.

It seems her daughter wanted to know why they didn’t have a play room like at Diane’s house.  Becca explained that, in order to have a play room, my daughters share a bedroom and that they would have to do the same at their house:  her daughter would have to share a room with her 4th grade brother.  Her kindergartener, of course, had no problem with this idea at first.  After a more thorough conversation of what that might entail and the discovery that she’d probably have to give up some of her dolls and toys to make room for her brother, her daughter decided that wasn’t quite so appealing.  She then declared, “You always want everything to be perfect.  You always want to clean, clean, clean.  Our house isn’t kid-friendly like Diane’s…”

(Apparently, this is what she wants…)

It was at this point that I almost fell on the floor laughing and, if I hadn’t been standing on a concrete sidewalk – in public, I would have done just that!  You see, I have never been to a house that is MORE kid-friendly than Becca’s.  The woman is a kindergarten teacher!  She has an art center right next to her kitchen table because that’s where the kids like to do art.  She bakes, and bakes…and bakes.  She throws Halloween and Christmas parties for her kids’ friends and she even invited all the kids in their classes over for a movie night!  *I* would like to be a kid at Becca’s house.

This leads me to only one conclusion:  Kids don’t know what the heck it is they want and they (like the rest of us) don’t appreciate what they have.  But, I can tell you some of what I think they need:

• They need parents who are around and who love them
• They need an outlet for their creative endeavors
• They need to run around outside and make up silly plays that their parents dutifully clap for
• They need cinnamon rolls

• And maybe, sometimes, they need to make a giant mess…but they also need to learn how to clean that mess right back up

So Becca, I’m here to say that you don’t need a play room to make your house kid-friendly.  You’ve already got that in spades.  And hey, if the little one still feels the need for the play room, I’ll trade places with her.  Think of the decorating possibilities!