A Free Weekend At Last

It seems like ages since I have had a weekend at home with no plans to speak of. The past two weekends I have been working at my new job (in addition to working my old job during the week) and haven't exactly felt like diving in to any projects after I get home from work. This weekend was gloriously plan free. Yesterday I was able to hang the art show that I curated with my brother and spend some time with the family. Today I actually had time around the house to get things done. Most of my time was spent on things like sweeping and yard work, just maintenance things that needed to be done. I did however finally get around to painting the bathroom! Well ok, it's not totally done but almost :-) I still need to go back and touch up a few more areas with a second coat. Still, it's looking lots better than it's previous state where it looked like someone attacked with a paintbrush but lost interest halfway through the job (which is exactly what happened). I'm still incredibly sick of room painting but I powered through, here are some pictures.

Like I said, I am super bored of painting. I have to do something to entertain myself :-)

More painting procrastination, I took a break to photograph myself in the mirror. I am also brilliantly painting in my new dress, amazingly enough I didn't get any paint on it.

That's looking more like it, mostly done with painting

I really went around and around about what color wall would go best with the warm green tile. Working with funky original tile colors is always a challenge, I like the gray/green combo though.

Color Scheme

Now that painting is (almost) done and all of the paint is bought I was looking back at my color choices and trying to remember how I chose them. Eric and I talked about the environment we wanted to create in the house and chose a few neutrals and some accent colors. We generally like keep things earthy but modern at the same time. We liked some of the colors that were in the house already but we felt they needed a little more oomph. Here is a little collage I made of the colors in the house:

Pretty interesting to see them all next to each other. They didn't really turn out as earthy as I expected, they actually put me in mind of the beach a bit. The red/orange color is the only one that was already in the house that we kept. The teal color was Eric's idea for the kitchen and the rest of the colors were chosen by me (with Eric's approval). I wondered if picking colors for the house would be a struggle but it turns out it was totally easy to find things we both liked. How did you and your significant other pick colors for your house? Did you have a specific design plan or did you pick colors emotionally? I feel like we started out with a specific plan but then kind of forgot about half way through the process lol. Nevertheless I am really happy with how the new paint colors look in theirs respective places and I love the clean feeling that a fresh coat of paint gives a room!

Setbacks, Delays and a Little Progress

So we were sooo excited to put in our new floors this weekend but unfortunately it didn't happen for two reasons.

First of all we ended up deciding to go with bamboo flooring for the whole house, after doing some research we decided this was the best compromise between cost, durability and good looks and we are still really happy we decided to go with the bamboo. We had a tough time deciding this though and we waffled on what kind of floors to get right up until the last minute so we weren't able to plan for the installation as much as we would have liked. The thing about bamboo is that it is a fiber and can expand and contract quite a bit depending on the climate it is in. because of this you have to leave a little room around the edges of your room when laying your bamboo floors so that they can grow if they need to. It is also recommended that the flooring sits in the room it will eventually live in for about 3 days before you install it so that it can acclimate to the space (this is supposed to cut down on the amount that it will swell). Well, darn... so we can't put the bamboo in for another 3 days, which basically means we can't put it in until next weekend since we have no time during the week.

The second snag we hit was that our sub floors are crazy. When we first pulled up the carpet we discovered that someone had put down a layer of particle board on top of the plywood that makes up the main sub floor. God knows why, the people who built this house were insane. So as it turns out you can't install bamboo flooring over particle board, ugh! So the poor men, (Eric, Don, My Dad and our friend Adam) spent the whole weekend pulling up all the particle board in the living area. Luckily the bamboo we bought is exactly the same thickness as the particle board so when it goes down the floor will be the same height. It actually works out well too because it gave us a chance to reinforce a lot of the squeaky areas on the floor so it is all for the best but it's frustrating to have the delay when we were so excited.


We did make some progress this weekend however (other than pulling up particle board of course). We painted the two remaining bedrooms so now all that is left to paint is the bathrooms, yay! I'll be excited to check painting off my list, I'm getting kind of sick of it to be honest :-)

So here are some pictures from this weekend just so that Ya'll can see what's going on with the house now:

Our new flooring neatly stacked in boxes and getting acclimated to the space

This is what the floor we chose looks like, we think it will really make the living room and dining room sparkle

Boys tearing up the particle board on top of our sub floors

Guest bedroom all finished being painted, we choose a lovely light gray for this room

Guest bedroom again

Master bedroom-painting finished. The dark gray really modernized this room.

I have to give a great big shout out to Mom, Dad, Logan, Don, Jody, Adam and Joanna for all their help this weekend. We have awesome friends and family! We love you guys! Also an extra special thank you to my parents for cooking everyone an amazing dinner on Saturday night. We had an awesome time drinking wine and just hanging out with everyone after a hard day of work. Looking forward to living in the house and hosting dinners of our own to repay the favor :-)

More Painting

We also did quite a bit more painting this weekend. We finished up the main living area (living room, dining room and loft) as well as doing the hallway and one of the spare bedrooms which will be my studio. I can't wait to get the rest of the house painted, it will be an awesome feeling to get that part of the renovation done and then we can actually start moving things in to these rooms. Here are some pictures from this weekend's painting.

Living room, dining room and loft, done!

Living room after

Living room after

Hall in progress

Hall, done

Studio before, it was a horrible lavender color and obviously used to be a little girls room

Studio in progress

Studio in progress

Studio, you can see the old color in the closet

Studio after, I love how bright and sunny it feels!

Studio after

Studio after, we just have to do a second coat of white in the closet

An interesting fact that we found out from our new neighbor is that the people who lived in this house before us had 6 kids, wow! That totally explains a lot of the problems it has, and why the walls and carpets were totally filthy. This room had tiny, dirty hand prints on the wall all over and crayon scribbles on the baseboards. It feels so good to have a fresh coat of paint and clean new start in here!

Painting

Finally! The part of the house renovation I am most excited about! I learned a lot this weekend from my painting experience. One is that color can totally transform and revive a room. It was amazing the feeling of satisfaction I got from seeing such a dramatic transformation in the rooms we started painting. Unfortunately a new coat of paint really makes you notice all the other things that need to be updated in a room. The other thing that I learned was that my fine art skills apparently don't translate well to room painting, I kind of suck at it. Fortunately my mother in law, Jody, is a painting machine! She got so much done this weekend and did an amazing job of it, we are super grateful to her for all her help.

So here are some pictures from the painting that went on this weekend. We still have a LONG way to go but it is a great start!

Mom, helping he do some edging before we start painting the kitchen in earnest.

Starting work on the kitchen.

First coat, looking pretty blotchy. Apparently dark colors over light are hard :-(

Sample spots on the wall of the dining room

Jody helping out in the kitchen, I think we are on the second coat at this point.

Jody again, starting work on the dining room

Dining room, living room and loft area. The new color is similar to the old one but a bit darker and warmer.

Living room wall with the shadow of the trees on it. The new color is called almond toast but I prefer to think of it as peanut butter :-)

Corner of the loft (with me looking silly)

Another corner of the loft. The red/orange wall is the only one we aren't painting in the whole house.

Kitchen is done! Yay! Next step in here is to stain the cabinets and get new hardware (and working appliances)

Dining room, mostly done. Just have to go back and do the trim.

Dresser Redo

Things are moving right along in the buying process for our new house. We turned in all our loan paperwork this week and hope to have all of that resolved and the loan in place very soon. We also recently found out that the appraisal went very well so we are good to go on purchasing home owners insurance. This is all great news as we are slowly getting closer and closer to our closing date.

Here is a little before and after post about a dresser that was a hand me down from my parents. I don't remember where it originally came from, I just know that it was used when we got it and that it used to belong to my brother. It's a cute little dresser but badly needed a fresh coat of paint and some updated hardware and I finally got around to making some changes to it this weekend.

Before picture of the dresser, it's a little dinged up and pretty horribly cluttered on top too.

Before detail of the old hardware.

When deciding how to redo the dresser I kept in mind the color scheme and style that Eric and I have been talking about for the bedroom in our new house. As I mentioned before, my current color fascination is for everything gray. We have decided that we want to paint the master bedroom in the new house dark gray and the adjoining bathroom light gray. We want the new bedroom to be different shades of blue and gray with some red elements as an accent color. With all this in mind I decided to paint the dresser a light gray color and add some red accent pieces to it. Here is the result...

After- painted a light gray and updated hardware.

I silk screened a red gazelle on the top of the dresser to add some interest. The gazelle image was inspired by art deco motifs depicting gazelles.

Detail of the new hardware.

Newly organized drawer, it will never be this nice again ;-)
This drawer reorganization was inspired by a post from apartment therapy 5 Tips for Organizizing Dresser Drawers

After picture, back in it's original space and de-cluttered a bit.

As with any project, the cats couldn't resist the urge to be a part of it. I ended up with little gray paw prints all over the floor and this cute picture of Reese "helping".

Hopefully I will have some news on the house buying front next week. Until then I will just keep posting about my interior decorating/design ideas and how they relate to the new house :-)

Color Pallets

Going to Home Depot and staring at the rows upon rows of paint colors can seem a little overwhelming. Eric and I have already put a good deal of thought in to the paint colors we want to use in the house and are using a very intentional color pallet. We are both naturally drawn to earthy, subdued colors and have pretty much decided on a color scheme of grays, browns and ochers with a little hint of muted blue/green for the house. The only wall that is staying as is will be the back wall in the loft area which will remain the lovely, earthy, brick red that it currently is. Here is a picture of some color swatches I picked up at home depot to use as inspiration. You can also see in the bottom of this photo a few samples of flooring that I picked up (more on flooring in the near future).

When I look at all these paint samples they bring me a lot of happiness, I can just picture living in a space with these colors and they make me feel very peaceful.

The wall color I am the most excited about at the moment is gray. For some reason I am crazy about gray rooms, in all shades and temperatures. Right now the plan is to use gray (in various shades) in the master bedroom, master bathroom and guest bedroom. I've been collecting photo inspiration for gray rooms and here are some pictures from design blogs that I've gathered. These are just a few of the gray rooms I'm digging right now.

 

Makes me excited to get in there and actually start painting! Right now Eric and I are in the midst of acquiring a home loan and homeowners insurance. Yes, this involves lots of paperwork :-P But it's all good, we're getting a house!