New Dining Room and Hall Paint! (I know....AGAIN!!)

Well, yet again those who know me know I love change. However, I wasn't the ONLY one in this house who was tired of the Brandywine color, lol. We decided on a color called Pavestone by Sherwin Williams, of course....it's a neutral color without being beige or khaki which I just can't do, lol. I just love color, and lots of it which is obvious if you look in our home. It's more of a grayish tone, but you can see hints of a slight tan in it which is why we chose it cause we can both live with this color. It's actually probably my favorite color in the house, and yes that includes the living room. Here is what our dining room and hall color looked like the first time we painted: Here is the second time we painted it Brandywine: And here is the hall in Pavestone: And here's the dining room in Pavestone: That big wood unit we have (which is older than dirt), is going to be painted Heirloom White and distressed when it's not cold and rainy out. Until next time....

Updated: Front of house DONE!!!

Well, the columns have been painted and have been done for a while. I've just been procrastinating on getting pics. We need to re-caulk (is that a word?) where the wood was nailed together and add another coat of white paint. So, without further ado here is a reminder of what our house looked like when we moved in: And, here it is now after new columns, and landscaping: And, here is our back patio....which we now love and have used every night since we got the canopy: Now we just have to finish the inside. We've decided to hold off on painting the other two bedrooms because we wanted to figure out what to do with the ceilings first. We have old, ugly acoustical tiles in there (yuck!) and I would rather have a smooth ceiling like we did in the other rooms with tiled ceilings, our budget just didn't have room for the guest rooms at the time. So, we've gotten in touch with someone who is coming out to do that hopefully soon, we've just got to buy sheetrock, tape and mud. Then we will be able to paint, add new door/window trim and crown moulding....then paint and install our new interior doors. Almost been three years here, so I'm ready to have it done!

Front yard and house makeover

This weekend, which also happens to be our anniversary, we decided to redo the landscaping in our front yard. After I came up with a design, we set out to buy edging, rubber mulch (won't blow away and doesn't need replacing every year), plants, weed blocker and soil... then we set off to work. Buddy did most of the hard work on Friday, which included mowing, and removing existing old, ugly plants. I have to admit, this undertaking was a bigger pain in the butt than we anticipated. I now understand why landscapers charge so much to do their job....it's hard, backaching work. The hardest part to me, was digging the trench for our edging to go down into....we found that a hatchet did really well for this, lol. Now that it's over, we can feel (and see) our property value going up! All that's left on the front of the house, is to paint our porch and the brick on the columns the same color as our foundation, which is Sherwin Williams Anonymous and to paint the wood on top white (just primered right now). We decided to leave our house white, cause after washing the siding, it looks so much better. Here is a refresher as to what our house looked like when we moved in: And here's the new landscaping. Keep in mind the plants are going to get bigger over the years: Here's the left side of the house: The center bed: And the far right: That's it! Looks so much better than what we had. Think the next blog will be once we finish painting the porch and columns!

Just a few updates

Well, nothing new to report on the indoors of our house....but, we have some exciting stuff coming up soon for the outside. When we bought this house we knew that eventually we wanted to do columns on the front porch and to get rid of all of that ugly, dated black metal railing, and also paint....cause a white house NEVER looks clean. We decided to do a gray color on the exterior, Sherwin Williams Summit Gray to be exact, and will keep our shutters black and the front door red. Here is a stock photo of what Summit Gray looks like:

We are going to be painting our house ourselves, mainly to save money, but also because we like to do things ourselves to take pride in our house. That being said, feel free to come help...we'll have all of the brushes etc and I'll cook/grill out for everyone. We're going to also be painting our foundation a shade a little bit darker to give it some definition. Now, onto the columns. We talked with our contractor (the same one who did our roof, cause columns and having to lift our porch is more tricky than I care to try and do ourselves...plus we're getting a fantastic deal) and we decided to do craftsman style columns to go along with the age/style of our house. They're going to be brick on the bottom (painted the same color as whatever we choose for the foundation) and will go straight up instead of being tapered at the top. Here is a similar style of column:

Then, we will start on landscaping the front and ripping out all of the old, ugly plants. We're going to be doing this ourselves too, and are doing something simple to go along with the size of our house. After that, all that's left is our two spare bedrooms, and installing new black interior doors. I can barely see the end of this tunnel, but I'll take it cause we've come a looooong way with this house. If you look on the right hand side of the post, you will see different blogs. If you click on the 2010 link, it will take you to our very first house blog and you should be able to see everything we've done until now.

New paint/updates for guest bath

This blog is actually overdue. We repainted our hall bath, added new baseboards, door trim and crown before we had family/friends over for Christmas (we actually did it the week before over a couple of days). We thought that the original color in there was a little too gold, and decided something a bit more neutral would fit better (this is the only room in our house a tan/khaki color....cause lets face it, I love color!!). Here is what the OLD color looked like:

Here is the new color:

By the sink/cabinets:

Art above toilet:

New base:

That's about it. Sorry it's not extreme, lol. Now all that's left to do inside is to paint the two spare rooms (after we put up sheet rock over the tile ceilings), do all of the trim in there, and install our new interior doors which I believe we decided to paint black. If you can't imagine what black interior doors look like, here is a pic:

This is actually a suggestion by realtors and interior designers. They say it really adds some "oomph" to your house, AND when you turn around to sell, most people looking at buying aren't going to remember that house with white doors....they're going to remember the house with black doors.

New living room furniture!!!

So, we finally got around to getting new living room furniture. We didn't necessarily NEED new furniture, but ours was torn, worn, battered and beaten (and add 3 dogs to that....we don't speak of the terror that was Abby, our other schnauzer who currently lives with an old gentleman on a farm). The set we got from Rooms To Go is the Pemberton and goes marvelous with the colors in there. This is also our Christmas present to each other :) Here it is:

The accent chair:

The sofa:

The love seat:

New lamp:

Up close of the fabric:

And the second accent chair in our bedroom which gives me a quiet reading nook:

And that's all. We are so glad to get it now so that when we host Thanksgiving and Christmas at our house this year, we have nice furniture for our guests. Until next time!

Master Bath :)

Well, we finally got the master bath done. I had a vision in my head of a vintage beach theme, and even though I couldn't find the picture frames I wanted for the art, I feel like it still came out looking good. Eventually I would like to add a small band of glass tile above and around the top of the sink and possibly above the shower/tub....we'll see. Please keep in mind that our house was built in 1953 and bathrooms were much smaller then....we also kept the paneling and just painted it (cause believe it or not, paneling is coming back!!!). Now onto a refresher of what the master bath looked like when we moved in. Ugly shower curtain they left, old sink/vanity and CARPET!!!

Now, with new paint, tile, vanity, art, baseboards, crown moulding and shower curtain:

Better view of the new vanity:

My "vintage" beachy art:

Sonnet 17 by Pablo Neruda:

Floating shelves that Buddy built using door trim to hold up premade shelves so I could "cutely" store our bathroom stuff in wicker baskets:

And that's about it. House is getting there :) Hope to have some sheetrock put up in the 2 spare bedrooms and our guest bath soon to cover up ugly acoustical tile. Then we can paint and install our new interior doors. Until next time!!