Thursday, April 24, 2014

Master Bed and Bath

     Apparently you all are more interested in kitchens than in living rooms.  I had triple the number of hits on my blog when I posted the kitchen photos than with the living room ones.  That's okay.  I get it.  It's cool.  Kitchen makeovers are a lot more interesting than just putting some furniture in the living room.
   
     Hopefully today won't be another disappointment for you: it's master suite day!  We didn't do much in the master bedroom.  New paint, new carpet, and swapped out the dinky little fan that was in there for a bigger one that was in the office.  We did Phase 1 of our bathroom renovation.  I'll explain as we go, but most of what we did was cosmetic for now.  We're planning and saving for a larger scale renovation, maybe in a year or two, but we wanted to freshen up what we are currently living with.  So...here are the photos!

Master bedroom, before
Master bedroom, after. We painted and replaced the carpet, but neither looks much different in photos.  It does in real life.



     Like I said, we didn't do much in here.  Just added our stuff.  I did purchase that metal decorative thingy that's over the bed new because the ceilings are so high in here that my old decoration looked dumpy.  On top of our armoire is a photo from our wedding and the candle we lit during the ceremony.  Awwww....

Tub area, before


Shower area, before (with spider light fixture)
Throne room, before


     Again, sorry for the terrible photos.  Still no photoshop on the computer.  Someday I'll come back and fix it.  Maybe.  Anyway, the bathroom before: ick.  Leopard print wallpaper to the rather high ceiling, two toned tile, spider lights.  ::Shudder::  I like leopard print probably more than the next girl, but I have to draw the line somewhere.  Here's the pretty new bathroom:

Master bathroom, after. No more spider light!

Tub area, after

Throne room, after

     We nixed the beige paint in favor of an airy pale blue (Night Frost, by Olympic), I put a coat of darker stain on the cabinets and added some hardware (none in here originally either).  My dad framed out the mirror in here and added that nice chunky trim at the top to act as a base for the new light fixtures.  My sis spend I don't know how long peeling off wallpaper, then we added the beadboard (you knew you couldn't get away from it, right?) and shelves around the tub and in the "throne room," and laid new tile around the toilet to more closely match the rest of the bathroom.  That's Phase 1...

     For Phase 2, sometime in the future, we plan to put in a new vanity (the current one is pretty stained and beat up), a new soaker tub (the current one has a hole in it and is rather shallow), and redo the shower.  The current shower is a one-piece slide in unit, which isn't terrible.  It's in good shape and easy to keep clean.  However, Chris can see over the top of it, and has to contort himself to bend low enough to wash his hair.  Apparently the previous owners had this problem too because the drywall above the shower insert is badly damaged from being wet.  We would like to tile the shower up to the wall partition (you can see it a few pics up) to prevent that kind of damage in the future.  And we'll likely add more beadboard because I have a sickness.

     It's been wonderful to have this much space to get ready in, and to have the toilet segregated.  I don't know about you, but we're still door-closed kind of folks, even five years into our marriage, and it's always been a carefully choreographed dance of getting ready in the mornings and for bed so we can both maintain the mystery.  Brushing your teeth beside someone is one thing, flushing is another.  :\

     What about you?  Door open or closed?  Any partial renovations at your house?  Plans for an upcoming redo?


Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Living Room Reveal!

     Many thanks to the handful of you who follow my blog.  I mostly use this as a creative outlet and motivation to clean my house and dress my kid up adorably, but I do appreciate when you check out my thoughts, follow the blog, or comment.  Feel free to let me know what you think about this stuff!  The house is "finished" in that the major items are in place, but it's more of a minimal acceptable baseline sort of finished.  It doesn't feel right quite yet.  That will take time, yes, but it may also take some ideas from folks like you!  
   
     Another day, another room revealed!  Today we're headed to the living room.  We do have a small entryway, but truly the living room is what you see when you walk in the front door.  As always, let's remember where we started:
The old view from the front door


The new view from the front door!

   We didn't do a ton in this room, and it was the last to be finished because it made great work space for all of our other projects.  The trim got a coat of paint because it was in pretty rough shape, and the walls were painted as well--no more gold walls!  I like how the new wall color cools down the wood tones in the floor and grabs some of the greys in the fireplace bricks.  The paint color is the same as the kitchen, which I thought was going to be a grey-leaning taupe, but turned out to be a warmish grey.  Good thing I like it anyway!  
   We did replace the ceiling fan in here too.  The original one was a little spacy/modern for my taste.  The floors were already in when we bought the house.  They're a nice laminate and were in good condition.  I would have chosen something a little darker and/or less orange, but once the new wall color went up and we got our furniture in, they're fine.  

Gallery wall



   Chris's dad was able to add an electrical outlet to the paneling over the fireplace so we could mount our TV up there.  I didn't want to have to figure out where else to put it when the fireplace seemed like the obvious choice.  It's not my first choice for interior design purposes, but it sure is handy!  The DVD player is resting on the TV mounting bracket, tucked in behind the TV.  No cords showing!  We don't have cable, so we didn't have to hide a cable box, but we did order a Chromecast that we LOVE!




   This side of the room is a little more bare bones right now.  The entry area is small, as I said, so I have hesitated to hang much on the walls there because I don't want them getting bumped or broken, or taking up valuable shoulder space.  And I just haven't figured out what I like sitting on the white dresser, so the Scentsy pot currently lives alone.  I pictured it as a spot to make adorable little seasonal vignettes, but I haven't quite mastered that yet.



     This aqua hutch was rescued from the trash pile at our last apartment and refurbed into it's current state.  I'll have to do a post on that some time.  We used it in our dining room previously, as sort of a china hutch, but our dining room here didn't lend itself quite the same, so it ended up in the living room.  I actually really like it on this wall, and I needed somewhere strong to put my scrapbooks.  The bottom used to house my scrapbooking supplies, but now it holds games and off-season throw pillows!

     So that's our living area!  We spend a lot of time here during the day.  The kitchen is very open into the living room, especially if you're standing at the sink, which I really enjoy.  Some day I'd like to add some more seating for when we have guests, but it's fine for now.  That isn't very high on my priority list at the moment!

Monday, April 21, 2014

Kitchen Reveal!

   It's been almost two months since my last post, and in that time, we finished renovating our new house and moved in! I am so thankful that we had family to take us in for a few months while we transitioned to our new place, but it has been wonderful to try to get back to some shred of normalcy.  C's commute is around 20 minutes, less than half of what it was when we first got here.  We're settled into our house, and it has been a challenge and a joy to unpack and decorate to make it a home.  I thought I would start the first of what will likely be many posts about how the house that we refer to as "The 717" has turned out by showing you the room that had the most dramatic (read: time, labor, and budget intensive) makeover, our kitchen!
   As always, let's go back to the beginning so we can all appreciate how far we came.  This is the kitchen as it looked on closing day:



   And here it is today, thanks to the hard work of my grandpa, my uncle, my father-in-law, and lots of other helping hands:


   This is the best shot of the new tile.  It's an 18" square tile, which my grandfather said he will likely never install again in his life.  Oops.  Our floor was pretty uneven, and it was apparently pretty tough to get the tiles level with the added size, although he admits that they look really good.  We picked a dark grey grout to pick up some of the tones in the tile.  The best part though, is that they have a bit of grit to them, so they aren't slick!  Yay!





   Excuse the yellowish photos.  My flash has been ornery lately, and we don't have Photoshop installed on the computer yet (Chris did an overhaul recently, another reason I haven't gotten these photos up sooner.)

   I absolutely love my kitchen.  It isn't at all what I had in mind on day one, but like many things, I think it turned out even better.  Soooo much hard work (not mine, as I said in my previous kitchen post) went into this room, and I can't imagine a better finished product.  Here are a few detail photos:


   We went with an off-white integrated sink because Lowe's was running a special on them the day I ordered.  They're typically a bit more because of the labor involved on the installation.  We also had a few things customized on the countertops.  Usually they come with a standard 4" vertical lip all the way around the countertop.  That would have left me with about two inches to paint between the lip and the serving bar you can see in this photo, so we asked that they extend the surface all the way up to the bar to prevent any moisture sneaking out from the sink. Sometimes I'm a little wild when I wash dishes, what can I say?


   Here you can see our pretty new appliances, and a good shot of the beadboard backsplash.  Some folks were worried that I wouldn't like that much white all together, but I love it.  It wipes off easily (I'm a wild cook too), it's a great backdrop for my accessories, and it adds a little bit of detail without busyness.  And raising the upper cabinets givens me good work space, allows room for a microwave, and makes the room feel so much taller, although I do have to tippy-toe to reach things on the top shelf.  Worth it.


   You already saw a photo with the dust-catcher decorative ledge knocked out, but now you can see it with the pendants hung.  So much more flattering for my pretty kitchen.


   Another look at those can lights, which make my kitchen SO bright and easy to work in, and the pendant hanging over the island.  No trace of the fluorescent light box that used to be there!



   Here's a closeup of the countertops.  They're a solid-surface countertop that we ordered from Lowe's while they were running a special.  I think they're trying to clear out a few colors because only selected colors were on sale.  Luckily, that happened to include the one we liked.  This photo is reading really brown, but they seem a little cooler in real life.  It's a taupey-grey with an ivory and a dark brown and maybe even a black speck in it.  I've only had them for a month, but they seem to clean easily and the color is forgiving of anything I missed.  (Not sure if that's good or bad...)


   This is crazy, but these cabinets are the most sentimental to me.  They hold my wedding china.  In five years of marriage, I have never had all of my china in a cabinet, ever.  It's lived under my bed, in my grandma's attic, a few place settings in a cabinet in one house we lived in, but never all of it in cabinets.  I cried when I put it all away.  It finally feels like I am settled, ready to live my life, not living a temporary life until we move somewhere else or until we buy a house.  This is my home.  This is where I belong.

As promised, the best source list that I can put together from my very poor memory:
Wall paint: Olympic Icon in Stormy Weather, satin finish
Cabinet paint: Olympic One in Off-White, semi-gloss finish
Appliances: Frigidaire, Gallery collection
Door knobs: Threshold, found here
Drawer pulls: Threshold, found here
Faucet: Glacier Bay Fairway faucet in Bronze
Countertops: Allen + Roth for Lowe's in Antiquity
Tile: For the life of me I can't remember, but I bought it at Mill Creek Flooring.
Light fixtures: Hampton Bay Somerset collection

If I forgot to source something that you're curious about, let me know.