Doors update

I knew new doors would be nice.

But I didn't realize just how much they would change the entire house.

Before....

Pic I found of Ed scraping up old nasty carpet pad...

Walls painted and floors refinished...

And after yesterday...

Wwwwooooowwww.

Beautiful.

Ed said, "Looks like a real house!"

Haha.

The room doors were bad before but not THAT bad. The real problem turned out to be not having closet doors. It was the lack of closet doors that made the house feel "not done"... and like we still live in a construction zone. 

Bathroom door before...

And after...

Knob close-up :)

And now for an update of a different kind.

The sad kind.

What....

is this....?!??!?

It's not a bunch of fresh herbs that I want to put in my food that's for sure.

I dumped the whole thing.

And why are you dying lavender???

No green thumb here! :(

At least the rosemary is happy.

The new plan is to fill the pots with indoor plants that require very little sunlight. Or maybe six rosemary plants.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The Doors *with update*

Not those doors...

via

I actually don't like those doors (gasp!) Ed on the other hand is a huge fan. I think Val Kilmer ruined it for me...

I'm talking about these doors!

Remember our bathroom stall door?

The one with about a 9" gap underneath it? 

How about our complete lack of closet doors?

Well all that's changing in the next two days! 

TWO. 

DAYS.

!!!!!!!

Why will it only take two days??

CAUSE WE HIRED SOMEONE.

I'm so excited! And I just can't hide it!

I love me some DIY but hearing that someone else could replace all of our interior doors in two days was too good to pass up. Trust me, the price stings. But we're trying to justify it by knowing that we've done pretty much everything else so far completely by ourselves. And by knowing that if we did it, it would takes us two months.

So by Friday, we will have these doors.

The doors above are closet doors hence the skinnier panels. The door doors are a little wider.

Can't wait to post an "After" pic of the hallway. Here's a real "Before"...

Gray wall to wall carpet that we found out was originally ivory/white (SICK!) 

And here again is the progress pic after we painted the ceiling, walls and trim, and refinished the hardwood floors.

Another bonus to hiring someone is I get to sit at home and blog about it instead of going to work. Hooray!

**update**

They already installed several closet doors!

Coat closet done...

Weekend projects

Happy Tuesday!

This weekend was a busy one for us. We both started on projects of our own and got quite a bit done. Unfortunately neither project is complete *Ed just finished his project while I wrote this haha*, but we're making progress.

First, I decided to tackle the office. It's the last room upstairs ("upstairs" is the main floor - we have a walk out basement/workshop/laundry area downstairs) that still needed to be painted and ...well, everything else.

Here's what it looked like when I started.

YOWZA!!!!

This is where we've been tossing things that don't have a home yet and things that should eventually be in an office type room. 

It was a mess.

So first I shoveled it out...

Nice to see the floor again!

Then I removed the old Mad Men style blinds and any other hardware in the walls. I thought I would pass along this advice for anyone else dealing with plaster walls. Instead of ripping heavy duty hardware out, just shove it in... When we prepped the guest room before painting, Ed tried to remove the old curtain rod  anchors from the wall and well....

This happened...

So this time around, I didn't want to rip anything out. Instead, I decided to shove the anchors in.

Out...

Shoved in...

Now I can just spackle over the small holes instead of worrying about ripping out a huge chunk of plaster.

Next came, washing the walls with TSP.

Who's tired of washing walls raise your hand.

Just me?

Actually I'm sure reading about washing walls isn't that fun either haha.

After washing and rinsing the walls, ceiling and window, I set up our small dehumidifier and turned it on high. It was a really rainy, muggy day so I figured that might work even better than just blasting a fan. 

While I was scrubbing away in the office, Ed got to work on the back door.

Remember the one I painted a bunch of horrible colors?

Still love that cobalt ....just have to find somewhere to put it.

I suppose Ed was tired of looking at it (I don't blame him!) and said he was going to paint it Stonington Gray. I on the other hand didn't want any more Stonington Gray - we already have a bathroom and bedroom painted that color!. So I made an executive decision to paint it the same color as the guest room: Makaha from Pratt & Lambert

Sooooo pretty!

Nice, fresh, aqua. And it matches the tile in the kitchen :)

Also....while I've been writing this post, Ed installed the new door knob and deadbolt!

Mmmm brass and aqua - YES.

Oh! And did anyone see the Hunger Games last weekend!?!? We did! SO GOOD! I was team Peeta after reading the series but I might be on team Gale after seeing the movie. 

Liam Hemsworth....mm mm MM mm mm.

Bedroom update and a blogging milestone

I have to say...the bedroom looked like a bomb went off after the bathroom makeover. My family is chuckling to themselves right now because the bedroom always looks like a bomb went off. But I swear this time it was extra bad! The materials and tools for the bathroom project had taken over at least half of the bedroom and last night, I got around to cleaning it up.

Since I was cleaning and tidying anyway, I decided to actually hang some things on the walls and also put a recently purchased bedskirt on the bedframe. We've lived in this house for how long now? 11 months!? And we had NOTHING on the bedroom walls... Unacceptable!

Finally getting around to hanging something on the walls involved hanging all of two things haha. At least it's a start.

First we hung up the soon-to-be-in-everyone's-home-in-America starburst mirror brought to you by Martha Stewart Home, available at Home Depot.

I LOVE it. LOVE IT!

Side note:  I am in serious need of a good camera :( 

Moving over to the other side of the room....

...which I have never shown on the blog and for good reason!

BO-RING!!!

This dresser is a black Hemnes dresser from Ikea. It comes with a matching mirror which had been sitting in our basement since we moved in. 

We decided to hang it upright instead of sideways so we could add two framed pieces of art on either side.

The two items we want to hang on either side are some paintings we bought in Belize on our honeymoon. 

Aaaaah Belize...

Sandy beaches....crystal clear water...

Complimentary rum punch...

Turtle!

But I digress...

Not the most exciting art int he world (....actually I don't think they go with the rest of the bedroom...) but we'll see how they look once I get them framed. 

The last update of the night was the new bedskirt!

Before... (and before headboard)

After..........

The bedskirt makes the bed look a lot bigger and heavier. No more rickety looking metal bedframe sticking out underneath.

A comment on the bedskirt:  I got this tailored bedskirt at Target for $39 - it was the cheapest one! Sheesh! It feels cheap too... I washed it first and the tag said wrinkle resistant. Wrinkle resistant my ___. I had to iron the crumpled mess even though I took it right out of the dryer! But now that it's on it looks good and I shouldn't have to wash it again for a while. Next time though I would probably pay $20 more and get a quality one.

Also Ed did not like the idea of a bedskirt at first. Because he thought I was bringing one of these home :)

But once I put it on the bed he came around and I even got a "Good job woman!"

Nice.

And now for the milestone! 

It's my 100th post!! 

I NEVER thought I would make it this far. And as of this post I've had 10,760 page views!

The best part about blogging has definitely been "meeting" all of you other bloggers!! xoxo

Thank you all for sticking around ;)

Bathroom process

Thank you so much for the nice comments on yesterday's bathroom reveal post! I love hearing from all of you. 

This post will be filled with all of the pics I took throughout the makeover process - feel free to skim haha.

Here's a wrap up of the entire process, start to finish.

Step 1 - The demo!

I removed the wall cabinet, old light fixture, vanity and sink, and the original ceramic towel bars, toilet paper holder, soap dish and toothbrush holder. I did all of the demo with a hammer, crowbar and drill.  If you haven't demo'd anything before - it's as fun as it looks on TV. This wasn't even a major demo (like the kitchen was!) but still, bashing off towel bars and whatnot with a hammer is awesome.

Here's the bathroom before demo....

And after...

Step 2 - The cleaning.

TSP for the walls and ceiling, Lysol scrub for the tile and floor and then a good spray of bleach for the whole bathroom. Then 24 hours to dry.

Step 3 - Wall prep and ceiling and wall paint.

I filled all the holes in the walls with spackle (I recommend the kind that goes on pink and turns white when it's dry!) and then used a palm sander to smooth everything out as much as I could.

Then, mainly because we had some leftover from when we painted the master bedroom, I went with Benjamin Moore Stonington Gray for the walls and ceiling. Since I knew I was going to be covering the wall tile with paneling, I thought having white on the ceiling, gray on the walls, and then another color on the panels would look choppy. Too many large blocks of color. So I painted the ceiling and walls one color.

Step 4 - New light fixture installation. 

I gotta tell you...every single light fixture I change in this house has a different set of wires. Sometimes there's a red wire, sometimes not. Sometimes there's a ground wire, sometimes not. So it's a whole new guessing game every time! I've changed out five light fixtures and each time I think, ok this one's only going to take me 15 minutes cause now I know what I'm doing. 

Not the case. *sigh* Oh well. 

I finally got the new fixture installed. This one was only $30 at Home Depot.

Much better than the old one!

I also installed the mirror at this time but shouldn't have. I had to take it back off in order to install the paneling....

Step 5 - New flooring!

Ooooh the flooring was a pain! Turned out great but ugh...it was a battle.

Installation was easy. It was the cutting that stunk.

A few comments on this flooring installation: This is when the project turned "temporary bathroom makeover" instead of "permanent bathroom renovation". I knew I was going to use this flooring, but I also knew that you aren't supposed to install it over a tile floor. This is not because it will harm your existing floor - it just "voids the lifetime warranty" because it might not stay put forever. Installation instructions on the box say that you have to install it directly to a plywood subfloor. I ignored these instructions and thus, voided the lifetime warranty :) 

I am not usually this type of DIYer. I always want to do things right, follow instructions and install properly. But in this case, the bathroom wasn't getting ANY worse and I really didn't care if the flooring failed after a year. At less than $2 a tile, it was just a fun project to try out. 

And so far...it's working! No grout cracks, looks great. 

Win, win.

I promise to tell you if it starts to peel or something weird.

Moving on to step 6!

Gettin' rid of all that pink! And the "burnt sienna" trim. Blech. 

Pink tile can be vintage and charming. But pink tile with reddish brown trim? With brown/yellow grout?? No way.

I decided to go with vinyl paneling because of the moisture factor in a bathroom. Wood probably would have been fine but I just wasn't sure. 

Installing the paneiling reminded me of putting up drywall - just in the putting-together-pieces-of-a-puzzle kind of way. Having to cut out around all of the existing obstacles.

So. How did I install it?

Elmer's!!

Kidding. Kidding.

I used six tubes (SIX TUBES!) of paneling construction adhesive.

The adhesive instructions said to rough up glossy surfaces so I used the palm sander directly on the tile. It didn't work. I couldn't believe how strong the tile was! So I was really skeptical that the adhesive would hold.

But it did! Phew!

I used masking tape for added support between the panels and on the rough edges.

Then things got a little crazy.........

I realized that on one seam, the outside corner trim piece I bought wouldn't cover the rough edges because I had cut the panels too short. And already glued them to the walls (of course!) And Home Depot didn't have a larger outside corner trim piece (PANIC!!)

Offending edge...

Genius solution...

(I did not come up with this solution - as I mentioned in my last post, I saw the idea of using dowels as trim for beadboard on Thrifty Decor Chic's blog.)

So I glued on a skinny strip of paneling (actually about 10 1" pieces of paneling - they are interlocking).

And after letting the small panels dry, I removed the tape and glued in the dowels.

Then I ran into issues at the top of the dowel/panel pieces mess....

It took some serious brain power to figure out all of the angles to go around a curve with trim.

Enter coping saw....

I ended up having to carve out the "guts" of a couple of pieces of trim so that they would fit seamlessly over the dowels.

Action shots... oh yeah.

Finally getting this right is my proudest moment of the bathroom makeover.

That and this cut around the toilet water line haha.

Step 7 - Caulking every little crevice.

Gotta make it seamless!

For example.....

Before caulk...........

And after.....

So at this point, I had been thinking I was going to paint the paneling white and call it a day. But Ed kept mentioning how much he wanted a dark shower curtain. Over and over again. 

I know Ed.... there's a reason why he does these things.

You tryin' to tell me something dear?

So I finally asked him, "Are you thinking it's too white and bright in here?" 

"Yes...."

And since it's his bathroom (it's the master bathroom but I use the one in the hallway) I definitely wanted him to love it!

But what color to use??? I already had light gray on the walls so I needed something to match and it had to be dark. Dark colors usually scare me - I can't commit to anything very bold. Benjamin Moore website to the rescue! I looked up the wall color and saw this...

"Goes great with 'Stampede'" you say? Excellent! I ran the color by Ed and he said "LOVE!" hahahahaha

Eek!

The first coat kinda had that whole baby poo thing going on....

But the second coat turned into a dark rich grayish brown. It really boosted the look of the vinyl (....plastic....) panels.

What was that... Step 8? Is anyone still reading this rambling post? Bueller?

Step 9 - MORE caulk.

To seal the edges of the trim and create a pretty white line between the Stampede and the Stonington Gray, I taped everything off ---again--- and finished caulking the bathroom.

Step 10 - Install vanity, hang shower curtain and add one of Ed's favorite posters.

Ok that's more than one step. But a bathroom makeover in 10 steps sounds better :)

A comment on the shower curtain - another request (requirement?) from Ed: In addition to needing a darker bathroom, Ed said absolutely no white shower curtain. Not even white with a pattern on it. I wanted to put something softer (prettier!!) in there so bad! But again - his bathroom.  So I came home with the stripes - a pattern yes but almost zero white and I thought a solid color would be WAY too blah. A slight compromise :)

And that's it!

Thanks again for following along!!