Closet Facelift

On the same day that the carpet installers were at the house, I decided a little closet facelift was in order. All of the closets at our "old house" had white wire shelves. That is not the case here. This is the closet in the master bathroom upstairs. It is an obscenely large bathroom (no photo to share now) in need of several updates, but with a smaller size closet. There is also a similar size closet downstairs adjacent to the full bathroom on the main floor which I am grateful floor. Right now, that houses everything child related since it is near their bedrooms and extra towels that are not under the sink. Note: without locking bathroom cabinets, the only thing safely stored in them are towels! Back to the closet...

The closet shelves were in need of new paint. As you can imagine hair products, lotions, etc sitting there over the years. Well, I didn't want to paint because that would mean sanding, cleaning up dust, etc and we will probably paint the closet when we paint the bathroom down the road. 

So, I used the next best thing, a material I am very familiar with…Vinyl! I purchased two large containers of this distressed chevron vinyl at JO-Ann's back in the summer for $2.97. The rolls were huge. Time to use them!

I simply measured the shelves, cut the vinyl and adhered it to the shelves. WaLa!

Now the shelves look updated, clean and it was a much quicker process than painting.

Progress - Flooring

While I haven't posted, we have certainly made progress on the house. I am going to break it up into all different posts so I have updates to share as I choose :).

Lessons Learned in Reno Progressively: You get more work done when you don't live at the house. For us this rings true because we have a toddler in bed by 7:30pm which restricts what improvement projects we can do because of noise. And we had family in town for William's birthday party/real birthday/Easter so we enjoyed three days with them instead of working.

So let's talk flooring since I did a whole post on it earlier. The carpet installers from Lowe's spent 7.5 hours installing carpet in 6 bedrooms of our house. We used two types of carpet: one for the four bedrooms and another for the two "bedrooms" in the basement.

Basement guest room

New carpet pad down

New carpet installed!

Removing the old and installing new carpet breathed a fresh breath of life into our house. It smelled fresh, it looked fresh and it looked updated and was what we wanted. We are glad we decided to go ahead and install all of the carpet at one time because the original carpet was old, discolored and stinky. Plus, since we spend alot of time playing on the floor, it probably wouldn't have been the best healthwise for young children.

Now Brad also finished our beautiful Pergo floor in the living room (large area, about 28x17). He did a great job and we are working on putting up new floor trim. Everyone compliments our floor and we are so happy with the color and material selection we made.

How did I contribute to the flooring process? Well, besides painting the floor trim in the bedrooms once the old carpet was removed, prior to the new carpet being installed, I also decided to pry up the flooring in the entryway (shown below). You don't need to remind me I was 34 weeks pregnant, my husband did that. I just sat on the floor and pulled up the pieces with a small crowbar, it wasn't too difficult. This area is going to have the same Pergo floor once we get the time to make noise for a couple hours to get it installed.

Lessons Learned in Reno: 1st Weekend

On Friday we started working on our new house! My husband picked up the flooring at Lowe's and we spent some time that afternoon enjoying the place we will call home (or "my farm" if you are my two year old).

Lesson 1: Main living areas look better WITHOUT carpet.

Living room on Saturday morning

Living room on Saturday evening

Lesson 2: Old mauve carpet looks best thrown out on the front lawn!

Photo of the carpet and pads from the two upstairs bedrooms

Lesson 3: Paint trim white! On Sunday we went and picked up a new gallon of Valspar White semi-gloss paint to start painting the trim throughout the house, mainly the bedrooms. New carpet will be installed on Tuesday so painting trim before carpet is installed is much easier and allows us (or me) to not have to be super exact.

Lesson 4: This house is going to be where we live for many, many years and raise our children. It is a wonderful feeling. It is so relaxing to walk outside and not see neighbors, only our land. I so like people, but it just seems so "zen."

Lesson 5: (No photo). We are lucky to have grandparents nearby to keep William while we work on the house. He spent both days this weekend with my mom and had a wonderful time. We missed him lots, but couldn't have gotten as much done as we did without her help.

Weekend 1 achievements:

- removed all carpet (about 1900 sq ft worth) and brought to the local "beauty spot" to dispose of it

- laid our beautiful new floor in the living room

- removed all of the window grates and cleaned the inside of the windows

- painted all the floor trim in the master bedroom and started the other large upstairs bedroom
- removed the floor in the entryway in preparation for our new floor
- in the laundry room, we removed a handful of boards with nails hanging out (as hooks), a large MDF bookcase once used to stack shoes to the ceiling and a broken wire rack

We Bought a Farm!

Believe it or not…we bought a farm! We just closed on the property eight hours ago after making our initial offer in September. Surprised we are moving again? Some of you may have been with me since 2009 when I started writing about building our current home. But yes, we are moving again. Only 2.5 miles up the road, but technically it is a new town (same school cluster) and 13 more acres of land. Eek! 

So this will mean one of two things for this blog. 1) I will be sharing lots of DIY and home improvement projects because we have a new place to start and make our own. 2) I will not share as frequently because I have an almost two-year old, am 33 weeks pregnant, moving and trying to make the house "ours" somewhat before baby arrives.

I am not going to share any pictures of the house itself yet, but for now, enjoy the view :)

Multi-Use Closet Makeover

My business has started to take off (woohoo! very blessed), which in turn means that I was making a larger mess in our home office...

See all of that wasted space?! Well, I decided it was time to do something about it. Brad installed the same white wire shelving that we removed from our laundry room when we renovated it and hung it in the office closet.

I "borrowed" a pants hanger from his side of the closet and put some of my ribbon on it so I could quickly see what I have in stock and not have to dig through a box.

Then I added some of my ready-to-order items: beach pails, different size plastic buckets, and water bottles. Many items are in the basement (ie: box of tumblers, more water bottles, floating frames), but this certainly is an improvement!

In case you are wondering, the photo boxes to the right don't hold photos, but greeting cards. One is cards to me, all from Brad, cards to me from others, William's birthday/baby shower/welcome to the world cards, and cards to Brad from me. Perfect way to organize it all!

Laundry Room {Renovation}

You may know that back in 2009 my husband and I started building our first home together. The side door with laundry room, closet and door to a half-bath seemed to work great. That is until we moved in. The laundry room became cluttered. We were using our side door 95% of the time for the past two years since we didn't have a front walkway until October 2011 and walking from the driveway to the front porch meant muddy feet. So this cluttered "passageway"became our entryway.

The laundry room was the builder's color paint until December 2011. Why did we wait so long? Well, my husband is a wonderful painter, but he also has a job with long hours which gives him little time for hobbies and other fun stuff, nevermind painting. It was me too, I couldn't decide on the color. We finally painted our kitchen Cliveden Gray Morning by Valspar on March 28, 2011. This is significant because I went into labor on March 30th so the dining room remained white until December 2011. Once my husband painted the dining room, I decided to carry the color all the way into the laundry room since they all connect.

Since the wire shelf was removed to paint, we decided to purchase a basic cabinet from Lowe's for $99 to hide our detergent, cleaners, etc. Installing the cabinet and hiding these things away made an immediate difference. 

Then we started thinking about a drying rack since I am one of those people who hangs jeans, unmentionables (ahem) and sweaters to dry. In my searching for new design options, we came across this image on Pinterest and knew it was what we wanted to do. I started looking for the fold down drying racks, but didn't have much luck. What I did find was along the same lines from The Container Store. We purchased a fold-away drying rack and hung it above the dryer. 

I also found this quote on Pinterest but created it myself with my Silhouette Cameo.

I am very please with our "new" laundry room. Cheers to my husband!

Kitchen Update

What is the least expensive way to update a large space? Paint!! We moved into our home in November 2009, but haven't made painting a priority for a few reasons: (1) We have 1.5 acres of land that needs to be maintained, beautified, landscaped, etc (2) My husband prefers to do all the painting which is great since we don't have to pay anyone and he does a perfect job (honestly), but he also has a full-time job that had more than full-time hours (3) I hesitate when choosing colors.

The rooms we have painted are our master bedroom (January 2010), master bathroom (June 2010), nursery (November 2010) and now our kitchen/dining room (March 2011). I had three color blocks painted on the wall in our kitchen that I looked at for many weeks. I am very pleased that I went with the middle option and my husband surprised me by painting the kitchen while I was out one afternoon and finished it into the dining room until the gallon of paint ran out.

This is a before picture of our kitchen from Thanksgiving 2009 when my family was in town. All of the walls in our house came standard in this "bisque" color:

After:

Of course, once the kitchen was painted, we decided that we really do need a piece of furniture where the cat's bowls once were. We have a two-seater bar where we frequently eat and also our informal dining room so we haven't purchased a small kitchen table since I am picky about what I want. Well, our large kitchen seemed to get cluttered with mail, keys, etc. and we finally found a buffet-style unit that we liked for the kitchen so we bought it!

I purchased a small bamboo tray to collect our mail and also my husband's black leather valet for him to charge his cell phone, drop his wallet, etc. So far so good (and organized!).

Since our kitchen and dining room share one large wall, we carried the same color into the dining room.

Before:

After:

I love it and it feels so good to see color on the walls downstairs! And to think it all got done before our baby arrives and additional visitors. Next project for this area are curtains for the double windows in the dining room and panels for the sliding glass door.

P.S.: The color is more green than gray in person...sad it looks gray here!

Whatever Goes Wednesday

Closet Do Over

The baby's closet is complete! Or at least until we decide we need more shelving once baby comes :).

We took a trip to The Container Store to buy additional wire shelving for the nursery closet. The closet is a little bit more narrow than we thought and although it is long, the door size is standard which means you run the risk of alot of dead space if you don't make the most of it.

Did you know my husband is an engineer? Well, the wheels in his mind were spinning and we decided to install two adjustable wire shelves on the left side of the closet so I wouldn't just have these big stacks of stuff that would topple over. Before that he also removed the existing shelving, spackled and painted the closet. He is so wonderful :).

We may install an additional short shelf in the closet near the right side, forward facing, but we didn't want to do that yet.

Right now the closet is a little more empty than you may be used to seeing in a nursery, but that is because we don't know the gender of our baby! The baby does have more clothes than what is in the closet, the dresser is pretty full actually, but since this is also our first child, we are going to learn as we go with some things.

I love being organized!!