Trimming the House

'Tis the Season!

The week of Thanksgiving, we scored a few deals: we got some new light fixtures, and found the bath vanity we have been drooling over on clearance! YES! (Its still in the box in our room. You will get to see it when we do the bathroom!) Right before Thanksgiving weekend, we found this light fixture on clearance at Walmart. We LOVE clearance. Barb's crazy obsession with the clearance aisle actually turned out to be fruitfull!

The coolest thing we did over Thanksgiving weekend was to trim the tree. Well, trees. :)

We also trimmed the outside of the house with live garland and red ribbons. True Southern Style.

Brandon installed the new light fixtures in the kitchen and in the hallway.

  

Before and After:

Goodbye 80s! Welcome to the 21st century! The only light left downstairs that hasn't been touched is over the sink. We have decided we want a pendent light, but we can't find one we like.

We trimmed the house literally as well! Brandon put in the trim around fireplace, and the thresholds in the doorways.

The project that has consumed the majority of our time is the counter tops. We did a lot of research at both Lowe's and Home Depot, but we like the selection at Home Depot the best.

These are the product pictures from the Silestone Website:

We are all set to have them delivered and installed before Christmas Vacation!

Since we now have had the specifications and measurements made, we can start painting the lower cabinets... FINALLY!

Brandon ripped off the counters in the right side of the kitchen. He just ripped the fascia off on the sink side. We set the counters back on top of the boxes so that we could still have a semi-functioning kitchen.

Barb started painting the lower cabinets with primer.

A vision of the kitchen to come!

Workshop, Pillows, and a Piano!!!

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Brandon's parents came out to visit. They were great in helping us get a few projects tied up.

Raymond helped Brandon put wiring into the shed attached to the house. The live wires that were already run out to the shed were a much higher amperage than could be used for regular outlets, so it was a great thing that he was there to help Brandon. Brandon would have had no idea, and would have fried every single thing he plugged in!

Brandon made a bench in the shed, and together, he and his dad hung the bikes and built more shelving!

Meanwhile, Barb and Debra were taking apart the hideous pillows, and resewing dark brown in place of the bright floral print. Brandon really sucks at taking pictures, so there are no pictures of Barb doing any work. Which is unfortunate, since she did so much of it!!!!

the process

the completed product!

While Barb was sewing up the pillows, Debra took off ALL of the remaining wallpaper in the kitchen. She scored HUGE brownie points for this. Way to go, Mom! :)

The most exciting adventure of the weekend was the one that Barb was nearly as excited about as Brandon! The piano! Brandon's predecessor at work had moved an acoustic upright grand into the music classroom, but it wouldn't stay in tune due to the fact that the room is not climate-controlled year-round. Thus, it was mostly just a piece of furniture. She gave Brandon permission to take it home on loan for as long as we wanted!

We rented a U-Haul and went to get it. Luckily, we didn't set off any alarms at school. Then, we had the challenge of moving it into the house. It took three drivers and five brains to get the U-Haul aligned to the front door correctly, but we got it in! HUGE "Thank-You" to Charles Peters, in addition to Brandon's parents, for helping us get the piano in place. We couldn't have done it without you guys!

...Now we just have to wait for it to acclimate to the temperature, and then tune it! Brandon has been itching to tune a piano... Just in time for Christmas Carols!!!

White Paint and Couches!

We knew that the brown of the front door was not going to work with the browns in the room. After debating over the merits of different colors, we decided that a white door would be the best for the room.

Being a vinyl door, we were faced with some interesting challenges. Regular primers didn't work at all, so after some serious eyebrow scrunching, we realized how silly we had been:

Vinyl is just plastic!

Three and a half cans of spray paint later, and a VERY sore pointer finger, we had a white door!!

Java loved the white door!

She was a bat for Halloween!

 But that's not all, folks. There was still MORE white paint to be painted!

We were quite tired of not being able to have all our kitchen wares out and usable, so Barb painted the INSIDE of the bottom cabinets and drawers.  This way, we could move things down from the upstairs closets, and into the kitchen. It was so nice to have bowls and service wear back!!!

Barb's Mom, Joanne, came to visit us at the end of October. She was a champ, and followed us around all day on Saturday sitting on couches with us. We finally settled on an AWESOME couch. It was the exact color, texture, and firmness that we wanted. The only problem was that it had a VERY bold pattern on one half of the pillow. And this bright pattern of yellow, pink, orange, and brown, was the exact opposite of everything we wanted in our front room. For the time being, we just turned around the pillows, and pretended they were normal. hehe

Painting and Trimwork

Barb painstakingly took off the wonderful wallpaper from the walls in the dining room, and prepped the walls for painting. Wallpaper removal fluid is a bunch of hooey. And even when you score the wall, it really doesn't do anything. All it did was mar up the walls. Barb found that the best way to remove the wallpaper was a spray bottle of warm water, and a putty knife. And LOTS of patience.

Once the paper was removed, all the little score marks had to be filled, and a hole in the wall (from the previous tennant) had to be fixed. Then, Brandon had to remove the crown molding, and Barb went to town painting the walls.

Brandon worked hard to put all the trimwork back up, and to lay all the baseboard trim in the front room.

Not all the trim was on yet...

While Brandon was away at the NC Music Educator's Conference, Barb painted all the trimwork white. It looks so bold and beautiful!

Curtains!

While Brandon was gone at a marching band competition, Barb decided to tackle the job of making curtains for the living room. About a month ago we found the fabric we wanted at JoAnn's, but weren't going to pay $37 a yard. After a little bit of searching on the internet, we found it for $9!

 Barb is a VERY thoughtful person. She thinks, thinks some more, thinks again, and THEN does. Thus, everything was done right the FIRST time. :) The fabric is a light linen, so we decided to go with blackout lining. Barb made the curtains so that you can't see ANY seams. She even figured out how to do blind hems with her machine!

The part Barb was MOST excited about was putting GROMMETS on the curtains. She squealed with delight each time she snapped them together. It made Brandon smile every time!

The finished product is on the left below. We still don't have a curtain rod, so here is a picture of the fabric held up to the wall to show what it will look "like."

 

Before Barb even tackled the curtains, she finished the upper cabinets! Look how beautiful they are!

So what did Brandon do? Umm... Here is a custom-width doorway jamb. 

He's working on trim in the rest of the house. Its gonna look so awesome!!

Stay tuned for a picture of the curtains hanging on a ROD! :)

A month (plus) of flooring

Well... THIS is a long over-due post.

So, over LABOR DAY WEEKEND we decided we would tackle the floors in the kitchen so that we could do it all in one big go. Ha.

We started with pulling up the old floor coverings.

We took out the carpet from the hallway and the front room. That was the easy part. Even taking up the foam pad and the staples, AND the carpet tack boards was easy. The hard part was the kitchen.

Under the layer of white linoleum was 1/4 inch plywood. That plywood was stapled into another layer of linoleum. And not just "normal" stapled, like a sane person would do. Someone was crazy trigger happy when they were stapling in the plywood, which was glued onto another layer of 1/4 inch plywood. Which was stapled and nailed into another layer of linoleum. Which was, thankfully, very easy to take off the subfloor.

 The carnage. And this isn't even HALF the pile...

It only took us all of Saturday to rip up the linoleum. And Brandon only sweated enough to completely break out on his forehead for weeks and weeks.

That brings us to Sunday. Which was only half a day due to church, but we spent the ENTIRE work time pulling up nails and staples. It was insanity. The bloody knuckles Brandon got still aren't completely healed. However, by the end of Sunday, the kitchen looked like this:

Sadly, even the unfinished subfloor was starting to look really nice.

So then, on Monday, we started laying the vapor barrier padding and floor.

And, you know how easy flooring is. Look how MUCH we got done in only one day!

Pathetic, I know.

And that was pretty much the case for the next few weeks. A little work here, a little work there.

Three weeks later...

 
And in the mean time, we were distracted by a multitude of mini-projects.

1. Making Barb a vanity table....

So, this REALLY hideous wooden valance was above the sink. Brandon decided to make a vanity table for Barb. This would be really useful, since the bathroom downstairs isn't very big, and doubles as both the master and guest bathroom. It only took a month to get from start to finish on this project too...

2. Barb refinished the mirror the previous owner left.

 3. Brandon changed the four-way light into a bedroom light on the fan.

 

4. We put the upper cabinet doors on the kitchen cabinets.

5. We bought a mower! (Happy Birthday, Brandon!)

6. We even just recently acquired a GREAT chandelier for the dining room. Yay, Homegoods! TJMaxx, Homegoods, and Ross have become good friends of ours.

Sorry. Floors? Oh yeah. A little at a time.

First the kitchen was finished:

Then, the LAST piece a week later in the living room:

And, finally, it was finished!

AREN'T THEY BEAUTIFUL!?!?!?!?! We finished and cleaned up this past Saturday and we were amazed at how much ROOM there is in our house! We both agreed that it finally feels like a HOME, instead of a property that we are slowly working on.


Its crazy. The kitchen took three weeks, and the living room: one. Figures.

And then we decided to tackle one last thing for the weekend: New Laundry Doors! Mind you, this is COLUMBUS day weekend now. Not Labor Day weekend. *ugh*

The previous owner's dog pretty much chewed on EVERYTHING in the kitchen. Pretty sure that's how there was such a big hole in the carpet too. These new doors look awesome.

We really like the "half"-louvre doors, instead of the full louvre which was previously there. AND we loved that they were pre-finished white! YES! We got back all the HOURS we lost on flooring! :)

Barb found these AWESOME rugs. We found out (the hard way) that our floors are quite sensitive to water. Thus, we needed rugs that are rubber on the back to protect the floors from our wet shoes. Couldn't find anything in the nice stores, so, we went to Walmart! YES!