The Nursery Reveal!

The nursery has been done for months but I am just now getting around to taking some pictures of it. I had so much fun putting Riley's room together!

Can't wait to bring our little girl home!
-Amy

Time to play catch up

Well, it's official... I'm a really terrible blogger. But I'm ok with that. Ever since we moved into our house I knew I wanted to keep track of all our house projects on my blog, and I still want to do that. The problem is that I never feel like sitting down to organize my thoughts and gather all my pictures to actually post it. Well, today seems like a good day to make a post so thats exactly what I'm gonna do and hopefully it won't take me 6 months between each post! So here we go...

The first thing we did when we moved into our house was paint the living room. We were all pumped up from buying our first home and thought, "it's just painting, it'll take a weekend". Just like always, we were wrong. Our living room was this nasty wood paneling, a common theme for 70's houses like ours, but it made the room so dark.


We had to tape everything off and sand the walls, then wipe with a wet cloth first to get any slick varnish off of the walls and make sure the paint would stick. It was a messy, dusty process.

We bought something called "bonding primer" which is special primer for wood paneling or cabinets. It is suppossed to stick the wood surfaces better than regular primer. We painted two coats of primer and two coats of paint. We also painted the ceiling while we were at it because it was dingy (hence why there are garbage bags around the ceiling fan).

 

One of the hardest parts of this process for me was picking out the right paint color. I knew I wanted a cream/off white/ light taupe which sounds easy until you go to the store and look at hundreds of colors that fall into that category. We probably bought a dozen samples before we picked a color. It's funny how colors tend to change from the way they looked in the store to the way they look on the wall in your home, and then the way they look in daylight vs. at night. It will make you want to pull your hair out, or maybe thats just me. We finally decided on Woodrow Wilson's Putty by Valspar and I still like the color over a year later which is good because I never want to have to repaint our living room again!

 



 

 

Then once the walls and ceiling were painted we decided that the trim needed a makeover as well. We wanted to paint the baseboards and window trim white and stain the top piece of trim darker to better match our ceiling beams. Instead of taping the walls and risking ruining our nice new paint job we thought it would be easier to just take each piece of trim off of the wall and then put it back on. I know, we are crazy, but that's what we did. We carefully took each piece of trim off, painted or stained it and put it back on. We cracked one or two pieces of the baseboard and since we couldn't find the exact matching baseboard at Lowes, we ripped two pieces of baseboard out of our bathroom. Sidenote: Our bathroom is a horrific mess that we will have to do a complete remodel eventually so it really didn't matter.  Once the painted trim was back on the room felt much more complete and updated.

 Here is a picture after we stained the top trim to match the ceiling beams and the rest of the trim has been removed.



And here with all the trim painted and finished.

Compared to before, it made the room so much brighter.

 

Then of course once the painting was done it was time to decorate. I took this beautiful oak coffee table that my mother-in-law found at a garage sale and gave to us (thank you!) and painted the legs white and stained the top a dark walnut color. It turned out really nice.



 



The decore in this room is continually changing, and I still haven't hung much on the walls yet...one day I'll get around to that. But this is what the room looks like now:

 

And that's our living room. Home Sweet Home!
-Amy

The Office Finished!

Well the office has been completed! I can't tell you how good it feels to say that. Really all that was left was just decorating and refinishing a desk I wanted to put in the room. So as a reminder, this was the office before decorating:

The closet that gave us so much trouble:

The striped wall and the daybed from Ikea:

I've had this desk in my garage for the past three years. I knew I wanted to use it somewhere. I loved the lines and look of the desk, I just never had a reason to redo it, but I kept it because I knew that one day I would. Well, that day has come! I don't have any pictures of the desk before, but here it is below with all the drawers out after I used paint stripper to get all of the previous stain and varnish off.

You can see what a difference the paint stripper made, it helped me get the desk back down to the bare wood so that I was able to re-paint and stain it the colors I wanted.

 All my drawers ready for painting!

Here's the desk after:

 I painted the body of the desk the same color as my stripes and closet doors in the room. I painted the top row of drawers the same color. I wanted to try for an "ombre" effect here so I painted the middle drawers a shade darker and the bottom drawers a shade even darker. The knobs came off of our master bedroom furniture. We changed out our bedroom hardware for brushed nickle so I took these and spray painted them a dark brown and voila! The top of the desk was stained a driftwood gray stain.

I also had this chair which I thought went nicely with the desk, it just needed a little makeover.

I painted the chair the same color as the desk, and painted the backing a shade darker for a little bit of interest. Then I recovered the seat in some gray fabric I had that went well with the desk.



Now, for the room reveal...

The closet doors with their new knobs



I hung some curtains, and a mirror I got on clearance at Target, my new desk, and another little piece of furniture I got at a garage sale years ago that I now have the perfect spot for!

 

The daybed all dressed up:

 





And then there's this...

 

This is Bear. My Papa shot this big guy many years ago in Canada. Bear is older than I am. He has been in my grandparents house as long as I can remember and I have a lot of childhood memories with him. I am so honored to now have Bear in my home and I hope my kids will be as fond of him as I am :)

 

So there you have it, the finished office.

Before:

 

And after:

 

Quite the change don't you think?