Office Closet Part Three: The Reveal

Okay, so the office closet trilogy continues! When I left you last, the closet doors were drying so we couldn't put them on yet. We have since attached the doors, woohoo we officially have a closet again! However, we can't get the doors exactly even. I feel confident we will figure it out though, we just haven't quite yet. But, without further adieu, here is the office closet... 
Before:

 

After:

 

Remember the outlet and coaxial cable we put inside the closet? Well, we have a TV in there now! It just so happened that a bookshelf we had was the exact width to fit our TV inside it. So for now we have our bookshelf in the closet. Our plan is to have a custom built in closet "look" inside. We may keep the bookshelf in the closet and build clothing rods and shelves off of it, or we may purchase an actual closet kit, we'll see. But for now, the bookshelf will work.

Below is the seam binder floor piece we had to put in to cover our gap of exposed sub-floor. It doesn't stick out like a sore thumb quite as bad as I thought it would.

So that's our office closet for now. On another note, we bought a bed for the office as well. We wanted a daybed, or couch with a sleeper bed in it. We settled on this daybed from Ikea. It was a great price compared to other things we looked at and when it pulls out, it makes into a KING size bed...pretty awesome! Then, as an added bonus, it has three huge drawers on the bottom for storage.
As with all things from Ikea, assembly was required and the dogs were not thrilled about it.

King size bed!

Here it is all put together. The Ikea mattresses were a little on the firm side,so I bought two twin size mattress pads to put on top. I really love that this bed has drawers for storage.

Now, that most of the difficult stuff is done, on to the fun part.....decorating! Here is a sneak peak of the bedding I plan to use:

Until next time....

-Amy

Office Closet Part Two

Okay so in my last post I showed you the new office wall color and the stripes I decided to do on one wall. But I didn't even begin to get into the closet redo. Just to remind everyone, this was the closet before:

 It was a really bad use of space. Not only was it hard to get things into and out of the closet but to be able to open the closet doors you had to allow enough space in the room for the doors to be able to swing all the way open. I just didn't like anything about it. All I wanted to do was knock out the middle portion of wall in between the two doors to create a bigger opening and put bi-fold doors on the new opening. In my mind it seemed very simple, a weekend project. Four weekends later, we are finishing up. The night that I painted my stripes, my very kind mother and father-in-law drove up from Houston for the weekend to help us out. My father-in-law works for a home builder so he knows a thing or two about this stuff. His expertise was greatly appreciated. Without their help we honestly would not have been able to pull this project off. Thank you Mom and Dad Smith! :)
First step, demolition!

The drywall was cut away from the wall so we could see our studs and framing. Then the framing was removed. A hitch in the process was that the current opening from door to door was going to be an odd size and we couldn't find any bi-fold doors to fit that size, so we had to widen the opening just a tiny bit. I think it was only about two or three inches, but that two or three inches made a lot of extra work because we had to take out the side framing, pull up the carpet and cut down all the trim work to match the widened opening. Already, the project was more difficult than I had thought. There was also an outlet in the small partition of wall we removed so that outlet had to be pulled up. I wanted an outlet inside the closet because I planned to have a TV in this room and wanted to be able to put it in the closet so it wouldn't have to take up any space in the room. My handy father-in-law was able to drop the outlet down through the closet wall and voila, I had my closet outlet. You can barely see it in the last picture in between the two dark streaks on the wall. 

The next step was to rebuild the new frame to the size we needed. Sean and my father-in-law did a great job on this.

Then we had to nail drywall over the exposed framing, and smooth it all out with joint compound and joint tape. Thus, I got my first lesson in floating and taping....and I decided I hate it. Let's just say, when I do something, sometimes I tend to become a little bit of a perfectionist and when floating and taping, your never going to get it perfect, eeevvveerr, so you just have to let that go. I am also just chalking it up to my first time to float and tape and I think if I ever do it again I will be better at it. I'm just thankful that this time it was a small area that doesn't get seen a lot. And, now that we touched everything up, it really doesn't look too bad (more on that later).

So at this point, the first weekend was over and my in-laws had to go back home. From here on out it was just me and Sean....scary....luckily the most difficult parts were out of the way.

The next step was to paint and touch up. After painting over the new drywall, I realized that our current walls had some texture on them (after doing some research I believe our texture is called orange peel), so the new dry wall looked completely different than the existing wall because 1) I could see every line and crevice from our float and tape job and 2) because it didn't have any type of texture to it.  After looking around at Lowes, I found this orange peel texture spray in a can and it worked great. Not only did it make the wall look more uniform, but the texture also helped to hide a lot of the imperfections from the float and taping. So I sprayed the walls with the texture and repainted them, then I moved on to the inside of the closest. I sprayed the inside of the closet with the same texture spray, then painted over it once it had dried. I painted the closet the same color as the rest of the room. 

You can see in the picture below how awful the wall looked before I put the texture on it. 

 Also, Sean and I (mostly Sean) were able to drop a coaxial cable down in the closet wall also, so that we could hook up the TV in there. I was really proud of him for being able to do this!

 Now we had to cut all of our trim pieces to fit the new opening. We salvaged as much trim as we could from the old openings. We didn't change the height of the opening so the two side pieces didn't need any trimming but the baseboards on both sides, inside and outside of the closet did and the top pieces did. I carefully measured and marked them all and trimmed them down with the miter box and saw. A miter box is a really great tool for trimming, and pretty cheap. We got ours for about $10. It allows you the get a perfect 45 degree angle or straight cut. However, it does require some muscle to use. I was definitely feelin' the burn as I was sawing through the trim. But my cuts turned out good and I got a workout in the process so it was worth it. Then I painted the trim and it was ready to be put back up.

 So by now, you can probably see that there is an issue with the flooring here. The room was carpeted around the previous two closet door openings, so when we removed the wall that separated the two doors, we were left with a section of bare floor in the middle (it's the grayish spot of floor in the picture above). Luckily we had two spare rolls of carpet remnants that the previous owners left at the house. Our plan was just to make a straight cut across the new opening and then cut a second piece that fit inside the closet and matched up with the other seam. But that would have been too nice and easy, so of course that's not the way it worked out. One of the rolls of carpet we had was more than wide enough but it was about a foot too short to cover the whole length of the closet. The other roll was long enough but as you can see above, it was about three inches too short. Three inches! We thought about cutting multiple pieces of carpet to fit the closet but didn't want a bunch of uneven seams everywhere. So after weighing our options, buying new carpet or reflooring the closet with something else, we decided to buy a seam binder. They make a lot of different types of flooring products for merging carpet to wood floor or seaming the flooring at the threshold of a room. We were able to find one that was five inches wide. We needed something this wide because our gap was about three inches wide and we would need our piece to overlap on each side so that the carpet could be tucked under securely. We bought the piece in natural wood, with out any finish on it and I stained it a dark walnut brown stain that I already had. I forgot to take a picture of it by itself but you can see it below, next to the new closet door as I was trying to decide on a paint color. Yay, no more carpet gap!

 I narrowed down my paint choices to three different colors: The top white-ish color is the same color that I painted the lighter stripes in the room, the middle color is a shade darker than the wall color and the bottom color is a cool gray that I really liked. Making this decision probably took way longer than it should have. I really wanted to paint the doors gray, but even though I thought it would look great, between the gray doors and the dark brown floor piece under them, I felt like it wouldn't have been very cohesive with the rest of the room. So I decided to play it safe and paint the doors the warm white color that I painted my stripes in. I thought this would help tie the room together. If I decide later that it's too boring then those closet doors will probably be getting painted gray, but for now we'll see. Currently, the closet doors are drying so I can't show anymore as it's not done yet. We are nearing the finish line... Be back to post the finished product soon!
-Amy

Office closet

Since my last post, I had grand plans of posting all of the things we have done to the house over the last 6 months but I've been a little preoccupied with our latest project in the "office". We call it the office but really, it is just bedroom number two and currently we are using it as the dogs room (yes our dogs have a room), and extra storage space. At the time I took the pictures below, we had our guest bed set up in there.

We would like for this room to ultimately serve as an office and also have a sleeping space in case we have extra guests. We were getting ready to paint the office (it was a bright green color) when I was looking at the closet and kept thinking what a horrible use of space it was. It is a reach-in closet, not a walk-in and it has two separate skinny doors. There is a section of wall space in between the doors that makes it really difficult to get anything in or out of the closet or even see what is inside. So I had this grand idea "Why don't we just knock that section of wall out and make the opening bigger?" Seems simple enough right? It should just be a weekend project right? Wrong! Three weeks later and we are still working on it, although it is pretty close to being done, phew!

 

As you can see, this closet lay out was just a bad use of space. It had to go.

First, we emptied out the room and painted the ceiling (it was a dingy yellowish/white). Then we painted the walls, knowing that the wall the closet was on was going to have to be repainted. I really wanted to do something fun on the walls but still keep it pretty neutral, so I decided to paint some thick horizontal stripes on one wall of the room. I chose to paint the bedroom the same color we painted the living room, partly because it was neutral and partly because I had almost an entire gallon of that paint color left over in the garage so I didn't have to buy any. Before I came to this conclusion, I painted several sample colors on the wall.

Apparently, I only took one picture of the new wall color before the stripes and it has the flash on so you can't really tell the color but here it is:

To put stripes on the wall I measured the distance from the floor to ceiling, then divided that distance by the number of stripes I wanted. I decided on 9 stripes, 5 the same color as the rest of the walls and 4 in a different color, a lighter off-white. So I think each of my stripes ended up being around ten inches wide. I measured and marked every 10 inch increment on the wall, then I got my wall mounted laser level (this thing is awesome!) and used the laser to tape the lines across the wall. Honestly, without the laser level, I'm not sure I could have done straight lines.

You can tell that some of the stripes look thinner than others. The tape went on the inside of the stripes that were going to remain the same color as the walls. Then I put a small piece of tape inside those stripes so I didn't accidentally paint them. It sounds easy enough to remember but you'd be surprised! You can see the laser lever in the top of the picture above. I highly recommend purchasing one of these, it's great not just for taping straight lines, but for picture hanging too. Once the taping was done, I painted my four stripes the different color. While that paint was drying, Sean touched up the baseboard trim paint (and yes, he is winking at the camera).

 I really love the way the stripes turned out!
Well, I must call it a night, but I will continue to show you the office closet transformation next time.
-Amy

I'm back!!!

Hello all! It has been far too long since I have posted on my blog, but I have been very busy these last few months. Sean and I bought our very first home! We moved in at the beginning of August and have been neck-deep in house projects ever since. I want to use this blog as a way to track the progress we make in transforming our home, mostly just for myself, but if others would like to follow, then the more the merrier! I love being able to look back and see the transformation of things from start to finish. Since we have been in our new home for over 4 months already, I will have ALOT of catching up to do on the things we have already done. So sit back and enjoy the journey with me!
First, the background story of how we came to find our home...
After months of house hunting, we were beginning to feel like a house that had the things we wanted did not exist in our budget in this area. I would check online every day for any new houses to come onto the market. And I mean EVERY day, several times a day, every hour may be more accurate. It seemed like everything that was available that we liked was juuussttt above our budget. We went and looked at several houses, even put offers on a couple and were outbid or our offers were rejected for being too low (yes, I want to get a steal on everything I buy, even a house!). The current house that we were renting was available to us until the summer of 2014, but we were ready to get a place of our own. We had several things on our checklist: at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, kitchen open to the living room, a fireplace, double sinks in master bath, and most importantly, a big lot. We didn't want to be right on top of our neighbors and wanted quiet and privacy. This was the one thing we were not willing to give up. Subsequently, this was also the reason we were unable to find a house in our budget. If we did find something that had everything on our list, it was just over budget, or even if we found something that didn't have everything, but did have the lot...still over our budget. Sean and I had a "come to Jesus" meeting and re-evaluated our wishlist. We decided we were willing to give up alot of things, almost everything, but not the size of the lot. I guess we just really like our privacy :) So, we decided that we would continue house hunting, but since we were able to keep renting our current house for almost a year longer, we would just be patient and continue saving up our money so that in a year, we could finally afford what we wanted. A few days later, something happened that wrecked our plan. The owner of the house we were renting came by to talk to us. He then let us know that he and his family's plans of coming back to the U.S. in summer of 2014 had changed and that they would be moving back into the house in the next month! In a matter of minutes, we went from having almost a year to find a house, to having one month! I ran for the computer and searched the housing market again. We made a list of any and all houses that we could consider, mostly houses that had been on the market for a while, but we weren't interested in, or ones we liked but were over our budget. We no longer had the luxury of being so picky. I called our realtor and told her our situation. She was wonderful and calmed me down and told me that "we can do this!" I wasn't sure how though, since houses could barely close in 30 days and we hadn't even found a house to put an offer on yet. We made plans to go look at several houses that we had stuck our noses up at earlier when time was still our friend. I knew every house that was on the market in San Marcos at that time and we really weren't excited about any of them except the ones that were over budget of course. I hated the idea of "settling" for a house that we didn't really love. A house is a big commitment and I didn't want to buy one with hopes of moving again in a couple of years. We also really didn't want to go back to apartment living. We were ready to settle into something that was finally ours. After discussing it some more, Sean and I decided that we would raise our budget, go for one of the houses that we did like, but was over budget and somehow make it work financially. That seemed like the best option that we had. I spent all afternoon and early evening crunching the numbers, convincing myself that raising our budget was going to be okay. Then, I went to check online to see if any new houses had popped up, as I did quite often. And there it was,...3 bedroom, 2 bath, large lot, and IN OUR BUDGET! oh, ya and a basketball court?!? That's when I knew this house was meant for us. I jumped and squealed and showed Sean, who tried not to get excited, probably for my sake, since we had seen a lot of letdowns in this process. Then he saw the basketball court, and I saw his eyes light up :) I called our realtor and emailed her the link to look at the house. She was going to set up a time to see the house the next day. I had just gotten out of the shower when our realtor called back. She said we needed to go see the house tonight. It was 8pm and I had just rolled out of the shower, but Sean and I jumped in the car and drove to the house. We pull up and another car was in the driveway, but not our realtor's car. It was another realtor showing the house to someone else. Just our luck. We wait around outside until the other people leave. After touring the house, it was love. Well, not ALL of it, I didn't get my double sinks in the bathroom and there is ALOT of updating to do, but the outside was perfect, it was the best thing we had seen in our months of searching, it was in our budget, and we were going to be homeless in a month. We'll take it! We made an offer right there in the kitchen of our future home. Over the next two days, we found out there was another offer and submitted our best and final offer, wrote the seller a personal letter (it was a nice touch) and said a prayer, lots of prayers. Then we got the news, the seller had accepted our offer! All that had separated us from the other offer was our personal letter and $15!!! Over the next 30 days, we managed to close on our house on time. All I can say is, clearly, God handpicked this house for us and all in His perfect timing. Thank you Lord! So here are some pictures of the house before we moved in:

 

 

 

 

So, as you can see, we definitely have our work cut out for us. But we love our home and it has tons of great potential. I'm excited to reveal the updates we have already done and continue to post our current and future projects in this blog! Until next time...

-Amy

Cavins Dresser Redo #2

I have finished the second dresser redo for my friends Taylor and Marlena. This dresser had a tag on it that said it was from the 1920's, an actual antique, which meant two things....one: if I ruined it, I ruined an ACTUAL antique, a piece of furniture history. And two: it was going to be a lot more difficult to work with b/c it was NINETY TWO years old. But I was up to the challenge :)
Here is the dresser in the store where the very talented Laurie Cavins (Taylor's mom) spotted this great piece.
Just imagine it without all the other items on it. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of it originally, I guess I was just too excited to get started :)

Here is the dresser after I removed the knobs and sanded. It looks pretty rough.

Then I spray painted it with the same gray that I spray painted the other dresser I did for the Cavins. (See my previous post)

The drawers spray painted gray, and I hand painted the raised detail on one of the drawers in a light yellow. 

Then I coated the entire dresser with a lacquer and polyurethane to help preserve the paint.  

I already had on hand the four pulls on the bottom two drawers. They came off of another dresser I redid a while back. The pulls on the top two drawers were the original pulls that came with the dresser. I spray painted all the pulls with primer and then a white Epoxy which is used for appliances and indoor metals. 

All in all, I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. What do you think?

Love you all!

-Amy