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Floors, Doors & More

9 Dec

Sorry for the delay in posts, I have been out of town every weekend for the past 5 weeks (Fiji for 2, Nashville, Miami for a bachelorette party, then Rockford this past weekend). I’m ready to spend some time at home and away from airports for a while.

Even though I’ve been traveling so much, lots has been going on at the house. The big thing being the floors are refinished upstairs! Not without a hiccup of course though. Our plan was to have them all done while we were on our honeymoon since you can’t walk on them for several days during the process. We came home hoping to finally move in upstairs, but they were messed up. There were bubbles throughout the top coat, so we had to wait another week until they were fixed. Meanwhile, we were sleeping in the dining room.

But alas, they are done and look great!

Here’s one of the bedrooms sans furniture.

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The stairs:

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Here’s a look at them when we moved in.

Entry

Stairs- Before

We still need to get new railings for the banister (several are missing), stain and paint them, and clean up the paint on the risers, but we’re almost done. We started hanging frames going up the stairs today too, so I will be back with an update later.

Here is the upstairs hallway now. Doc wanted to be in this photo.

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Along with new floors, Ben installed new shoe molding. The old stuff matched the floors so we bought white stuff and painted all the baseboards and trim bright white.

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You may notice the doors are missing. That’s because they are all in the basement in a makeshift spray booth getting sprayed with the paint sprayer. It looks pretty funny like a door graveyard.IMG_1989

Ben gave them their first coat today, so we should have them ready soon. Also still need to get new oil rubbed bronze door knobs to replace the shiny brass ones.

On the subject of doors, we scored this 1920’s exterior door yesterday at an architectural salvage yard in Rockford.

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We’ll put this on the front of the house and haven’t decided if we will stain it or not. They just don’t make them like this any more. This was only $140 compared to if we tried to buy something like this new it would be $1,000 or more.

We also put the Christmas tree up this week. I love it. I like to switch up the color scheme every year (God bless Ben for letting me), and this year is purple and silver. You like?

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IMG_1993And last but not least we welcomed a new family member this week! A new little Tuxedo kitten named Mia.

IMG_2008She is teeny tiny, just 2.5 lbs but were already fattening her up. She is SUPER cuddly and friendly and after a couple of days has warmed up to Doc. Here’s how I caught them in the kitchen today. I’d say they are going to be good friends.

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Today we spent all day unpacking the rest of the boxes, hanging picture frames, moving furniture, laying down rugs and getting organized. It’s coming together. I’ll try to do an upstairs house tour soon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Putting Lipstick on a Pig

8 Nov

Painting continues at 12 Oaks. We’ve now painted all but 2 rooms (both bathrooms, one of which was completely demo’d this week.. more on that later).

We painted the current Master bedroom this week. The color is a bluish gray called Metropolitan by Benjamin Moore.

Before:

Master Bedroom

After:


The “pig in lipstick” comes into play in the master bathroom. Originally we were going to rip out this bathroom right away and use the hall bathroom. However, we only had a total of 1 shower each in the hall bathroom before it started leaking and Ben had to rip half of the shower out to find the problem. So now we are going to renovate the hall bathroom first and use the master bathroom.

It’s tiny and outdated, but the best part is the beautiful seashells and god knows what else they painted on the vanity.

Master Bathroom

So we gave the entire bathroom, vanity included, a coat of Metropolitan. We also switched out the toilet. This should get us by until we gut this bathroom.

My apologies to the previous owners for painting over your masterpiece. Apparently this was a family affair, even grandma was in on this. Babcia= grandmother in Polish. Thanks to my Polish friend Alex I knew that one right away.

The next pig in lipstick is the entry and staircase walls. These were a lovely gold faux finish which will now need to be skim coated or re-drywalled to get them smooth again. For now, we just painted over it with the upstairs hallway color, Perfect Greige by Sherwin Williams.

Before:

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During:

After:

Back to the hall bathroom which Ben demo’d yesterday. Everything is gone except for the pink cast iron tub, which we can get re-enameled white for about $300.

I put together this mood board for what I am thinking in here. Blue/green walls, white subway tiles in the shower, weathered-wood vanity, etc.

That vanity is $1,600 from Pottery Barn so we are going to try and make it ourselves. We’ve ripped off some Pottery Barn furniture in the past, so hopefully it works.

Lastly, Ben cut down and burned all the weeds that were up to 15 ft! tall around the pool.

Before:

After (yeah it’s going to look worse before it looks better):

Between the chainsaw, 4 wheeler, ride on mower and all the fires, Ben is like a kid in a candy store.

Fine by me, I am busy making mood boards, picking paint colors and scouring Pinterest for decorating ideas!

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Sayonara Sharapova

29 Oct

The title will make sense in a second if you don’t get the reference yet. We had a marathon first weekend of painting and moving. With the help of Ben’s friend Lee and my Mom and little brother, we were able to accomplish a ton. We moved all of our things from storage, the basement and garage, plus painted 5 rooms, among other misc. projects.

Ben and Lee doing the heavy lifting

We also spent our first overnight in the house on Saturday! My mom and Jared stayed the night too so they could help bright and early on Sunday. Even our cat Macy came and stayed the night.

Ben and Jared relaxing Saturday night

Macy inspecting the place

We’ll start with paint before and afters, because that is always fun.

This is where we said good-bye to the first Maria Sharapova.

Before:

Yellow Sharapova room

During:

After painted “Soft Suede” by Glidden. All of these only have 1 coat of paint & primer-in-one and need one more coat to cover the horrendous colors and writing on the walls.

Here is the upstairs hallway painted “Perfect Greige” by Sherwin Williams.

Before:

Upstairs hallway before

After:

The “Purple Sharapova” room is now Mineral Alloy by Benjamin Moore.

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During:

My mom, the master “cutter inner”

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Here is the dining room, which we painted “Cliff Rock” by Behr above the chair rail. Under the chair rail will be shadow box molding and be painted all white, so we just primed it white for now.

Before:

Dining Room before

After:

Finally, we decided to slap a coat of paint on the kitchen walls. We’ll be removing the main wall and renovating the entire kitchen but this will get us by until then. We used leftover paint from our last house called “Crisp Khaki” by Benjamin Moore.

Before (grody):

After:

In addition to all that painting and moving, we did some small projects including replacing a broken window in the old purple room.

Cleaning out the leaves from the pool and filling it up.

Jared helping out.

Not only will filling the pool before it freezes ensure our pool doesn’t pop out of the ground when water around it freezes, we will get to go ice skating! Score.

Pool filling up, slowly but surely

The beauty of being on well water is that all the water to fill this massive 20′ x 40′ x 12′ foot deep pool is FREE! My mom said it takes $300 to fill her much smaller pool on city water, so we lucked out there.

We also chopped down a half dozen dead trees/weeds around the property. This is one of those things where its going to look worse before it looks better, but its a start.

Ben hacking down a tree by the pool with a machete

Pretty much everything you see in the picture behind him is eventually coming down too. They are all weeds. Ben is investing in a chain saw before then.

We also put a few homey touches around including hanging the American and Kiwi flags and a front door wreath my friend Stacie made for me.

Iwo Jima pose

Lastly, check out this amazing sunrise we caught this morning from the bedroom window. Don’t mind the piles of logs, we’ll be burning them up this Friday in a big bonfire for Ben’s 30th!

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Let There Be Paint

27 Oct

It’s truly amazing what a coat of paint can do.

Exhibit A. Our scary basement went from this:

Basement

To this:

Basement with Kilz paint

Our garage from this:

Garage before paint

To this:

And my favorite, the living room painted 2 coats of Analytical Gray by Sherwin Williams.

Living Room on Closing Day

New living room paint

Excuse the badly lit pictures, it was dark by the time I snapped the photos.

Here are a few more “afters” of the living room. We love the color, it’s a good mix of gray and beige (aka greige) and should go great with our furniture.

The problem with painting one room, it makes all the others around it look even worse!

Ben did the majority of the rolling, and I did most of the cutting in. I loved using Ben’s scaffolding to cut in on the ceiling. I call it my tight rope, but it makes it so much easier than moving the ladder every few feet.

On my tight rope

In addition to painting those 3 rooms, we’ve also changed the locks on all the exterior doors, ripped out a moldy bathroom ceiling (and sprayed it with bleach), patched some holes in the walls, defrosted the fridge, filled some pot holes in the driveway with gravel and cleaned the place within an inch of its life.

Not bad for just 3 nights of work. Here’s a few pics of us working away.

Spraying bleach on joists to prevent mold

Tomorrow morning our friend Lee is coming over to help move our stuff still in boxes and furniture that we didn’t move into the rental to the new house. Most of it will go into the garage or basement so we have room to work before we move in.

We’re also hoping to get a majority of the rest of the painting done this weekend. My Mom and brother Jared are coming on Sunday to help. Wonder what they will think of our progress so far!

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