You Left A Stain on Every One of My Good Days

In this case, the stain was left on one of our good days - in a very good way. If you didn't get the Matchbox 20 reference, it's ok. Moving on...

The best part if DIY'ing is that you can move at your own pace as your feel motivated or inspired. This past weekend, JC felt the motivation mojo for the office floor upstairs that has been neglected its whole life... the office floor was exposed hardwood that never had a finish put on it so it had been beaten down and become sort of grimy and dull with time.

For some reason I wasn't feeling the mojo, maybe it was my upcoming Lasik eye surgery that was distracting me from enjoying the project. Whatever the case, this was mostly JC's baby. But because I don't like to sit anything out when it comes to our house, I helped out a little. Here I am power sanding like an outlaw... in jammies:

I like JC's ninja style, it's tough being married to someone who is so much cooler than me.



Back to the point... Day #2 of the project, after we sanded and cleaned up the dust (BEFORE my surgery, mind you), it was ready for stain! This is where I stepped back and let JC take this one over all by his lonesome. He was so spellbound by this project, he didn't even mind doing it alone. I did managed to sneak up for a picture. Here's my hunny making our house pretty:



Meanwhile, in the living room, I recuperated from my eye surgery with the cutest couch potato ever:



2 days later, the project was complete. Here's the before and after shot:

ta daaa! Pretty, pretty mahogany. We love, love, love it. Now I just need to get back up there and finish the mopboards. Now that there's some polyurethane on there, any accidental paint drippings will wipe right up instead of immediately soaking into the untreated wood like before. I'm picturing a reading nook with a little white desk and a snuggly beanbag.

Kitchen Inspiration

I've been in a kitchen state of mind lately. I suppose you could say that I'm in the "heavily thinking" stage. I'm pretty much consumed with cabinets, counters, floating shelves, and shiny appliances. So, how are we going to turn this into our dream kitchen?



With lot's of patience, research, good ideas, and good deals. It's coming together very nicely in my head. I've been telling JC for a while now that my plan is to ditch all the upper cabinets and put in some open shelves. The look on his face told me he was picturing fur and grease covered dishes and
maybe this image jumped to his mind:



Needless to say, he was completely against it. Lately he's been warming up to the idea, especially since I started showing him pictures of what I was actually talking about:



The open shelves on either side of the window are a big YES. Love those chunky shelves:



We went over to a friend's house the other night to check out their recently renovated kitchen and their custom-made cabinets. They were fancy shmancy and gave us LOT'S of great ideas. I'm glad we're taking our time with this, it'll be worth the wait. I'm sure I will have thought/talked all the details to death by the time we actually start. I'm just trying to hold myself back at this point. Everything within me wants to attack my cabinets with a paint brush but I know it will just be a waste of my time since they will be completely replaced in the semi near future. Gah, patience.

Spiffing Up A Nook

This just may be my favorite room in the house. I love the fact that it has 2 windows even though it's so tiny.

Here's what it looked like in December back when it wasn't my favorite room in the house:

::gasp:: the clutter! the horror! Well, that's all taken care of now and let's just say our spare bedroom which was recently cleaned out has been completely filled up again. Such is life.
Here we are, all ready to get our paint on.



Now, because the office has the same amount of light as the livingroom, and the 2 rooms are connected by an open stairway, we decided to go with the Burnished Metal up there as well. In this room we carried the paint color onto the ceiling. The ceilings are undoubtably low, so instead of ultimately failing at trying to raise them by keeping them white, we thought it would be best to embrace the small space and cozy it up by making the whole room the same color.









Mmm, I can't wait to sit up there in my over stuffed chair and read a book.

Painting Our Blues (and yellows, and greens) Away

We did it. We painted our living room and dining room. I'm feeling a little romantic about it so don't be surprised if this post gets mushy.

In order to refresh your memory, here's the grim before shot:

Makes me cringe and shiver.



Now, here she is folks. A nice, soothing, airy, grey. The polar opposite of the dastardly yellow. We used Stone White by Glidden.







Here's the dining room before & afters:





I love how the white trim makes the windows pop. I could just kiss it.














Here we used Burnished Metal by Behr. We didn't want the two rooms different paint colors to clash or compete with each other so we went for the subtle layered look. We tried to settle on the same color for both rooms when we were testing out colors via paint swatches but the Burnished Metal was waaaay too dark in the living room and the Stone White was way too, well, white in the dining room. There you have it! Our house already feels bigger. It's amazing what a little paint will do.

Let Out the Outlets

You have no idea how exciting this is. We've been using those handy little 3 prong adapters all the live long day... somewhere along the line we named them "nipple things" not sure why, but it stuck. (Yes, mom - I just said "nipple" for everyone to see.



After shutting off the power to the entire house (we take no chances...), JC installed all the pretty white outlets.



Ah, MUCH better.

 

Sayonara "nipple things"!

Put Some Mud on It

Because our living room was 2 toned in bright colors and there were a lot of cracks in the dry wall, we taped, mudded, sanded, and primed everything. At first we started with drywall tape which bunched all up on us and turned out to be incredibly frustrating. So, JC turned to facebook about his "crack in the drywall" woes and tons of people suggested the fiberglass mesh tape... ta da! What a difference. We had the living room and dining room taped and mudded in one evening. First we went around and scraped all the bumps and crud off of the walls, especially around the windows.

 

J handled all the big stuff and I went around driving the nails that had wiggled their way out back into the drywall. Then it was mud, mud, mud, scrape, scrape, scrape.



Sanding is disgusting. Luckily, JC didn't mind doing this part and I conveniently found other things to do like laundy and dishes, you know, things that just can't wait.



By the end of the night, our house was a hot mess. We ended up tearing off the wall paper in the old dining room and the DUST from sanding was incredible. Oh my, my, my.



The dust covered everything, but mostly it covered JC. Here he is sporting his "intense and creepy" face. The dust adds the creepiness. Spookay.



...and here we are at the evening's end. Notice that I'm not so dust covered?



Ahh, happiness.

Demolition Woman

While prepping for the mudding and sanding process, I went around the livingroom and scraped off any little tid bits of wall paper that were left behind aka i-think-i-know-how-it-feels-to-have-arthritis-now.



This included getting behind the door frame where there was a whole strip of floral wallpaper just hanging out in there. NOTE: this is an old picture, you can see that the wall is still there through the doorway but it'll give you an idea of what I was doing. Also note that the only wallpaper left at this point was the one strip in the corner by the door jam.



So, I pried off one trim board... then another... then another... before I knew it, drywall was flying everywhere and I was standing in a mess.



Then I gave JC my best "oh my, look what I've done" face. Not that he didn't know what I was up to to begin with but he agreed to be my partner in crime and wrestle out the door jamb.
Eureka, a wider doorway:



We were planning on leaving the doorway the way it was but JC didn't stop me when I went buckwild on that sucker so I took it as his sign of approval. Happy wife = happy life.