Kitchen redo

The kitchen has been our labor of love. It was the thing I hated most about the house and wanted changed asap. I know this sounds bratty, as there was nothing 'wrong' with the kitchen, but you can blame my mom and dad for spoiling me with new, updated kitchens (OK, houses) throughout my childhood! We knew that this was going to be our biggest cost of any of the projects that we had planned for phase 1, so just like with the carpet, we held some of our down payment back so we could afford to make these changes without going into debt or being broke.


Before:

SO MUCH OAK, and laminate, and white, and 'custom' valances and futuristic light fixtures...

First things first - new appliances. Now even though this was extremely important because the previous owners took the fridge with them and pretty much told us the dishwasher was crap, this wasn't something we wanted to spend money on. We just did it 3 years ago in our first house! Not good planning on our part. Luckily my Sister in law Sarah works at Whirlpool and she was nice enough to help us out with a discount!

Next came the paint. We wanted a light grey in here to coordinate with the darker grey of the family room.

Then a very important DeVon Custom Home feature if you have ever been in any of my families previous houses - a cat hole :) That way we can keep the basement door shut, but the cats can still go up and down the stairs to do their business in peace - a win-win.

 

Next was the big undertaking - sanding, priming and painting the 1001 cabinet drawers and doors. We had to do it in stages as there wasn't enough room for them all at once.

 

 

It was at about this time that we found out that I was pregnant - therefore I was able to put down the paint brush! Poor Stephen had to power through the bottom half without me, darn :)  

 

While we were re-doing the cabinets, our friend Chad was also working on our new concrete counter tops. So not only did our kitchen not have doors for a while, it was also missing counters at the same time, there was lots of take out and PB&J during these few weeks.

After the counters were installed and we FINALLY finished the cabinets, the back splash was next.

 

With our friends recommendation, we didn't use mortar, instead we used a peal and stick adhesive to hold the back splash in place. It was a little more expensive than mortar, however with the new counter tops, we wanted to be extra careful that nothing got on them.

After that - we were in the home stretch - we just needed install the hardware (they didn't have any on the cabinets before which left for very greasy corners), change out the sink, install the new faucet, and switch out our light fixtures. Not that there was anything terribly wrong with the others, but the very modern look just didn't fit with the house.

After:

 

 

So much better!!

 

A few things still to do:

1. Put the crown molding back up above the cabinets

2. Window Treatments

3. Replace the floors

Main Floor - Phase 1

Below was the next step in our house update after we did the upstairs updates. This meant paint, paint, and more paint!


Living room:

First things first, the 'custom' valances that the previous owners were kind enough to leave, the moss green blinds and the black media wall and mantel needed to go:

 Before:

During:

Two things we quickly found out - after painting the entire room this 'grey' color, we soon realized that it was the complete wrong shade of grey, it was way too purple. Second - the green blinds were even worse when they didn't match the green walls. EEK.

 

So after we re-painted the entire room, and replaced all the blinds (along with all the blinds in the house, as they were nice enough to custom match all rooms with their blinds) We both felt much better.

 

After:

 

 

 We had done the stencil in the half bath a few weeks before, and really liked it. I knew I wanted to try it in the same color but different finish on the media wall, so Stephen surprised me when I was on a work trip and finished this feature wall before I got home!

 

Ahh, no more black and moss green. So much lighter.

 

 

We still have a few small things to do in here:

1. Replace the green tile around the fire place with a more neutral tile.

2. Add window treatments - I am sewing these, about half way done, but no motivation to finish the other half :)  

3. Crown molding - eventually.

Back entry/hallway:

Unfortunately I only got the before of the hallway, not of the back entry, and I could kick myself! PS, please note the 9" ceilings - while this is a great feature to have in your downstairs to open things up, it is not a great feature when you are painting every room in your house! I never knew my arms could fall asleep so many times.

 

Before: 

 

After:

 

Just imagine the back hallway all white, brass handles and no coat rack. One of the many projects Stephen was nice enough to make for me - Thanks Pinterest :)

 

 

Half Bath:

Nothing to major to do in here, for some reason, this was the one room in the house that they updated - it had a pedestal sink, brushed nickel light fixture, etc. We just needed to get rid of the white. I had been wanting to try out a stencil that I had seen all over Pinterest, so I figured I would try it in this small space before doing it on the large Media wall (pictured above but with a different finish).

 

Before:



 

 

During:

After:

 

 

Other projects we would like to finish on the main floor:

 

1. Add board and batten around the combined living/dining room.

2. Paint the top portion of the living/dining room

3. Crown molding (throughout entire downstairs)

4. Laundry room: The previous owners decided it was a better use of space for the washer and dryer to be down in the unfinished basement instead of in the actual laundry room. I on the other hand, do not need an extra level of stairs to hinder my lack of laundry love. So we had one of Stephen's friends come in and plumb the 'mud room' so that we could move the washer and dryer to their rightful place. I can't explain how happy this made me! Who wants to go downstairs to a creepy unfinished basement when you can have it on your main level.

So anyways, while I am thrilled that the appliances have been moved, that means a few more updates:

 Hide the huge cut-out square hole behind the washer/dryer with board and batten (along with all of laundry room). Paint the top portion a fun color. Add a small counter top for folding/storage. Add a cabinet above for more storage.

5. Replace all downstairs flooring with hardwood. If you are standing in our family room, you can see 4; yes 4 different types of flooring throughout a tiny area. We have white tile in the entry way, carpet in the family room, laminate flooring in the back hallway/laundry room, and a different faux wood laminate flooring in the kitchen.  This will be a big project that we need to save for.

 

 

 

Next up: Kitchen remodel pictures; where most of our time and energy went this spring.

 

 



Moving into our new house

Luckily for me, I have a handy husband! To be honest, I don't think I could have ended up with somebody that isn't, thanks to my dad.

Stephen and I are definitely a DIY couple, we would rather try to do a project ourselves, as opposed to having somebody come in and do it for us. We figured out in our first house that we actually work pretty well together! They say that if you can make it through home reno's with your partner without wanting to kill them, than you are in good shape. I can only recall a few times that I wanted to put that blue painters tape over Stephen's mouth :) He is definitely more of the perfectionist, every detail counts kind of DIYer, whereas I am the go with the flow, see what happens, 95% girl.

So below (and in the coming posts over the next few days) is the reason that I didn't blog for 4 months in between my first two posts and the last two- we moved into a house that needed ALOT of updating to our taste. The house was in good shape per say, but definitely straight out of the 90's. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, I will show you some before and afters.  It is still a work in progress, but we are starting to feel like it is our home and love it more each day.

Upstairs update; Phase 1:

First things first - the night that we closed on our house, we headed straight to the 'Florida State' room and began painting - see why:

AHH! Just looking at it makes me want to put on a blind fold - I mean seriously, what grown man (the kid was 24 who lived in this room) can sleep in this room every night and stay sane - so intense! The reason that we started painting ASAP was because the entire upstairs carpet was getting ripped out and replaced the next day. This is why:

This doesn't do the carpet justice, its just the only picture I got before they ripped it out - it was NASTY. There were stains everywhere, along with the wear and tear of raising 2 teenage boys and a dog and a cat.  The reason that there are random lamps everywhere is due to the fact that we were painting well into the night and we quickly realised that the guest rooms didn't have electricity - oops, just a minor thing we didn't notice while buying the house...

We tried to sand the stripes down with a sanding block, to the best of our ability, but that could only do so much. We also had to choose a color that was strong enough to cover/compete with the lovely maroon and gold - so a very blue it was. A little saturated for my liking, but, really, anything is better than that hideous before.

 

 

This is our main guest room, and also holds our old Master bedroom furniture. I love this bedroom set, as it was my first 'big girl' purchase after my 1st bonus at VMS - ah those were the days.... Anyways, we decided in our new bedroom that we would try our hand at building our own headboard, and mixing up the furniture so that it didn't all match, therefore, the main guest room got our nice Ashley Bedroom set (like I would by anything other than Ashley....)

 

 

Which brings me to the next project - our master bedroom. While some would call a fireplace and a ginormous custom mirror in their master bedroom a 'feature', we could call it a hassle and a waste of space. However, it was what it was and it was too risky to remove the mirror and risk ripping down all of the drywall and figuring out a way to get it downstairs without it shattering into 100 pieces. Plus, as I stated - we were in a time crunch with the whole new carpet instillation situation.

 

 

Before - More Maroon - yuck! (and Stephen doing the edges - I am always the roller and he is the edger, see above for that reason :)

 

 

And yellow on the other side of the room.

 

We are lucky because we have this wonderfully large master bedroom with vaulted ceilings and a great walk in closet. However, with vaulted ceilings comes a ton of paint and arms falling asleep because you are up so high for more than half of the room!

 

So about half way through the painting of the lower half of the room, I got worried that the dark blue was going to make the room feel closed in and too dark. I came up with the idea that adding chair rail around the top and mirror to break it up would be a great idea (much to Stephen's dismay). So literally, in the middle of painting, we switched things up and went out and bought some light blue in the same color family and threw that on the top portion of the walls, along with the window wall. Good thing Stephen is flexible :)  

By the time that the carpet guys came the next day, we already had the guest room and a majority of our Master bedroom painted (just no chair rail yet). Talk about a marathon paint session!

 

 

We can't forget that awesome faux wood/tiki fan that doesn't belong in the room whatsoever:

 

 

 

After:

 

 

 

You can kind of get the picture of our homemade headboard, but I will do a few more up close photos of that, along with a few other DIY projects that we did in an upcoming post.

 

 

Out with the old! I would highly suggest that when you move into a new house, get rid of the old carpet. It was somewhat pricey, but just knowing that it is brand new and all of the old dirt and grim is out of there was totally worth it. We just held back some of our down payment money for this and a few other projects, that way it wasn't a major cost that we were not expecting.

 

 

  A few other plans for the upstairs update:

 

1. Update all brass handles/lights/hinges to brushed nickel.

 While this is not a hard task, it is an expensive one, and more importantly, we just did it about a year ago in our old house!

 

 

2. Master Bathroom rehaul.

This is our next 'major' project. I am not quite sure when it will get completed, as we are focused on Samantha at the moment, but hopefully in about a year or so. We have big plans for this room - a double vanity, ripping out the garden tub, adding a walk in shower, removing the tiny corner shower, adding a linen closet, adding a window for natural light, update laminate flooring, ripping our the lovely boarder that is in there now... you get the idea, expensive stuff here....

 

 

3. Repaint Foyer banister.

My mom can attest to the nastiness that was the banister. (She was sweet enough to degrease and clean it when we moved in) Completely gross and faded from 16 years of grime and neglect. Yuck.

 

 

4. Nursery

We are working on this now - pictures to come soon.

 

 

 

PS - I added my 32 week belly shot to my preggers photos, feel free to scroll down.  

 

Samantha's Baby Showers

We are so lucky to have such a loving and giving group of friends and Family! To say that Samantha already is spoiled is an understatement, including work showers, there were 4 thrown for us. (Sorry for the lack of pictures, I am new to this blogging thing!! I so wish I would have taken a lot more, I will work on it for future posts! If anybody has any pictures from the showers, send em my way and I will add them.)

1st up: Stephen's work
Stephen team at work wanted to throw us a baby shower, which was so great! We knew that we were already going to have the two main ones (one in South Bend for my family, and one in Indy for his) so we wanted to do something different for this one. As I stated before, Stephen's niece passed away about 6 years ago, so we thought it would be nice if everybody donated what they would have spent on Samantha to Riley's Children's Hospital in Lauren's memory. It was so touching to see that his team rallied together! We still were able to celebrate with a party after work, and even some of Stephen's male friends came for the baby games (guessing baby food by taste and smell, YUK) and food!
I do have to admit though, one of Stephen's co-workers gave us a bottle of Cab for after Samantha arrives, and I CAN'T WAIT to uncork it!

2nd: Indianapolis shower - hosted by Stephen's sister Jennifer
This was such a fun weekend! Not only was it Stephen and my birthday weekend (our birthdays are 3 days apart), my mom came down for the weekend, my best friends husband was out of town, so I got her all to myself, and the Maroon 5 concert was up at Klipsch, which meant that Stephens mom and our sister in law Amy stayed at our house after the concert on Saturday night! Now that we have a house big enough to have people over and not feel like we are sitting on top of people, I love it! The shower was on Sunday afternoon at our house, so Jennifer, Kathy (Stephen's mom) and Amy kicked me out of the house for a few hours so they could set up. When I got back they had all of these cute decorations and tons of food and cupcakes! We played a few games, everybody watched as I opened some great gifts (which is always awkward!) and just had a great Sunday afternoon with my friends and family. It was so nice to see that some of my friends even drove down from South Bend and up from St. Louis! I can't thank Jennifer (and Kathy & Amy) enough for all of the hard work they put into the shower, even on such a hectic weekend!

3rd: South Bend shower - hosted by Molly (one of my best friends) and Sue (Molly's mom, aka my 2nd mom)
Molly and her mom are definitely what you would call 'the hostest with the mostest'. They love to throw a good themed party and always go above and beyond when it comes to the perfect decorations and making sure everything is just right. Well lucky for me, my shower was no exception - the theme was 'the mother to bee' and everything was black, yellow and white. (a few pictures below). There was delicious food, gifts to be opened and crazy enough, two of my friends started having mild contractions during the baby shower and both went to the hospital that night to deliver their own babies! Lori gave birth to a little girl, Ali, the next morning, whereas Beth had to suffer through the night at the hospital with contractions and then they sent her home the next morning! Ahhh, I would be so mad! Apparently Molly and Sue know how to throw a wild party - enough so to start the birthing process :)

4th: My work - hosted by my boss
I have only been at my new job for just over a year and was not sure what the 'protocol' was for things like babies and weddings. At my old job, they were celebrated every quarter with cakes, gift cards from the company and a little celebration - however at my old job, somebody was getting married or having a baby every 15 minutes it seemed like! I am the first one in the past year to get pregnant, so I wasn't expecting anything, however my boss surprised me and insisted on throwing a baby shower over lunch, which I thought was so sweet. I was really surprised by how many people attended, and even a few of the guys came by(though to be honest, I think they were there for the free pizza...). It is so nice to see support from your place of work and I really appreciated all the effort from my boss, she is truly excited for me and doesn't even hold it against me that I am about to go on maternity for 3 months :)

Lori and I are exactly 2 months apart, it has been so fun to go through pregnancy with her and call each other after each check up and detail. She went into labor that night and had Ali Beth Trevino the next morning!

The growing baby bump

I can't believe I am in my 3rd trimester and counting down until we finally get to meet our Baby Girl!A lot has happened in the last few months and here are a few of the highlights:

The Sex of the baby: A GIRL!
I never thought that day was going to come; I do not do well with anticipation, hence the reason we planned our wedding in 6 months, and I don't really plan anything too far out, because I just can't handle it! This now brings our family count to 2 boys and 2 girls on the Wiley side, and 3 boys and 2 girls on the DeVon side.



Her name: Samantha Alice Wiley.
I seriously love it. I have loved the name Samantha since I was a little girl and was so happy when Stephen agreed with me and loved the name just as much as me. We are not ones for trendy or of the moment names, and I thought Samantha was timeless and fitting. We also enjoy the nicknames that she will evenutally be called, Sam, Sammy, Samantha, we like them all!

Alice is a Wiley family name - it was Stephen's grandmothers name, and also his niece Lauren's middle name. Lauren passed away a few years ago due to heart surgury complications and I never had a chance to meet her, however we thought this would be a great tribute to both of these wonderful people that mean so much to Stephen.

And just for fun, the name also happens to have the same initials as Stephen - SAW, so of course he loves that :)



My Pregnancy so far: Smooth
I feel as though I have been pretty lucky with little Samantha. As many of you know, I have had some friends who had some really tough pregnancy journies, so I count myself lucky and remind myself daily that a few aches and pains is nothing. I had a few scares towards the beginning of journey, but luckily both turned out to be non-eventful, or more correctly, non-worrysome (they were both plenty eventful). I have been measuring on track with a typical prenant person, even though most days I get a reaction from friends and family that my stomach 'should be bigger!'
I haven't documented a weekly belly shot, but here are a few:

 

The first picture is with all of my sister in laws who are also preggers! This was at my nephew Dominic's 2nd birthday party. Amie (Shannon's wife) was about 36 weeks, Sarah (Adam's wife) was about 33 weeks and Beth (who we consider a sister - She is Sarah's sister) was about 22 I believe. I was 16 weeks here. I had started telling a few friends and family, but it wasn't FB official yet.

 

24 Weeks

 

 28 weeks -

Stephen and I at at Luke Bryan concert.

 

32 Weeks

36 Weeks

 (At my 37 week appointment) Samantha measures 'small'. Everybody, other than my doctor, seems to be worried that she is measuring behing. However my doctor assures me that she is ok. Since she was measuring about 3 inches smaller than 'normal' my doctor decided to do an ultrasound just to be sure. While she is in fact measuring about a week behind, she is a healthy and full term. She is 5 lbs and 15 oz, and in the 41% percentile size wise. I am 1 cm dialated and am more than ready for her to make an apperance! Just a few more days/weeks!

 

38 Weeks