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.
No comments:
Post a Comment