Celebrations & Creations

I would like to start out my congratulating my lovely friend Jen on her recent engagement to her Fiance Ryan! I am so excited for the two of them and very pleased to share my Maid of Honor roles with another great friend Brandi! I wish nothing but the best for the both of them and can not wait to begin the traditional wedding festivities :-)

Just a little inspiration from theknot.com based on Jen's color choices...just getting the ball rolling :D

On the home front Aaron and I actually spent the weekend at home and it was quite pleasant I must say! Aaron did some more work on the island and I finished my kitchen curtain project. These are the fabrics that I picked up at JoAnn Fabrics for my curtains, table runners, and the PB wall decor I will be replicating with my own spin!

The brown and white fabric is for the curtains. The orange and green fabrics are for curtain tie backs and table runners. The Asian inspired fabrics are for the wall art work.

I think these curtains turned out pretty well for my first attempt at making them. The curtain rods I purchases off of EBay a while back. The total cost of the curtain's and rods is $30.

Aaron and I also went to Heebie's this weekend, a surplus store for home construction materials. We looked at back splashes, counter-tops, and cabinet hardware. We decided to stick with the hinges we already had on the cabinets but just spray paint them a worn silver/gray look that we liked on some of the handle pulls we had seen in the store. It's hard to get a good feel from the images but you can see the beautiful possibly art deco look of the hardware previously.

The doors are about 1/3 finished. The spray gun worked so much easier than painting them by hand, Aaron says it's a bit messy to keep all everything clean. The doors however look great and I can't wait to get the rest of them painted and the painted hardware back on the cabinets! 

Island Colors

Aaron spent a good part of last night working on our island and he's doing such a great job! We aren't sure what color to make the island though. We can just paint it the same color as the cabinets or we can branch out, maybe stain it a dark stain color, or paint it a completely different color. I've been looking at pictures online to get some inspiration and I love what Thrifty Decor Chick did with her kitchen island.

The idea is the same with the beadboard and even the countertop color looks about right for what we are going for in our kitchen. The only difference it our island is more like a peninsula, situated under the kitchen window.

Aaron has also decided, and I agree, that we don't like the normal run of the mill window shutters. We are missing a couple in the front of the house and I'd just like to replace them all. Right now the one's that are on there are just black vinyl, normal looking shutters but I think I've decided that I like the Board and Batten shutters. They're wooden and I also think instead of buying them for about $40 a piece we could make all of them for almost that much. They would look similar to the one I found below, we would likely paint them a different color though, maybe some sort of slate blue since that is what Aaron is thinking for the siding.

Well I think I'm back in the swing of blog updating so I hope everyone has a wonderful Labor Day Weekend and fingers crossed Hurricane Earl doesn't ruin out plans. We're shipping up to Boston to do some exploring so I'll let you know next week if the rain and wind threw a wrench in our plans!

It's a Coffee Tile weekend

We had lots of help this weekend from both our families and sunny (but very hot) weather. I should have taken a picture of the front of the house but forgot, Deb cut down the rest of the hedges that overtook the front of the house. It opened up the front and looks so much better already with just stumps haha. We just have to decide what to plant there now to make it pretty.

The men stuck to the kitchen for nearly 8 hours after a water pump scare. Thank goodness it was revived, what a disaster that would have been. My dad provided the tile saw, and with lots of man power the beautiful coffee tile turned our kitchen into a very inviting space (that is as long as you can close your eyes and envision, cabinets, appliances and a light fixture haha). All coming soon!

The grouting will be done tomorrow, we chose a grout color a bit lighter than the actual tile. The color is called haystack.  It's hard to tell the true color of the tile from these pictures (and all the dust) so i'll try and get some better pictures taken this week with the grout in place.

It's starting to finally hit me that I can do things to the house since I own it. It's a strange feeling having free range, but it also made me realize how many projects actually need to take place to get the house looking the way we envision!

Slowly looking like a Kitchen

Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day Weekend. We decided to take a little break (I decided...) and go camping with some wonderful college friends down in Maryland. The weather was great and my dad went crabbing on Sunday so we even got to come home to a bushel of crabs and feast with the family (oh how I miss Maryland)

The kitchen is finally taking shape, we only have 23 more days to move out of our rental home so we are in crunch time now getting the kitchen to a functioning point. Here are a few updates:

I guess it's been about a week and a half at this point but we have managed to lay the hardie backerboard on the kitchen floor, tape and mortar the joints, patch holes in the wall, sand the walls, and primer.

Aaron's dad generously took a day to cut the backerboard to fit around the pipes and baseboards. We bought 4-50 lb bags of versabond tinset mortar (gray) to seal the boards to the floor. Home depot also sells special screws and bits to use to screw the board to the floor.

It's a long process but after we got all the boards down we had to tape the cracks with joint tape and then mortar over the tape.

We will be painting the walls today and laying the tile this weekend. The next pictures you should be up this weekend of the final paint and tile progress!

I'll also be discussing our cabinet situation once I have more time. We have decided to scratch the staining idea due to the type of wood and go with painting them a mocha brown color. Details to follow.

A few weekend fixes

We didn't have an enormous amount of time this weekend to work on the house. The weather was absolutely beautiful though, probably a bit warm for some people. On Saturday we attended Aaron's cousin's wedding and by the time we got home late Saturday afternoon we decided grilling out with the neighbors was a better idea than working on the house. So on Sunday with the help of Aaron's parents we moved four loads of stuff over to the house, mainly things we won't need in the next month or so and piled it into the guest room and the basement. I'm thrilled with how large the guest rooms are, even with all of the things we moved the main guest room still has plenty of room for lots more things.

Aaron and Dave worked to square up the plumbing in the kitchen so that one of these days we can turn the water back on and they also cleaned the gutters around the house. The big beautiful trees we have in the front yard aren't helping with the water flow.

Gutter Cleaning

While the boys were doing those things, Deb and I were out front cutting down some of the vegetation that was protruding the walkway up to the front door. Eventually all of the shrubs will be coming out so we can put in more attractive greenery.

You can see the before pictures in my first blog post, all of the original pictures of the house were taken then. I can't figure out why there is one dark stone on the face of the house, I didn't notice it before...but I don't think I like it.

We will be getting new shutters for the front to replace the one's that are on the house and to add to the windows that don't have any. An added feature are the stones that stick out underneath the window. Planter boxes were built and can be mounted to the house, I can't wait to put some pretty flowers in them!

Aaron took the white laminate off the planter boxes, once they are painted or restained they should look really nice.

Just a couple random shots: the first is looking down the street, trees line the street which looks really pretty now so I can't imagine what it will look like in the fall. The second is a picture of one of the hundreds of spearmint plants we have growing out back of the house (mint icecream and mojitos I think so...)

Currently the kitchen is at a stand still, we have striped it down to the wall and floor and are waiting for the tile to come in. Aaron is having his knee surgery this week so I'm not sure when we'll be able to get the tile in but hopefully I'll have a progress report on that in the next week or two.

Day 2: Kitchen and Basement Renovations

On Sunday we headed back over to the house to pick up where we left off. We continued taking down the kitchen cabinets, removing the backsplash, and I began scraping away at the linoleum floor. Removing the flooring is no easy job! I have about half of it up so far and it took about five hours to get that far.

I also had Aaron take down the kitchen light...no matter how many times I ran into the thing it never failed. a few minutes later I was smacking my head on it. So we are almost down to the bare bones of the kitchen and next comes the fun part, making it look beautiful. I am in the process of looking for a coffee inspired painting in hopes of inspiring tile and countertop ideas. Enjoy

We removed the upper cabinets to make it easier to sand the backsplash glue and paint the walls.

The bottle of wine left in the refrigerator and then we have Aaron making fun of my clumsiness and running into the light.

Putting some muscle into removing that flooring.

Amongst the kitchen renovations Aaron has been removing the paneling in the basement, along with the framing, and ceiling. We need to check out the electrical and piping situation. The basement was also poorly finished and needs to be redone.

Aaron hard at work :) ripping away that beautiful wood paneling. He kept saying he smelled a strange odor in the basement...look what he discovered!

A DEAD SQUIRREL!!

Not sure how long it had been in the wall but there were walnuts all over the place. We discovered its entry way today. Hopefully it didn't do to much damage up in the ceiling.

Day One: Rip and Tear

With a hearty breakfast and plenty of tools, day one of home renovation consisted of kitchen cabinet removal and a few fun discoveries! The kitchen and the bathrooms are our main projects to take on over the course of the next year. The remainder of the house doesn't look as 60's as those three rooms.


I'll start by introducing the lovely kitchen appliances that took way to long to remove...who would have known.

The never seen before, bush button stove by General Electric was nicely hardwired in to the wall. What this means is instead of a plug from the stove into the wall there was a electrical cord 'hardwired' right into the back of the stove (yippee) Aaron gets to learn the electrical trade!

This little discovery led us to a poorly labeled electrical box that thankfully did have the stove range labeled, fingers crossed the wire was removed from the stove. The only problem is a new electrical socket has to be put in for our new appliances once we get that 'wonderful' tax credit from the government!

...and then there was a matching dishwasher. It's hard to believe this is what an attractive appliance looked like in the 60's. I will admit they were made much more durable than the one's we have today, too bad we didn't just paint them a nicer color, like the color of steel. Oh well

Thankfully we have awesome wood cabinets that we will definitely be salvaging. I'll be trying out darker stain colors over the next couple of weeks so be on the look out, I might need opinions.

Taking doors off by hand until Aaron introduced me to the scary handheld drill! (so much easier)

Unfortunately we are not keeping this part of the cabinetry in order to put a big enough refrigerator in.

The clock attached to the cabinets that I wanted to keep...Aaron ripped it right off without a second thought. I thought it was a convenient addition haha.

I think the appliances consumed most of our day, determining how to shut the water off to the sink, as well as electrical safety issues from the appliances, and finally countertop removal. Next we will tackle the back splash, flooring, and electrical sockets.

Day one complete..while Lexi watches on.