Before and After: Chair

Way back in May, I shared some photos of the awesome things I found at Antique Weekend in Round Top, TX. One of the items was an old chair.

Our plan was to recover the seat with a fun fabric and leave the weathered look of the wood. Well, we finally got around to it. I found a super cute fabric (Herringbone in Pond) online at Hawthorne Threads. I left the actual task of recovering to my husband who has a little more experience than myself. I like the contrast of the crisp blue fabric against the worn brown frame. I couldn’t be happier with the result!
 

 
 

Sharing a room

When Oscar, our youngest, turned 2 in December, we decided it was time to move him from his crib to a big boy bed. We also decided we wanted the boys to share a bedroom. So we moved Simon out of his blue room and into Oscar’s room. We had never painted or even really decorated Oscar’s nursery after moving into the house, so we were very excited to finally tackle this room and do what we wanted with it.

First, we moved all of Simon’s things over to let them get use to sharing a room before tranferring Oscar from a crib to a bed. Here is what the room looked like at that point:

 

As you can see, the room was a minty green color. It wasn’t a bad color, but not exactly one we would have chosen ourselves. So it was time for a change. After a few weeks, we went in with paint brushes in hand and changed the feel of the room completely. We are very happy with the end result.

Entering the room:

 
Light but bright blue:

 

 
Glow-in-the-dark stars:

 
Dressers:

 
Art desk:

There are still some small adjustments to be made and things to add, but we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. The boys especially like the dark blue area with glow-in-the-dark stars. Originally that was a closet, but at some point it was changed to make the room a little bigger. Almost everything in the room was purchased at Ikea, including the bunk bed. I am a huge fan of Ikea for a kid’s room.

While doing this room, we also painted Simon’s old room (now the guest room). No more primary blue!! We haven’t done much else at this point, but I’ll post pictures as soon as we get it closer to where we want it.
 
 

Revisiting the Bathroom

Back in September, I posted about our guest bathroom quickie makeover that was not quite complete (see it here). I realized I have yet to update you on the progress that has been made. We still need some finishing touches, but folks, we are getting closer. Alex and I tend to take our time on things. We do a little here and little there. That way it’s not a stressful process and just happens organically.

Here’s the “Before we did anything” pictures:

Here’s the “After we did a little” pictures:

And finally, the “After we did a little more” pictures:

We found these towels on clearance at World Market. They were exactly what we were wanting. Being on clearance was just a bonus :)

We still need to find the right accessories for the sink area. I know, why would I want to replace the Soft Soap bottle currently there? And we plan on hanging some small artwork. In the big picture, we want to rip out the entire vanity and replace with a wall mount sink. We think it would open the space up greatly. But for now, we are happy with the progress we have made thus far.
 

A hint of red to make them pop

After a little hesitation, I finally tackled the “E” painting. We hung these letters a while back (see here) with the plan of painting them so that they would pop off the wall a little more.

But then, I fell in love with the imperfections and the raw quality of these metal letters and didn’t want to take away from that. So as a compromise, I painted the outside of the letters and left the inside in its natural state.

 

Don’t you just love the inner grittiness? And I think the red works perfectly. I used a red spray-paint that I bought at Lowes. I had to contend with some bad spray-painting weather for a while. It was coldy and rainy, and although I was doing the painting in the garage, the humidity caused the paint to bubble up in some areas. So I had to sand it down and reapply. And getting the inside of the lowercase “e” was especially tough. That’s one tight little space. But in the end, I’m pleased with the results. We get a lot of compliments on those letters.
 

Quickie Bathroom Makeover

A couple of weeks ago, Alex and I decided it was time to tackle the half bath that is connected to the office. We were tired of the sickly, yellowish coloring that the antique white walls were giving off. And since this is the bathroom that visitors tend to use the most, we wanted to freshen it up a bit without spending a lot of money (or time). We have loved the gray that we painted the living room, and we just so happened to have half a gallon left. So we got to work. This was no easy task considering the size of the bathroom. Just getting in there to take some photos proved to be difficult as well. But I did my best!

Here is how blah the bathroom looked before:
 

 
See, I told you it had a sickly yellowish glow. But not anymore:
 

 
Like I said, we used the same gray that we used in the living room. It’s called Versatile Gray, which I would say is very accurate. As you can see it calmed down the yellow a lot. That’s not photoshop, people! We also took down the mirror that was originally in there, and replaced it with this $10 estate sale find that we painted a turquoise blue for a pop of color. We plan to add some sort of embellishment to the mirror just to jazz it up a little more, but we haven’t decided on what just yet.

We hung a metal and glass shelf above the toilet that will evenutually hold candles, towels, books, etc. This has just been sitting in our attic waiting to be used. Alex had bought it for his apartment years ago, and we held onto it knowing that one day we might need something like it.

We still need to finish decorating the bathroom with final touches such as putting things on the shelves, buying new towels, and possibly hanging some artwork. But we think taking a few hours out of one weekend just to paint and make a few small changes has
made a world of difference. Eventually we will replace that old sink/vanity but that will come later, much later.
 

Shut the front door…we finally hung something

Most of this week was spent oohing and awing over the new living room wall color (I’ve told Alex a million times a day how much I love the new color). But we managed to stop admiring it long enough to finally hang something on the walls. Well, not quite on the walls, more like on the fireplace above the mantle. That still counts though, right?

I mentioned a couple weeks ago (read here) that we had finally purchased a mirror for the living room from World Market. And now, we finally hung it up. Yay! Go us!

Here’s a little before shot of the sad, empty space that we’ve been staring at for so long.
 

 
And here it is a little less naked.
 

 
Did you check out the awesome wall color? Alright, I’ll shut up about it. I guess I’m just too easy to please.

For the most part we are very pleased with the mirror. We weren’t quite expecting it to be covered in shiny gold thread, but we are getting use to it. At first, I thought we’d be sending it back for sure, but it’s starting to grow on me. Now, the thing that I want to change is the color of the brick. I’ve never been a fan of the color, but I just don’t know if I have it in me to paint over brick. Don’t get me wrong, I love the way painted brick looks, but will future potential buyers love it too? Not that we plan to sell our house anytime soon, but you never know.

What do you think, paint the brick or leave her be?
 

There’s paint on our walls

We did it! We finally found some time to paint the living room, thanks to grandparents taking one child away for the weekend. And although we had a couple of curve balls thrown our way (last minute hockey tournament for Alex, trip to emergency room for Oscar), we somehow managed to finish. And I must say, I am very pleased with how it turned out.

Here’s the before shot right after we moved in:
 

 
And here’s what the living room looked like with all new furniture, but before tearing down the built-ins:
 

 
And for good measure, here’s a shot of what the wall looked like after tearing down the built-ins:
 

 
Finally, here’s what the living room is looking like today:
 

 

 
The change doesn’t seem very drastic in these photos, but the room feels so much better now. Not only did we paint the walls a light gray color, we also applied a new coat to all of the trim. It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint will do for a room.

Before, we felt that the walls, trim and carpet were all a very similar color. The antique white caused the entire room to give off a sickly, yellow glow. We think the soft gray color on the walls adds the perfect amount of contrast without making the room feel too dark. And it’s a great neutral color that won’t scare off potential buyers should we decide to sell the house for any reason anytime soon.

Next step is to hang art/pictures on the wall and organize the bookshelves. And of course hang the mirror that I talked about here. It has been delivered, we just haven’t gotten around to hanging it yet.

I didn’t get a chance to shoot any “in progress” photos due to the fact that the hubs kept leaving me to paint all on my own. He got the chance to play in a hockey tournament, and I wasn’t about to complain about it seeing as he was going to spend his Father’s Day painting and all. So I did a lot of the room on my own, just saved the hard parts for him :)

Oh, and that trip to the emergency room that I mentioned above… Well, Oscar was being very silly Sunday morning, spinning around, making himself dizzy and falling to the ground. At one point, he stopped spinning and started to fall, so Alex tried to catch him. We aren’t quite sure what happened, but he wouldn’t stop screaming and wouldn’t move his arm. We decided a trip to the ER was the new plan for the day. Luckily, the x-rays were normal, no broken bones!
 

Our thumbs are turning green

On my very first post, I showed a picture of the front of the house right after we moved in. The yard had absolutely no curb appeal. There were just a handful of tiny plants in oversized and misshapen flowerbeds and a yard full of dying grass. It was pitiful.

We knew a lot of work needed to be done, so little by little we got out there and got to work. First, we reshaped the flowerbeds in front of the house. We liked the rocks that were used as the border, they just needed to be buried into the ground a little. When we were finally ready to do some planting, we had no clue where to begin. Luckily, my father-in-law loves gardening and has an extensive knowledge of plants. He and Alex headed off to the nursery and came home with a bunch of plants to get us started. That was last spring, and since then, we’ve been adding plants to fill in some areas or replace those that did not fare well over the extremely hot summer. You should hear us talk now. We actually know types of plants and point them out in other flowerbeds around the neighborhood. We feel so old.

We’ve also done some work on the big circular flowerbed around the trees in the front. We made the circle smaller and buried those rocks as well. The smaller circle looks much better, but it left us with a ring of dirt around the perimeter. Just this past month, we finally got around to laying sod down. We hope it starts spreading soon. We’ve also added St. Augustine plugs throughout the yard to fill in some of the bare areas.

Here is the BEFORE picture that was taken right after moving in.
 

 
And here is the AFTER picture (almost two years later).
 

 
As you can see, it’s looking so much better. Now we just have to wait it out while the St. Augustine spreads and the plants get bigger and fill in. I’m positive we will be adding new plants and moving old plants around until we get it just right. We’ve even been talking about adding another flowerbed to the front yard, along the sidewalk near the street. But in the mean time, we are pretty happy with the results and amazed at how much we have learned in the process.
 

The Garden of Egner

After my post about the yard yesterday, I’m really excited to talk about the progress we made this past weekend. It just happened to be 70 degrees in the middle of winter, so Alex and I took advantage of it and got to work on our soon to be vegetable garden.
 

 
I know it doesn’t look like much, but had I remembered to take a BEFORE shot, you’d really be able to see the work that we did. So I’ll just tell you about it instead. We chose this corner of the yard because it is one of the only areas that receives direct sunlight for a good amount of the day. (We are starting with a small garden for now, in order to test the area and make sure it really does receive enough light.) The entire chain link fence was covered in English Ivy coming from our neighbor’s backyard. We tore it all out. And do you see that pile of bricks? Well, that’s just the leftovers. We moved a ton of random bricks from that corner of the yard. Not sure why they were there to begin with, but after digging them all up and stacking them nicely behind the shed, we realized we had enough to start another backyard project…a walkway. Yippee! Starting a garden is basically free, other than the seed, and now a project we thought was going to cost a bundle, won’t cost much at all thanks to a little hard work (and dumb luck).

The worst part about digging those bricks up—which I mostly did myself, thank you very much—was not knowing what kind of creatures were living underneath. There was a lot of screaming and running involved when a few spiders, centipedes, and even snakes came crawling out. But I was a big girl and got right back to work—after my heart rate returned to normal.

So the walkway will come later after a little more planning, but we got the area for the garden cleared out. And since we had so many bricks, we used some of  them to form a border around the space. Next, we’ll just have to till the soil and plant the seeds.

You have no idea how excited I am about this small amount of progress we made. I’m already dreaming of all the yummy foods I’m going to make with our plethora of fresh veggies.
 

A living room worth living in

In our house, most of our time is spent in the living room. It’s a huge room, and it took us a while to decide how to best set it up to make it feel more cozy, yet still have space for the kids to play. So here’s a picture of what the room looked like right after we moved in.
 

 
Very eclectic, right? We didn’t have much furniture having just moved from a much smaller house. After a lot of talking, a lot of shopping, and then even more talking, we finally decided on this new furniture and a rug to help break up the beige carpet a little.
 

 

 
The coffee table, two chairs and entertainment center are from Crate and Barrel, the rug is from Home Decorators, and the side table is from CB2. And for Christmas, we bought ourselves a new TV by taking advantage of a nice Black Friday deal from Best Buy!!

Hopefully you’ll agree that this is a huge improvement, but there are still some things to be done. For example, Alex built bookshelves to go along the wall behind the two chairs. And those are still sitting in the garage just waiting for a couple coats of paint to be applied. I plan to tackle those very soon…I’m embarrassed to think about how long we have had those out in the garage and not in our house. Seriously, it’s ridiculous!

Here’s the list of all the things that we plan to accomplish in the not-so-distant future (some more distant than others):

Paint the new bookshelves

Knock down built-in bookshelves next to fireplace (They are very narrow and in a weird place, I’ll post more about this later)

Paint the walls

Add carpet in area where built-ins were

Hang things on the walls

Replace mantle (we want something with a little more presence)

Get mirror for above fireplace

Scrape popcorn ceiling

Replace ceiling fan

Update all of the old throw pillows