Project # 2 - Family Room

These pictures are from before we moved in and my in-laws were still living there.

This is going to be a long project. We haven't really started anything yet, but our plans are to have my 30th birthday party at the house. That being said, this room is going to get some major exposure, so it's been moved up to (one of) the top priorities for the house.

We have been able to remove the popcorn from the ceiling - a task which proved much lengthier than planned due to the age of the home. There were many large cracks that kept reappearing after being repaired. Personally, I think there might be some structural concerns from when the addition to the house was built back in the 70's, however, that's not something my husband wants to visit at this time. *sigh*

All the pictures have been removed from the walls. We'll be doing the actual swap-out of rooms this weekend. The sofa is going to be staying though as we need to buy one that will fit in the room. Our current sofa is built for a much smaller room and would be completely eaten up in a room this large.

Ideally, I'd like to rebuild the bar into a 90 degree angle as right now this bar is only 45 degrees, which makes it hard to make efficient use of the space closest to the wall. However, that may be a project for further down the road since I'm sure it's not in our budget right now! :)

The bar chairs will be going and replaced with something that just took my breath away!! :) See the palette below. My plan is to paint the walls a blue-ish grey color (Benjamin Moore Grey Wisp) with an accent wall where the TV is (Benjamin Moore Wedgewood Grey). I hope to go with champagne colored floor-to-ceiling curtains and espresso colored wood furniture. I'm still adding to the palette as I find items... but it's a great way to keep everything in one place and give an overall idea of the goal for the room:

Project # 1 - Bathroom Remodel

As stated in the first post, we recently redid the bathroom upstairs - although that was not our initial plan. We had originally intended to just replace the vanity. Unfortunately, that led to redoing the floors which led to replacing the toilet which led to us just redoing everything.

Here is the bathroom before:

(picture to come)

The vanity I purchased from a seller on Craigslist who bought a few of these when his company (a sink / vanity manufacturer) went out of business. It was gorgeous and a major steal!! It also came with the two mirrors - an added bonus! ;)

The tile we purchased from Montagna Lugano from Home Depot - it's a porcelain tile though you really can't tell by looking at it that it's not real stone. We ended up pulling it up through the entirety of the shower.

While the renovation itself is not a showstopper, it was a definite improvement and was done on a budget. The entire project (labor and all) cost us about $3,000. Not bad considering most bathroom renovations can cost upwards of $10,000!

Merrily We Roll Along...

I can't believe it's going to be Halloween. I also can't believe that in a matter of 9 weeks, we'll be in a new decade. How did that happen?

Speaking of new decades... my birthday is two days before the new year, and this year marks the big one. 3-0. Scary. It's kind of a nervous excitement for me. You see, for all of my life, I've always been the young one. I was the only child and raised around adults... young one. I skipped my junior year of high school and graduated a year early... young one. Went to college - young one in class. Got a job - young one. Ran in a pageant (that's another Oprah) - young one by about four years. Married my 32 year old hubby when I was 23... youngest of my friends to be married. Had a baby at 27... I'm sure you get the picture. Now I'm going to be 30. It's slowly hitting me that I'm not the young one anymore. There are dresses that I can no longer wear because I'll be "in my thirties". I'll become that classification of women who you see in the magazines where they say "oh this sexy dress is great for a woman in her 20's... and this argyle sweater is perfect for the mature woman in her 30's." Okay so maybe that's a little overboard, but you get where I'm going.

Life is changing. Now I'm slowly realizing that I want to be the fun mom who makes the cute arts and crafts gifts for her daughter's classroom friends. I want to be the happy homemaker who helps to make the house a home - furnishing it, decorating it, providing yummy dinners, and so on.

Seriously - what corner did I turn to become this person? Let me tell you - I am NOT crafty by any means. I'm the type of person who would much rather spend the extra money to buy the completed project than go to Michael's to buy the supplies and do it myself. But somewhere along the way, I've been bitten by the bug.

In the last few weeks, I've created a long list of things I want to do for our new house (painting each room being the number 1 priority). Maybe I'll be able to do it all, maybe I won't.... but we'll soon see how it goes. It may be a total failure, but I guess we'll never know until we try. On to Project #1 (which, thankfully, has been completed by our wonderful handyman, Julio.