-
Parkside Twin: 9 Years and Counting
Happy almost May everyone! Between the pandemic and parenting, renovation things here have been paused or put in slow-mo for the past couple of years. But we’re still here and still kicking! We’ve deliberately put on hold anything that would take more than a day or two, as well as the things we felt couldn’t be delayed any further. (I’ll tell you all about our dishwasher experience from H-E-double hockey sticks later.) Here’s a quick rundown of our project list from the last two years We bought a new light for our dining room from Wayfair. Our previous fixture – which I swore I had a picture of but after…
-
Our Breakfast Nook Refresh – Part 1
Happy Sunday Friends! An avid reader, I’ve always loved the idea of a window seat somewhere in our home so that I could enjoy lounging the afternoon away to a good book or cuddling up with one of the dogs as I listen to the rain. When we first toured the house, I couldn’t picture a better place for a built-in than the breakfast nook. From the delightfully over-sized window and its soothing natural light throughout the day, to the sense of seclusion it offers, feeling tucked away within our otherwise open floor plan. It was the perfect spot! Now the challenge… With our humble footprint of a house, everything…
-
The Big 6: Reflections on another year of home ownership
Happy Wednesday everyone! Hard to believe it’s May already but I hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day weekend. I’ve had the privilege to be a stepmom to a fantastic kid for the last 3 years, but this year it was especially sweet since I celebrated with my little one who arrived in February. Enough about me and the baby though. It feels so good to dust off the keyboard and (attempt to) get back into the rhythm of blogging, or at least as much of a rhythm as it can be with a new baby. When I’m not completely sleep-deprived, I’m planning out the laundry list of projects…
-
Board & Batten – Grid Wall
Morning friends! A few months ago the Mr and I determined it was time for a change of pace and listed our home on the market (more on that to come). Now, despite all of the improvements we’d managed over the past year, I couldn’t help but feel hopelessly underwhelmed with reviewing our living room space. When we first moved in, the entirety of the main level was wall to wall, floor to ceiling, every nook and cranny in a harsh and very unflattering yellow. It felt busy and not in a good way. More like a slept through your alarm, rushed out to your car, and realized halfway to…
-
Board and Batten
When we first moved into our home we found that the dining room’s previous “look” offered little in the way of charm. Initially, I armed myself with a roller and set to painting over the saturated yellow with my favorite neutral, Grey Owl by Benjamin Moore. It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do and we were left with how we wanted to inject our personality into the space. In our dining room, we found that we had one actual wall, a shared wall to the living room, and two partial walls where the walls had been opened with wide-set archways. Going for a feature wall seemed the…
-
A Fresh Take on the Master Bedroom – pt. 1
It’s no secret that our new home was extremely busy when it came to ‘the bold and the outrageous’ color scheme throughout. Managing to be both unflattering and non-complementary in one fell swoop we felt as though each room had been sealed away from the whole. That left us with a myriad of odd and questionable taste within the confusion of color as far as the eye could see. To be fair, despite the menagerie of colors it still held a punch of personality (not ours) versus that of the numerous ’50 Shades of Beige’ we’d seen while touring homes for sale. However, disjointed chaos is the best way I…
-
The Living Room: Finally Finished
We finished the living room with barely 2 days to spare before my family arrived. Of course, finished is a relative term since there was still so much to do. The room was painted of course with the not-as-overwhelming-as-I-first-thought blue, but baseboard and crown molding needed to be purchased and hung yet, and the light fixture I had ordered 2-day shipping was, of course, delayed. Panic started to set in but I kept reminding myself to keep pushing through as I channeled my inner Dory from Finding Nemo singing ‘Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming’ as I worked. We did manage to get the baseboard hung and caulked the day…
-
The Living Room: Pushing Through
So, there we were – in the living room where we bit off more than we could chew – with new floors and a renewed drive to finish the work we had started (at that point in time) over a year and a half ago. Of course, we should have realized then that our plans never seem to pan out in the time span we hope or expect them to. (I guess we’re slow learners?) The floors may have been finished but there was still SO. MUCH. WORK. left for us to do. In the meantime, we learned how to attach and mud over corner beading, layering spackle on…
-
The Living Room: Our Never Ending Project
I wrote about this room early on in this foray into blogging, but I feel like a recap is in order, simply due to how much time has passed. It’s been about 3 years since we started the remodel in our living room. It was early into our homeownership and both of us being somewhat new to DIY, we made what I’ve now come to understand to be the cardinal mistake when tackling a home remodel – we bit off more than we could chew. To be honest, we really had no idea what we were getting into with this room, heck with this whole place. I mean, the house…
-
Painting Wood Paneling
When we bought our house 5 years ago, I was 100% certain the last time it had a makeover was sometime in the ’70s. It’s horrible really. There is dark, wood-veneer paneling all over the second and third floor and really it pains me to look at it. I don’t know about you but I am not into the whole ‘retro but not in a good way’ vibe. After discussion and a bit of research, we decided that painting would be the best and most cost-effective way to update the rooms without having to remove the paneling and then drywall after. The bedroom was the easiest starting point as there…
