The House on the Hill

Closet Progress

May 19, 2013

We had a whirlwind weekend full of spending time with friends and getting some much need rest – it was great but also meant that we didn’t make as much progress as we would have liked, especially since Kyle was sick pretty much all day today. While he was camped out on the sofa, I decided to finally get busy working on the closet makeover that I started a week ago. I still have a long way to go but wanted to show you guys the progress I made tonight:

I decided that instead of a closet with ugly brown bi-fold doors, it makes the most sense for us to have a “landing spot” to toss shoes and hang our keys. I really wanted to use the laundry room for that but it’s too small already and adding hanging coats and a place for shoes would make it unbearably cramped. We already have to do this weird tango when we’re both coming in or out!

This is just part one – building a bench where we can sit and put on/take off our shoes. I’ll also be building a wooden crate that will slide in so our shoes will be hidden and I won’t have to worry about tripping over them.

This project really tested my skills and patience what with it being the first thing I’ve ever built besides a desk and bookcase from Walmart. It was also my first time using any kind of saw and I’ve got to say, I’m already feeling it. I’m sure I’ll be sore all over tomorrow but for now I’m incredibly proud of myself for doing this about 99% by myself. I’m also super thankful for the tiny bit of help I did get from Kyle though or else I probably would have ended up sobbing in a corner.

Now I’m going to reward myself with a cookie and an episode of Deadliest Catch.

D-O-N-E

May 17, 2013

That’s right, we are DONE painting our cabinets! Of course we still have to tackle the drawers but there are far fewer of those and they’re much smaller. I plan on posting again later today but was too excited not to share the news! It’s recommended that you let them dry for about a week before hanging but we’re going to see how they feel on Monday or Tuesday and go from there.

This project has been a pain but it’s going to be so worth it once we get those pretties into place!

Oh where, oh where have my 2x4s gone?

May 15, 2013

So a funny thing happened last night.

We were finishing up a coat of paint on the cabinet doors and I was gearing up to finally start work on the hall closet project. As I’m rolling along, I spot my plywood but can’t seem to find my 2x4s anywhere. I looked around the garage for a solid five minutes just thinking “What the heck?! Where are they?”

It was at that moment that I realized we were using them to help us paint and dry the cabinet doors.

Of course. So it looks like I probably won’t be starting the project until this weekend. That’s okay though because there is plenty we can do in the meantime. I’ll give you a hint – it has something to do with these things:

Have you ever searched tirelessly for something that was literally right at your feet/in front of your face?

The best laid plans…

May 13, 2013

You know those “big plans” I had for the weekend? Well, let’s just say the closet looks the exact same as when I last showed it to you.

Saturday we spent most of the day sanding/painting cabinets and running errands (complete with a trip to Home Depot, duh) before going to spend time with some family. I had every intention of tackling the closet on Sunday but I was feeling a little under the weather. We ended up just lounging around the house on Sunday and resting which was probably good for us but it did mean my closet project didn’t get finished and we haven’t flipped the cabinet doors to paint the fronts yet. It was kind of hard to walk away from spending the day like this though:

We’re going out of town tonight but our new plan is to work on the cabinet fronts and the closet after work tomorrow. This will push back finishing our cabinet project until Wednesday of next week but we should have a few projects in between now and then to show you.

Have you ever had one of those days where you throw your plans out the window and just laze it up instead?

A little Friday night demolition party

May 10, 2013

Well that’s a bit dramatic. It was a lot less like demolition and much more like disassembling. Confused? Allow me to explain.

You see, this weekend I have big plans for this guy:

That my friends, is the hall closet in the front entry. Not the prettiest girl at the ball if you know what I’m sayin’. Let’s take a look behind Door Number One, shall we?

Sigh. This has been our “catch all” closet which included a random assortment of items left behind by the previous owners. Thanks for the broken fan and beige paint, I guess. Anywho, this area has been nagging at me since our house hunting days. It’s just begging to be fixed up and turned into a much more attractive space (don’t even get me started on the parquet, that will be changed but not quite yet). I’m not going to go into too much detail because I want it to be a surprise but I’ll just leave you with this “in progress” photo:

Of course, this means that our foyer currently looks like this:

Yikes!

Get out of my dreams and into my car

May 9, 2013

And by car, I mean house.

Seriously though, I have been absolutely drooling over white kitchens for the longest time. Sometimes I day dream about them…that’s a little weird but hey, we’re all a little weird sometimes, am I right? I don’t know what it is about a white kitchen, maybe how clean they look or maybe it’s how open and airy they seem to make a room feel. Whatever it is, I want it. Who wouldn’t want to cook in one of these beauties?

(via)

These are just a few of the hundreds of white kitchen pictures that I’ve been ogling lately. Keep in mind that for now we’re just painting the cabinets and then we’ll move on to installing a backsplash, adding new lighting, and maybe one day we can even expand our space a bit (or maybe that plan will just have to stay in my dreams forever).

One thing that I know we’ll be making room for is a baking station – hopefully we can make it look as pretty as Jenny’s from Everyday Occasions:

(via)

Anyone who knows me knows (or should know) that I absolutely love to bake and I’m stupid excited to have my own little corner of the kitchen. Jenny’s baking station is not only gorgeous but functional and incredibly organized which I love.

Progress has slowed a bit in the kitchen since Kyle is out of town for a work trip but we should have all of the painting done this weekend which means next weekend I’ll be able to do the cabinet reveal! Until then, I’ll just keep getting some inspiration from my BFF.

What do you think about white kitchens? Too trendy? Classic? Boring?

The List – Part One

May 7, 2013

So if you’ve been following along, you know that we gave our laundry room a face lift and that we’re currently working on phase one of our kitchen. You can also see from what I’ve posted on the House Tour page that our house could use lots of updating. I thought it might be helpful for you guys if I posted a “to do” list of sorts – giving an overview of our master plan.

Now, I love a good list – seriously, next to spreadsheets, amortization tables, and DIY projects, a list of any kind is my all time favorite thing – but I know that too many boxes to check off can be overwhelming for you and me both…but mostly me. So to keep you guys from dozing off (and me from having to check myself into a mental facility), I’m just going to do a broad plan for “Part One” of our whole home makeover which focuses on the downstairs.

PHASE ONE (of a million)

Front Porch

Sand and refinish the wood
~~Change light fixture~~
New front door
Add some greenery
Make it look less like a cave

Entry

Create an attractive entryway (table, lamp, art, etc)
New flooring
Pretty up the hall closet

Half Bath

New flooring
New lighting
New toilet
New vanity top
New mirror
Paint

Living Room

Figure out what to do with the pine paneling
Make the fireplace look less groovy (did I mention our house was built in the 70s?)
Create a sitting area
Revamp media stand
Disguise ugly railings

Study (formerly dining room)

Add storage
Add seating
~~New Light~~
Find or build a piece to use as a bar but that doesn’t look like a bar – this ain’t a frat house
Tables/lamps/general decor

Kitchen

Paint cabinets
Add backsplash
Change lighting

Dining Room

Build table
Paint old chairs
~~Reupholster old chairs~~
Find additional chairs
Add storage
New light fixture

Laundry Room

~~Paint walls~~
~~Paint cabinets~~
~~Add counter~~
~~Storage for keys, sunglasses, wallets, etc~~

General

New doors
Window treatments
Art

Phew! I’m worn out just from typing that list. We don’t really have a deadline for any of this, we’re just trying to do what we can as we have the time (and dolla’ dolla’ bills, ya’ll).

What do you think? I didn’t want to go into too much detail but I promise that I have some exciting plans for these spaces! Next time, I’ll share a little bit of the inspiration behind our kitchen plans and hopefully the reveal isn’t too far off.

Until then,

Jess

The quick kitchen remodel that wasn’t so quick after all

May 4, 2013

Once upon a time, we decided to do a “quick” kitchen makeover. You know, just slap some paint on the cabinets and throw up a backsplash, no big deal! Now, we look back and laugh and laugh and laugh at how naive we were. “Quick” has now turned into 5 1/2 weeks of not doing much. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

Here are a few of the listing photos of our kitchen:

And here it is a mere four hours after closing – progress!:

Look how happy I look here – so excited, so blissfully unaware of how long I’ll spend without kitchen cabinets:

We were able to get all of the doors down that night but since then, life has gotten in the way and we’ve only been able to work sporadically. It’s tough to muster up the energy and motivation to work on kitchen cabinets after you’ve both been working all day and we’ve spent far too much time at home improvement stores instead of at our own home on the weekends. One day after we had made a good bit of progress, we decided to step back and admire our hard work. That’s when we decided that we didn’t like the direction we were going in and all of the bottom cabinet bases would have to be re-painted. Womp, womp.

If you look really hard, you can see that originally we were going for a two toned look – the bottom cabinets and pantry were going to be a light blue and the tops were going to be white. We decided the shade of blue didn’t go well with the shade of gray we had on the walls and it wasn’t enough of a color difference to be the pop of color we were looking for. It just wasn’t coming together like the image we had in our heads:

We decided the best thing to do would be to go all white and as of today, our kitchen looks like this:

We still need to finish priming the insides of the cabinets, add a second coat to everything, and then prime and paint almost all of the doors and drawers (plus paint over the blue that’s still on the pantry). Unfortunately for us, Mother Nature has decided to be a bit moody this weekend and we’re worried that it’s a tad too cold to paint in the garage where all of the doors are currently living.

Hopefully we’ll be done soon and I can show you a good before and after! I think it already looks a hundred times better and the light cabinets make the space feel so much bigger.

So, have any of you tackled a project like this? Was the outcome worth all of the work and waiting?

One room down…

May 2, 2013

…all of them minus one to go.

One of the very first rooms we started working on in the house was our laundry room. This is the place where we access the garage from the house so we knew we wanted it to be a functional space for both washing clothes and storing our keys/sunglasses/random assortment of daily items.

Here’s what we started with:

And BAM! This is what we have now:

I really love how it turned out and it didn’t take much effort or money. We painted the cabinets white and the walls a calm grayish blue color (Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams). It feels so much more pleasant and clean now than it did with the yellow/beige that was there before, don’t ya think? We also added a counter ($60 for 6ft at Lowe’s – cut to the size we needed), a couple of his and her baskets for keys and mail, and a lamp from Target. The small green container is an old vase we’re using as a trash bin for lint and random pocket junk.

I say it didn’t take much effort but to be completely honest, I only did the painting. My dear, sweet husband installed the counter and let’s just say I heard more than a few grumbles and five dollar swear words coming from behind closed doors.

Jess

The Ugly Duckling

April 29, 2013

Hi there!

Since this is my very first post, I’d like to tell you a little bit about who I am and a little more about the house Kyle and I fell in love with.

Let’s start with little ole me, shall we? I’m an early twenties Southern gal married to a guy born and bred in the great white North. In terms of design and decor, our styles may not always mirror one another’s but we know how to compromise. I enjoy having my steady desk job but I get most of my excitement from crafting, baking, and most recently from designing and decorating every last inch of our first house.

Speaking of the house, let me introduce you – but first I have a secret. Our house is an ugly duckling. Phew, glad that’s out of the way. Allow me to explain. I love our house – major L-O-V-E, but as a proud homeowner I have to be able to see my house as it is, not just how I would like it to be. We got a crazy good deal on this baby. She’s a 1970’s 4 bed, 2.5 bath, 2600 sqft contemporary style with a lot of potential that was on the market for quite some time. The inspection gave us no reason to fret and the appraisal came back solid. A few people have wondered why nobody else snatched up such a great opportunity and I often reply “Oh who knows, maybe it’s because the lighting was bad in the photos” or “Could be the fact that our neighbors are actually power lines.” Deep down inside, I know the answer. She. Is. Ugly. The house is just not the most attractive from the outside – not a ton of curb appeal. But c’mon, people! That can be changed! Even if she’s not currently the prettiest girl at the ball, she’s my baby and I love her. We have some major plans to make her inner beauty shine on the outside but since the trees here grow leaves instead of money (ugh, I know right?), we’ll be taking on small projects little by little.

Without further ado, please meet the house on the hill:

I hope you stick around to see what we do with the old girl!

Jess