{ 500,000 Projects, None Completed }

I am ready to paint.

 I've been ready to paint for a while now. 

The dry wall is not quite ready yet though. 

In good news it is DEFINITELY looking like things will be moving along quicker now that the drywall is almost done. I feel like I've been saying that statement for awhile now, and I have, but since we cant quit our jobs or quit being parents and work full time on this house everything will always take a long time to reach completion. Nothing is actually completed yet in this house. 

We have about 500,000 projects going all at once. Thats how we roll. Currently we are working on the living room. We didn't have to replace any plaster/drywall in this room but we did have a lot of fixing to do on the plaster. A lot of spots were cracking and bubbling up so we knew if we just painted over it that eventually those spots would chip off so we wanted to take care of the issue now instead of leaving an issue for later. 

Remember the living room?

That was the cleanest it has been and that lasted about 5 minutes. Here's how it's looking now. Sorry about the blurry photos but it's hard to get a great shot with dust in the air.

We scraped along the surface at all the bubbling/cracking spots and slowly chipped away so that each spot could be patched. The photo above shows a whole section that has been chipped, sanded, and patched. The next step is to skim coat the whole thing with drywall mud and then sand it smooth. 

Heres a close-up of the chipping method we used. 

You can see that the wall has a texture to it. We aren't huge fans of the texture so by sanding and skim coating the surface it should remove most of that texture and appear much smoother.

Did you see that I didn't get the trim in this room primed yet? I really was hoping to get that done but drywall dust and wet primer don't play well together so I will have to wait until the drywall is completely done to start back up on the trim. 

I've made a decision on what I want to do with that empty spot above the fireplace. At first we were going to just try to fill it in with drywall. But then I saw this website and we really liked what they did so we are going to do something similar. They have an awesome tutorial on how they did it too so I am really excited to see this happen in my house. I still really want to white wash the brick at some point like I referenced here, but I will probably wait to see what it looks like with the trim work done first because if I really like it then maybe it will stay...we shall see. 

Our goal is to have ALL the drywall finished by the end of next week. Ok, maybe thats just my goal but hopefully Mark will agree. My plan is to prime and paint the walls upstairs this week. That drywall is about a day away from finally reaching completion so this plan should be reality. After that I am going to bring the kids beds up there that I bought off craigslist and paint those. I'll be sharing all those projects as they happen. 

I'm off to the paint store today to pick out colors for a couple rooms. Anybody have any great paint colors they want to recommend?  

{ Kitchen Inspiration }

I am finding that when I do these inspiration pages that it's a whole lot easier for me to figure out what it is that I want in each room. 

I realize too, now that I get to decorate another house, that my first house wasn't really decorated in the style that I love. Honestly, I'm still not 100% confident that I know what my style is yet. I was safe in our first house. I mean safe because the colors I chose were neutral (earth tones) and the furniture that I chose was neutral (beige). I picked dark color stain for my living room furniture (book shelves, tv stand, etc.) and I've come to the decision that I really prefer white or colored furniture pieces more. I know that while I still like neutral wall colors, that I want more soft color in my new home like pale gray-greens, gray-blue and cream colors instead of dark browns, rust browns and dark reds. My previous kitchen is pictured below. 

I loved my kitchen. 

It was clean, cozy and functional. But...you can see I picked dark brown counter tops, rust orange for wall color and dark appliances and accessories. Nice but not really my style anymore.

This time around, since we are painting our kitchen cabinets white, below is my inspiration. 

from my pinterest "home" board

I love the crisp clean feel of this room and the pops of color are just perfect. 

I love the white cabinets, white walls, light colored counter tops, and dark flooring.

What do you think? 

We plan on doing some open shelving, so I will have to find some cute dishes to display up on them. I also plan on having a small island. While we wont have a lot of room for stools like the one above, I would like to add one on the side of the island and I think a bright orange stool would be awesome. 

We still have our black appliances from our first home which I would like to eventually replace with stainless because I like that look better. I've settled already on a dark flooring and a light colored counter top. I'm still trying to decide on wall colors yet. The plans seem to be coming together and I cant wait to make it happen in our kitchen!

Now that I have inspiration to go off of, I will be busy looking on craigslist for a stool or two and shopping around for other accessories in white and blue and red/orange (check out these fun orange accessories).

 In the spring you can expect a large barn sale at our home. I am going to need to unload a lot of things that I will no longer be using! 

It's about time I figured out what my "style" really is. Do you guys find that your style is always changing? How do you adjust your home and accessories to changing tastes without breaking the bank, any tips?

{ Trim Decision }

Hi there! We welcomed in 2014 celebrating with some of our greatest friends and we are so excited for what will be happening this year! Top on our list of exciting things to come will be moving into our home!! It's still a few months away we are thinking but slowly and surely we are working to get to that point. Mark literally lives and breaths home renovation. I am grateful for that man. 

Remember my big question of whether to paint the trim in the house or to leave it? You can see that blog post here. WELL...the damage has been done. I started priming the trim   so I can paint it. I knew that if I didn't do it, I would regret not doing it. It's only the beginning and I've already spent about 5 hours on priming (not including the prep time) and have only done a small portion of the trim in the house. It will be a long process but in the end I will be so happy that I made the decision to paint. 

master bedroom closet

hallway

It's only primed but it seems like a big difference to me already. I don't have the best photos to show you yet because I only thought about taking them as I was walking out the door and it was already dark out so after I get it all primed and painted I will show all the rooms. 

With my decision to paint the trim, I also decided to NOT paint the doors. I believe it was a Facebook comment from someone to paint the trim and leave the doors wood stained. At first I thought that was weird but then I started looking on pinterest and I actually really like that look. Something like this and this is what I am going for. I will have to re-stain our doors since I'm not a fan of the honey colored doors but that will happen later down the road. 

 My goal for next week is to get the rest of the trim primed and maybe start painting it too. This is NOT a project that I can do while the kids are there so it's a little tricky to get a lot of time to do it but that is the goal and I am going to try hard to accomplish it. 

The kitchen ceiling is being worked on right now. It's a little complicated (seems thats how all things go in this house) due to the uneven level of the ceiling. Turns out that each side of the beam (that is now gone) were different heights. This wasn't something that Mark could eye ball since its only a slight difference but a slight difference is a big deal when you are putting up drywall and trying to make it level. Believe me, a lot of brain power and time went into figuring out how to get that ceiling all one level! I will hopefully have a kitchen update for you really soon. 

So what do you think about the painted trim/stained doors idea? Like it? Any suggestions?