{ Fireplace Mantel makeover }

Apparently I am not the greatest at juggling three little kids, a full time job, a side gig, a home, everything else that life brings AND a blog because I haven't posted in eight months! yikes! It feels like it was only a few and then when I looked back I was like whoa.

We did make time to capture a new family photo this fall. I love this one!

These kids of mine have my heart.

photo credit Kety Studio

To be quite honest not many "big" things have changed around here. We spent the summer camping and playing outside endlessly. Winter slows things down in the "DIY projects" department plus we've just been busy. I mean we are all busy right, but for some reason I just haven't figured out how to do this full time working plus everything else thing. Like keeping up with laundry and meal planning has consumed my time and even then it seems like I am always behind and have at least 3 loads of laundry to do at any given time and scrambling at 6:30pm every.single.week.night to come up with a delicious, easy, quick, healthy, everyone likes meal (like that's even possible) ha! If you have tips for me please share. not joking. how do you do it?

One thing that we finally checked off the crazy long to-do list is our fireplace mantel! I figured I would check in to give you guys an update on that. I know you were on the edge of your seats to see it.

So here's a quick reminder of our sequence of events and it only took us a little over 2 years. We are fast.

 

I was like what is that piece of paneling sitting on top of that fireplace? who does that? Then we figured out why...there was a hole behind it so duh, that's why one would buy a piece of faux wood paneling and some trim to cover it up.

 

 

We took the vent grates off, cleaned them up, and sprayed them white. The lovely gold screen came off (eventually), the limestone mantel was removed, and the giant hole was covered up with drywall.

 

 

Mark started putting the wood up to trim out the fireplace. and that's how we lived with it for over a year.

I improvised on our tiny little ledge that I had to work with. so pretty, right?!

and then finally a fire was lit under one mans behind and the mantel was constructed.

I primed and painted and then it was finally complete. Now I just need to go shopping to pretty up the mantel just in time for spring!

I love it. The room finally feels much more completed with this done.

So much better than this...

I'm itching to get to hobby lobby and home goods to scoop up some good mantel décor. Here are my inspiration mantels.

This spring we will be starting on the exterior of our house and I am so ready for that. Have you drove by our house? Let me give you a reminder.

Pretty right?! ha!

That yellow has got to go. The wood trim is peeling and rotting, that's gotta go too. That front cement stoop is uninviting and tiny so a new front porch will be replacing that.

We are still debating on color. For sure I can tell you it wont be any version of yellow. I know I want a combo of vertical board and batten and vinyl siding. I will find time to share the process with you and I am sure if you live local you will be seeing all the progress as we go!

So maybe I am writing to myself since it's been so long since I've updated but honestly it feels good to blog again. It feels good to have a small thing checked off our list and it feels great to dream about the big exterior changes to come!

Be blessed!

{ Skim Coating }

We should really find a use for drywall dust cuz this stuff is in abundance and it's not going away for awhile yet.

It's coming from the skim coat that my fabulous hubby and dad have been working on. Like I explained here, the walls had a bumpy texture to them that we weren't really fond of so to get rid of that texture plus cover up some plaster cracks, Mark decided to do a thin coat of drywall mud over all the walls and then sand that down to get a more smooth surface. 

First we scraped all the cracked parts of the wall and then he filled in the holes with compound

Next he sanded down all the walls and then applied the thin skim coat layer

It's so messy and dusty everywhere, but it really looks great. I'm just happy to see that yellow color gone! The smooth walls are going to be so much better and hopefully it will help to decrease plaster cracks in the future.

He didn't do the area above the fireplace because we are still planning on doing the built in around it, like I referenced here. I added a horrible photo shopped pic below of where the built-in's will be so you can visualize what will be covered up. 

Are you laughing at that picture?! I said it was a horrible but you get the idea. I was helpful for me anyway!

He has a little more sanding to go and then he'll be moving on to fixing a few things on the ceiling. Still not sure what color to paint in here but I'm excited to get at it.

{ 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?  

{ Cleaning Up }

While Mark's been working upstairs my main job has been to clean up around the rest of the house. You might have seen my post about cleaning the basement. It was the grossest area to clean and it still has a long way to go but the rest of the house is in pretty bad shape too and has needed lots of scrubbing. I figured I would give you a little update on how the living room looks now. 

Once we got it cleared out, I (using gloves) swept and scrubbed the floors three times. My bucket of water was black every 5 minutes. Seriously. Black. I lost count on how many times I changed out that bucket for clean water. It was a lot. It still amazes me that a floor could be that gross but, it was. Believe me. 

I didn't take a photo of the empty room before I started scrubbing. I think I was in to much of a hurry to get it cleaned. Above is a picture of it in the beginning stages of cleaning. My process was sweep, dry swiffer, sweep, wet swiffer, mop, mop, hands and knees scrubbing. I didn't want to get down on the floor until I was confident that most of the nastiness had been removed ha!

Here's a close up of the difference in how the floor looked with the first swiffer run through. It was amazing how "new" the flooring looked. Before I couldn't tell if the finish was in good shape or not due to the thick layer of dust/dirt/grim. But it looked pretty good. It will still need to be re-finished at some point though at least a couple coats of poly for sure. 

Oh, did you notice in the first picture that the random piece of paneling above the fireplace has been taken down. We decided we wanted to know what was behind it and what we would have to fix/replace. Well apparently it was covering a giant hole of brick, insulation and studs. Weird. 

This room has plaster walls so we will have to figure out how to patch that. I think we are planning on putting the t.v. up there. Not for sure yet though. 

So here is the beautiful result of lots of sweat and hard scrubbing! 

 Doesnt it look pretty darn good! I was excited. I even felt comfortable enough to put Chase's car seat on the floor! 

Here's a few more pictures for ya...

It feels so good to have one room cleared and cleaned! Can you see the new can lights in the last photo too?! There were no lights in this room except for that random old light that wasn't even in the living room space, so now that there are lights it seems like we are getting somewhere!

There's still lots to do in here. Obviously that huge spot needs to be patched along with a few other little spots that need some attention. Then cleaning the walls and painting them. So far a few things have been crossed off my list for this room and it feels good!

Living Room:

• clear out stuff and clean
• paint
• white wash the fireplace like this
• install a wooden mantel
• resurface the hardwood floors
• install ceiling lights