Kitchen Island Color Help

After months of hunting, we're picking up a used version of this island that I found on Craigslist. It was originally black, and the owner painted it white, but didn't do a great job, so it's going to need a bit of TLC. Since it will need to be repainted anyways, I've been thinking about different color options. Here are my thoughts:

1, 2, 3, 4

Red could be fun - our front door is red, and I love the idea of bringing this color into our house a bit. However, I also have lots of pink in my living room, dining room, and porch (basically, every other room on the first floor), so I'm not sure if this is the best choice. 

Green is on the walls in my entryway and half bath, and I have a cute new chair in my living room that's green and white, so it would be fun to incorporate a bit more of this color into another room. 

Navy is an interesting option, too. A lot of my house is light in color, and it might be nice to have something a bit darker in the mix. The walls are pale blue, and I always like when rooms have layers of the same color in different intensities. (This sounds like I really know what I'm talking about, but let me assure you that I do not!)

And finally...good old white. I have paint that matches our cabinets exactly. That's definitely the path of least resistance! 

Thought?! I clearly need help deciding!

Stairs Re-do

This little re-do took a while to reach it's final (ish) stage. The weird cloth "curtain" came down as soon as we moved in; a few months ago, I stripped the stripped wall paper and the walls got painted; and then this spring the carpet came up. In the last few weeks, I painted the stairs, ledge, and installed the runner.

Hooray for a normal, non-scary stairway!

The Nursery

For obvious reasons, we referred to this bedroom as the "scary doll room" until it became Lizzy's cute nursery. Those dolls were haunting!

The first week we owned the house, we went over to strip the crazy blue wall paper, gave the walls a coat of white paint, and pulled up that nasty pink carpet. That made it livable for us for the almost year that we used this as our bedroom. This spring, once we finally decided to make it the nursery, it got painted a very pale grey, the closet door got painted white, and we added a real door instead of that crazy piece of folded paneling. Icky. 

Now this is one of my favorite rooms in our house. Her crib is the DaVinci Jenny Lind from Target, but I found it on Craigslist for a song. (The woman selling it bought it a few months earlier, and claimed her daughter refused to sleep in it?!) That Ikea chair was in our living room for years, but now happily lives upstairs. The curtains were a fantastic find from the Pine Cone Hill Outlet that my mom picked up. They were made for a Nordstrom's window display and were then sent back, and I think she got them for $15 a panel! They were picked up after she was born and we knew she was a girl :) The light was another great find from my Mom - I think it was $10 at a consignment shop, and Peter installed it for me.

I painted our Expedit duck egg in Annie Sloan chalk paint, and we attached her changing pad to that (inspired by Young House Love and Pinterest). I put a serving piece on her table to store burp clothes and swaddle blankets, wipes, and diaper cream, which is also an idea I saw on Pinterest. It's nice having all those things so handy.

That little corner of a quilt is from Peter's grandmother. I believe it was a blanket that was made for her when she was a baby! She gave it to us years ago, and I'm so happy that it now gets to live in our sweet daughter's room.

Lizzy has officially moved out of our room and into her crib, and the transition was an easy one - easier for her than for me, I think! For me it felt like her first little step toward independence...and for her, I think it just meant sleeping in a bigger, more comfy bed. Ooh parenthood!

Master Bedroom Re-do

Oooh goodness. It hurts me to even look at these photos! We used this bedroom as our guestroom for almost the first year in the house, and then - after much deliberation - decided to make this our bedroom and the room across the hall the baby's room.

Our hesitation was mostly because this room is super narrow, and there isn't a great place for our Queen sized bed to live. AND you might have noticed that it had a horrendous wall covering. That, my friends, is paneling covered in contact paper.

At first, I wanted to take down the paneling, but this super fancy paneling was put on with special seams that tightly gripped it to the wall - you can kind of see them in the top two photos. Also the ceiling, which is in decent shape, was redone after the paneling was installed, meaning that if the panels were removed, there would be a gap around the perimeter of the room. Ugh!

So, covering it up was the best near-term solution. I found six rolls of thick grass cloth wallpaper for sale on Craigslist for $30 (total!), and my Mom came up one weekend to hang them all. We went right over the contact paper and crazy seams, which you can obviously still see a bit through the paper. The trim got painted white, and my Mom made those pretty floral curtains for me. I picked up new shams at West Elm, lamps at Target, and called it day :)

This isn't my ideal bedroom in any way - the shape is still tough to arrange furniture in, and the walls are still wonky. But it is so much better. I didn't think it was possible for me to feel even remotely positive about this room, and now I really like it. Thank goodness for forgiving grass cloth and handy mothers!

Dining Room Re-Do

Oh, the dining room! We naively thought that the dining room would be one of our easiest spaces to give a little make-over to. Strip the wallpaper, pull up the carpet, add some paint...not too bad! But as I mentioned before, the wallpaper was actually covering paneling, which was covering up crumbling plaster walls. The built-in hutch was nearly impossible to strip, and the floors were in very rough shape underneath the carpet. 

When we decided to re-do our kitchen, we also opened up the wall between the two rooms, re-did the plaster on the walls and ceiling, and Peter installed the new hardwood floors, which are the same in the whole first floor now.

The walls are painted Silver Mist by Benjamin Moore, which is the same color as the kitchen for continuity. That rug is Dash and Albert from the clearance sale they have each summer in Pittsfield. It might end up in the nursery eventually, if I find something more substantial at the sale this year to put in the dining room instead. 

The hutch got painted in Simply White by Benjamin Moore, which is the same color I've been using on all the trim and doors throughout the house. And the chandelier was replaced with one my Mom had been using for a while, but was sitting in her basement. I gave it a coat of white spray paint to spruce it up. (But I failed to cover up the sockets before doing it - don't make that same mistake! Peter had to clean them out to make all the lights work again...). The art work over the side board is a painting was picked up in Brazil years ago, and the one above the chair was purchased to celebrate our first anniversary.

We are gearing up to host some dinner parties (of the come-over-for-take-out variety, let's not get too ahead of ourselves!).

Basic Tools for Your Old House

We've only been in our crazy old house for about 9 months, but now that we are closing the door on our final major renovation (I promise to share some pictures here soon!), I thought it would be fun to show you a few of the little things that have been life savers for us while doing house-related projects.

These are all relatively inexpensive tools that we've turned to again and again in the last year. I originally just wanted to write about my pry bar (top left) because it truly is my favorite cheap tool that has countless uses, but I thought that would be a boring post. I'll just give you a few sentences instead! I bought two of these when we were removing the carpeting upstairs, and it's great for that, but it's also incredible for removing nails from tight spots that the back of a hammer doesn't fit in, scraping mysterious gunk off of stuff, opening boxes - it's just the handiest thing to have around. $10 you won't regret spending!

This mainly applies if you have a dusty old house like mine, but I picked up a big package of respirators that we've used for painting, carpet removal, cutting the flooring, etc. I love my caulking gun because I believe there are very few household issues that can't be solved with a bit (or a bundle!) of caulk. I've used this to fill in gaps on windows and trim, when we installed our new counter top in the bathroom, to seal tile gaps in the tub, and on and on. When you buy the gun, go ahead and buy a kitchen and bath caulk and an adhesive caulk (only a few dollars each). This kind of goes with the poly foam caulk, which we've used to fill in larger gaps in windows and trim (and then covered up with white adhesive caulk after - I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but it seems to do the trick!).

If you have a lot of painting in your future, go ahead and buy a big batch of foam rollers, the ceiling extender, the wood putty (if you have beat-up/new trim to paint), a few nice angled brushes, and a packet of artists brushes for touch-ups. I find that if I have all the supplies on hand, I'm much more likely to dive in and get a project done, so this is really just to save you from procrastinating.

We also bought a few basic saws that have come in very handy - a hack saw, a cross saw, and a coping saw, as well as sanding blocks in different grits and a pocket plane (great for getting new doors to fit in our wonky, off-kilter house!).

What are your must haves for home-ownership? I'm sure I'm missing some really helpful items!

Hooray for the end

(cute onesie)

Hope everyone had a lovely spring weekend! It was beautiful here, but Peter and I were trapped (kind of by choice...) inside, finishing up the floor and trim downstairs. I'll share some pictures soon! Our contractor very, very nicely had been letting us borrow his power tools for this project, but he is coming by today to pick them up. Hooray for the end of dust!!!

Our counter is taking longer than we hoped to come - we're currently scheduled for next Tuesday, and then appliances go in after that. Last week, I called and tried to give them a bit of a sob story about how I'm having my first baby any day now (kind of), and if there was any way they could move us up, we could be available at a moment's notice. The woman was unmoved. "Umm, I'll make a note..."

In between all that sawing and gluing, we went on a super fun date to State Park on Friday night, and then met friends for dinner at Russell House on Saturday. At Russell House, we were able to sit upstairs where the windows were wide open and it was breezy and still light out when we sat down at 7:30. Glorious. We'd already paid for parking (something we're usually allergic to, but it was a lovely concession to celebrate working all weekend/being 37 weeks pregnant) so we extended the evening a bit to sit outside in Harvard Square and share a concrete from Shake Shack. All in all, an excellent eating weekend.

I had my ultrasound on Friday, which sadly confirmed that the baby is still breech. It also looks like a frog in a jar at this point, it's face all mushed up against the top of my stomach. Poor baby. I'm doing all kinds of weirdo things from Spinning Babies, but we also have an external version scheduled for Thursday. I honestly had no idea how involved that procedure was, so I'm having some second thoughts. (If you had it, or have any stories about someone who did, I'd love to hear! The only things I've come across are tales of woe about it not working and inducing labor early, so...not really what I'm hoping to hear).

My mind has been spinning out of control, imagining an emergency c-section on Thursday while my house is in ruins and all my baby stuff is still at my parent's house in Connecticut. But the end is here (ish), whether I'm ready or not. And it truly doesn't matter if that second coat of paint makes it onto the dining room trim or not. My parents are coming up this weekend to drop off all the baby stuff regardless, so it will be in my cozy nesting fingers soon enough.

And, of course, I could still be pregnant a month of now! I have a feeling this stubborn child will be born a Taurus, so I think I've got until at least next week until we say "hi ;)"

The Pinnacle

This week, I think the house reached the pinnacle of chaos that it can contain. Almost nothing is where it belongs. Our temporary quarters have been worked and re-worked to accommodate ever changing areas that need to be accessed, and my brain is turning to mush. 

And yet. I really think this is one of those "it's always darkest right before sunrise" kind of moments, because even though it looks totally insane, the end is very, very close. Our kitchen cabinets are all installed, but the appliances are hanging out in the dining room. Our furniture is all over the place because Peter's laying down our floors, which are about three-quarters done as I type. And we made tons of progress on the upstairs this weekend, thanks entirely to my parents. I get overcome when I think about how much they've done and helped these last few weeks.

On Friday morning, Peter and I left for work while my mom stayed at our house (with our worker bees!) to paint the walls and trim in the baby's room. That afternoon, my dad came and he painted all the trim in our hallway upstairs. Then Saturday, we all painted the trim and walls in the dining room, hung curtains, and moved around tons of furniture. Gah! Do you see what I mean?! They come and do these terrible jobs, and they are cheerful and happy and bring us donuts. It's beyond amazing, and both Peter and I feel so incredibly lucky.

This week, the appliances will go in, the template for our counter top is being made, we'll finish up the floors, and continue to set up the baby's room. Because goodness! We've only got about a month until this baby is expected to make it's debut :)

Upstairs Bathroom Re-do

Last fall, I hatched a brilliant plan - we could give our upstairs bathroom a quick make-over during Christmas vacation!

(Ha. Ha, ha, ha.)

Initially, this space wasn't anywhere near the top of our priority list because, unlike almost every other room in the house, it functioned. Hideous, yes, but functional. But because we convinced ourselves that making this room a whole lot better would just involve a series of small upgrades that we could do ourselves, it moved rapidly up the list. Plus, it made me kind of depressed to imagine giving the baby baths in that putrid yellow tub. The pictures above are from when we first moved in (that's not my curtain - they kindly included it in the sale...).

The first order of business was the tile. Now, if we were planning to stay in this house for many years to come, or if our tile was in great shape (but was just an unfortunate color), we would have either saved up to totally re-do the tile, or had it professional re-glazed. But we decided a quick and easy fix was more than fine for our purposes, especially since the tile has some cracks - I think it was a somewhat poorly done DIY when it was initially put in.

I heard about tile paint in This Old House, and thought it might be worth a shot, even though it seemed almost too good to be true. Painting over ugly tiles for a bright white finish?! But as you can see below, it's pretty darn good! I buffed and cleaned the tiles one night and filled in all the cracks with caulk, and then Peter painted the finish on the tub tiles and around the floorboard tiles (I actually left the house in honor of our unborn baby's brain cells - this stuff was incredibly toxic smelling). Then - and this is the tricky part about using this product - we left the house for a week (it was Christmas to New Years) because the tile can't get wet for a few days.

After this, the series of updates runs together in my mind, but we painted the walls a really pretty pale blue, replaced the horrible track doors on the linen closet that were never on their tracks (this task nearly broke Peter because the frame was so far from being square it was crazy!), replaced the light over the vanity, took down the huge, glued on mirrors and replaced the one over the sink with a Home Goods find, and installed a new towel bar and toilet paper holder.

We lived with it with these updates for quite some time while we shopped for, ordered, and waited on a new granite vanity top and sink to come in. Earlier this month, we finally picked it up! Right before that, I painted the awful faux marble laminate vanity base with Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. I was very skeptical about this product, but it was amazing. It's strange stuff - very thick and matte - but the coverage was incredible. I did have to give it four very thin coats to effectively wipe out the marbling, but it was worth it.

The small narrow shelves to the left of the vanity had shudders that were falling off (this house is FULL of shuddered doors!). I took the measurements to Home Depot and they cut me new pieces of wood, and I bought some basic trim pieces to finish them off. I added the same new hinges and knobs to these that I used on the vanity.

The final-ish task was taking off the old vanity top and sink and replacing it. My parents were in town last weekend, so Peter took off the top and disconnected the water in the hopes of finishing the job when they were around so they could help lift it onto the vanity. The pipes were so old that they weren't standard sizes, and our new sink didn't line up exactly with these old pipes. Nightmare! After hours, Peter basically gave up called our plumber on Monday morning. The plumber assured him he was super close to finishing and gave excellent instructions, and he was able to finish the job.

I can't believe how much I've written about this bathroom update, and I know most of it wasn't exactly riveting. But I am incredibly proud of this project. My mom calls it the "painted everything" bathroom, which is fairly accurate, but it's also a place where we - and particularly Peter - did some things that we both would have happily left to professionals just a few months ago. With the electrical work, carpentry, and plumbing tasks, I feel like we made huge strides in our confidence to dive in and figure things out in this crazy old house.

And now, of course, I'm not at all depressed about giving the baby a bath in this pretty little room :)

Down to the Studs

Our house is looking really crazy these days. We're 2 1/2 weeks into the renovation, and it's basically on schedule so far (I am furiously knocking on wood now that I've typed that!). 

The kitchen and dining room had the carpeting and flooring removed, and were taken down the studs so that the ceilings could reveal what was causing our upstairs to sag. It turns out that there wasn't a load bearing wall for that entire half of the house, which was, of course, causing the drop. Three big beams were added to the ceiling, and now the floor on the second level is flatter and the house is a lot more secure. It was a sad discovery, though. We were kind of hoping that the cause was just old age and there wouldn't be anything we could do about it :)

The electrician has come to set up all the new outlets and lights in the kitchen, a gas line was added for a new stove (I am so excited to go back to gas! Cooking with electric is kind of terrible), the stack pipe, which used to be in the middle of our kitchen counter (!), was moved further back into the wall, and the wall between the dining room and kitchen was opened up. So much progress! By early next week, we should have the new plaster up on the walls and ceiling.

Here are some things keeping Peter up at night:

• Installing a new engineered hardwood floor throughout the first floor with me, his soon-to-be 33 weeks pregnant wife 
• Installing the new sink, super heavy counter top, and faucet to the bathroom upstairs 
• Keeping my somewhat grandiose time frame of when everything could/should be done in check

I would be kept awake by these things, too, if only I wasn't so tired each night when my head hit the pillow. Last night I did have a dream about taking down paneling and peeling wallpaper, though, so the renovation is successfully haunting me in my sleep. 

The Chaos Before the Storm

Sooooooo. There are a few things that have happened in the house since moving in that I've been too embarrassed to tell you about. This is because they were my fault, and they made our already crazy house even more crazy. But now that we are on the cusp of the rest of our renovation (which will address these insane things!), I feel like I can come clean.

The top two are in our dining room, and they are things I did within a week of moving in last August. I innocently pulled a piece of wallpaper off the wall to see how stuck on it was, and was horrified to realize that the previous owners had put the wallpaper on over paneling. What the what? I told Peter we need to take down the paneling so we could paint the walls, which involved taking down the (very tacky, very plastic) crown molding and trim. However, underneath that sheet of paneling was a horror show of crumbling plaster that can't be salvaged. We've been living with that piece of paneling propped against the wall for almost seven months. Gah! But the entire room is going to get a coat of new plaster, along with the ceiling. And the carpet is getting ripped up, too.

On the hutch, I took off the horrible shudders and then sprayed it like crazy with paint stripper. Over and over and over, and it still looks all chippy and crazy. I know that I could be more patient and get it clean enough to re-stain, but I'm totally resigned to painting it at this point.

The last photo captures a taste of the worst thing I've done to the house. Before we moved in, I peeled back a piece of wallpaper in the kitchen to see how stuck on that one was, and that also revealed paneling underneath. One weekend in October, Peter was away for a bachelor party, and in what my Mom thinks was a fit of hormonal insanity, I pulled off all the paneling, which revealed no fewer than six (6!!!) different wall papers throughout the room. My brilliant solution to this horrendous obstacle was to buy the biggest tub of joint compound I could find and literally cover every single square inch of the kitchen before Peter came home. It is a disaster. (To Peter's tremendous credit, he has admirably pretended that this is not a completely awful thing.)

I am really writing a novel here! Easing toward the wrap-up, the kitchen is being remodeled, starting tomorrow (Monday!!!). We got back from a glorious week in San Diego last night around midnight, and have spent all day paper writing (for me, boo), and then moving all our stuff out of our kitchen and dining room. Lots of stuff on the porch, a new-to-us fridge from Craigslist in the entryway, and a make-shift kitchen set up in the living room. By the way, I have a fun California post coming up this week, too...

Anyways! I didn't snap a picture of this, but we're also having our stairs opened up a bit so that we won't hit our heads on the ceiling when walking on the fourth step multiple times a day.  I am 30 weeks pregnant today, and this all feels a little bit insane, but I really hope our instincts are right that we'll be very, very happy to have this all done pre-baby.

Just keep cooking, baby. Please don't even think about coming early!