Before we get into the latest and greatest, I couldn't help but share our house remodel in Missouri...
We bought this house when I was 9 months pregnant with our 2nd child. Not something I would EVER recommend but we didn't really have a choice in the timing. David said he knew it was the one when he saw the look on my face. It was the staircase that caught my attention first and it was love at first site. Not for the way it was, but for the way it could be. We would spend the next 2 1/2 years putting all of my design thoughts into reality.
HARPERS ROOM
My first task, our daughter Harper's room. This was the first move she would have remembered so we wanted to make her transition as smooth as possible and a fancy new room was first on the list. The before was horrible, something out of the early nineties when burgundy, gold and hunter green were popular.
Baby Jack was a great sleeper, the kind you had to wake to feed or he would sleep through the day. Rather that sleeping when he slept and all that advice they tell you about resting when you can..... I chose to strip wallpaper and paint, because it was just that bad and I was excited to get started!
I knew I wanted something fun. Where else can you pull off hot pink stripes but in a little girls room. I had made the curtains for her previous room and pulled the colors from there. I went with Sherwin Williams Jocular Green for the bottom and Fussy pink/Marshmallow for the stripes. It was a great compromise for David, as he wasn't as excited for the pink as much as I was.
LIVING ROOM
After some time to recover from the first project we got to work on the living room. I have a lot of ideas but I love it when David can help execute them, team work! The exterior of the house is a cape cod style, so what better feeling than to go with some coastal touches. I love the look of board and batten, if I could I would put it everywhere!
We lived with the before (more chair railing and peach sponge paint, again with the nineties touches) for as long as we could, which was 3 months too long!
We removed all the baseboards and the chair rail and put up the board and batten up. Our initial thought was to keep the fireplace surround and just paint it white, but after everything was up the scale of it just didn't fit. So constructing a new mantle was project number 2. After that came painting the cabinets, a quite difficult task since Jack was crawling at this time. All of the trim work was done in Sherwin Williams Marshmallow, this blue paint unfortunately is the only color in the whole house I cant seem to remember, but it was from Home Depot.
THE MAN CAVE
David got full creative control over his man room and that meant one room I didn't have to paint! He did a great job. We were both happy to see the abundance of dental molding go away and had quite a generous drapery donation to the salvation army that month.
After painting and adding new lighting, again it was decided that the mantle just wouldn't do as is. He found a hand hewn piece of wood, cut and sanded it to fit and then finished it with Danish oil.
JACKS ROOM
We got lucky with this room!
The paint was neutral enough as it was, so all we had to do was move his stuff in!
MAIN BATH
What better time to start a new project than right before the holidays! This is the best motivator we have going for us, because if there is no deadline, then we are going to drag it out for FOREVER!!! The bathroom could have really used a total gut job but with a whole house to do it just wasn't in the budget.
Since paint is the cheapest way to change anything I started with that. The oak cabinets were sanded down and finished with Sherwin Williams Fawn Brindle and the walls were Watery. After changing out the mirror and the faucet I think it looked pretty great for minimal work!
DINING ROOM / KITCHEN
When we bought this house I was kind of excited to have a "formal" dining room. But after we got our furniture in there it was revealed how small it really was, and how stupid it was to have 2 tables on either side of the wall that divided the kitchen from the dining room. We had talked about it for a while but just couldn't pull the trigger. Until one Sunday morning while eating breakfast we had shimmied one last time past the high chair to get the other side of the room. After that David was ripping down walls in his pajamas and it was like a breath of fresh air, well, if you don't think about all the dust we live in for months!
We got really lucky that the previous homeowner picked out a tile floor that we liked. Not only was it pretty, but after about a month of living there I decided it was time to probably sweep the floor, don't judge me I had a newborn! I had no idea how much dirt it was hiding, yes I was a little disgusted at myself for not getting to it sooner but also ecstatic at its hiding power. The only tile we had ever had before had been white and that stuff is visibly dirty as soon as the floors dry after an intense mopping session, so we gladly matched it to our room expansion. After freshening up the place with paint (Sherwin Williams Accessible Beige) and new lighting throughout we were in love! I had thoughts of phase 2 (painting the cabinets and adding a backsplash) already churning in my brain but this was our biggest project to date and definitely needed a little break.
MASTER BEDROOM
This one started out as a not so lovely beach themed room complete with textured bottom walls, a sail boat border and smooth blue walls on top. I can be for certain that is it never ok to texturize only half of your walls...EVER!!!
We could go about this mess one of a two ways. The easiest would have been to just put up chair railing where the texture changed and live with it, but I didn't want to do that of course. I instead decided to skim coat the bottom with drywall mud and sand it smooth. Apparently I didn't give myself enough time in between this and the last project as it was in a state of disrepair for 10 months. I found it is just impossible to get anything done when your husband works crazy hours and you have small children running around, because you sure can use an electric sander during nap time, so hand sand it was! We enjoyed this room completed for maybe 2 months before we moved!
THE DECK
Remember when I said I didn't recommend house hunting/purchasing when you are nine months pregnant? Its just an overwhelming stressful time and your mind just isn't all there for obvious reasons. We knew that we had some issues with the deck once we got our inspection report back but just didn't realize the magnitude of it all. After a little over a year of living there I ventured out one spring afternoon to get a better look at what we were dealing with. David and I had built a deck before and with my design experience I wanted to kick myself for all the problems I didn't notice while the baby had taken over my brain, nothing about it would pass code, so we decided it would be in the best interest to completely redo it.
We found out pretty quickly how it was possible for the deck to be in the shape it was in, there were no deck building codes in our county, which was a bit shocking and explained a lot. All the county cared about was the easements. This was another one of those projects that took months to complete, but we sure enjoyed the top deck while the bottom was in progress. It was completed just one week before we listed it for sale.
David once said "this new deck ain't goin nowhere!" my response...yeah because it was built the way it was should have been in the first place!!!
This place will always hold a special place in our hearts, both for the sweat we put into and the memories we shared in it. But its time to move on to the next project....
