Monday, December 10, 2012

Bring Christmas Outside!

Not only do I love Christmas lights, I also love to see a festive house during daylight. Plus, when one has a white house after a blizzard it can tend to blend in with it's surroundings. Trying to avoid a bunch of tacky plastic yard decorations I decided to use some good old fashioned wreaths. My inspiration...

 
 
So I ran to Menards and bought the cheapest/expensive looking wreaths. $10 bucks a piece.
 

And then some $1 bows.


Just wire those bows onto the wreaths and whollah!

 
We have wood window frames so I just put a nail in the middle of each one. SUPER easy! I've been waiting for a good snow storm to show them off and what do you know. We have well over a foot!
 

Here's some more sun!
 

Over to the garage. We have plant hooks and I have been having a hard time the past two years figuring out what to put on those darn things. Menards had exactly what I wanted! Stockings!!


I love them!


I'm going to stay in for the rest of the day now. Brrrr!





Sunday, November 25, 2012

Master Bedroom

There really isn't many rooms in my house that I would consider finished. Something always seems to bother me that I need to have fixed or updated before I want to show it off. I have finally finished our master bedroom though. I don't have much for before pictures besides what it looked like when we bought it.


Before we even moved in we replaced the carpet with laminate wood floors and painted.



Our full length mirror addition.


Then I did my picture frame project.


I just wasn't feeling it was right after I completed this project. After some thinking I decided the bed needed to be moved under the window. However, the window is not as wide as the bed. To Pinterest I went and saw this amazing illustration.


I figured I could just make my window look big enough. So I extended the rods out and put them up a bit higher, then bought some $10 cream curtain panels from Target!



Needed some charecter on the sides of the window so I used some metal plant hooks from Menards and some lanterns I found at Pier One.


Here's where our dressers are now.


It seems so much more cozy and comfortable now.


Where are the oval frames you ask? I found an even better spot for them on the wall in our stairway.


So happy that our bedroom is now officially complete. When we have a million other projects going on in the house I can just go hide and there and forget about all of it.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Dog Bath Issue

Since we became dog owners we have always had a hose type shower. It may not be the prettiest thing in the world but it make giving the dogs a bath a breeze and cleaning the shower is not so bad either. You can see it here.


So when we put in the new shower and new bath fixtures we just couldn't bring outselves to put that ugly thing in when it can look at fancy like it is now.


A few days after we put the new stuff in the dogs needed their bath. What a nightmare! I don't know how people do it. A cup, seriously, you rinse them with a cup of water! Sorry friends but this does not work for me. And, I don't see a special dog bath being installed any time in the near future.


Anytime I feel like I need to invent something new, I go to the internet and discover that someone already invented it so to Google I went. Instantly I found my solution.

 
Yay fot the Pet Shower Sprayer! It easily pops on and off when needed so no one even has to know that you have a top of the line dog bath. It's even more convenient than that ugly thing we had before because there's a control button on the sprayer to turn and off and off when needed without having to mess with the shower faucet. Life changer for $22!

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Bathroom Update: Tub & Shower

I'm so excited to share our most recent update to our bathroom. Yes, this remodel is going to happen in steps but my goal is to have it all done by Christmas. Sounds like a reasonable expectation to me. If you remember from my earlier post 10 Thing I Hate About My Bathroom I had some bad things to say about our tub and shower. Everything from the color, to the shower mechanics, to the fact it leaked into our laundry room every time we took a shower made this one of my least favorite parts of the room.


Notice that their also wasn't much for storage space. Yeah, I know there's only the two of us, but some of us need alot of products in the shower, don't judge. If you look closely you can see that we needed a plug to take a bath. For some reason the plug in the tub never quite worked right from the time we moved in.

The most important thing to me was to be certain that whichever new tub we put in would be deep enough. That's all! We went back and forth between getting a regular store bought shower surround or doing tile. Finally we spotted a really nice looking shower and tub combo at Menards for half the price as one we had our eye on at Home Depot. Less work and less money... We'll take it!


Ahhhh, I could look at this all day. You wouldn't believe what goes into putting in a new tub and shower. Because the tub is wider and it was deeper all of the plumbing had to be adjusted. On top of that we had to redo the sheetrock all the way around the shower to build it back in. I didn't even think of that.


I am so grateful for my dad and Ryan for working there butts off this weekend to get this in. I did the priming, painting, and cleaning after the fact so don't give me much credit.


We've still got a long way to go in the bathroom but this was a huge part of it. What's next on the list? We're waiting for our new vanity to be delivered. Another built-in fiasco!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Patio Buffet + Storage!

I don't know about you, but I really struggle when it comes to entertaining out on our deck. I feel like all I'm doing is going in and out, in and out, grabbing this and grabbing that. Then when we're not outside grilling, our grill tools are taking up so much room in my drawers I can hardly close them sometimes. Then one day I came across the Organizing Made Fun blog where she turned a dresser into a patio buffet.


And wouldn't you know it, I just happened to have a dresser that I wasn't using that fits perfectly on my deck! So I moved it downstairs to my workshop (our unfinished sunroom) and got to work.


This was a dresser I got for free that I painted a pinkish purple a few years ago to match a quilt in our guestroom. I wanted to paint it black to match my newly painted shutters and I had plenty of paint leftover.


Luckily the hardware I bought from the previous redo looks perfect with the new paint job. Next I wanted to get a decal for our last name just like she did in her blog. I found ours on Etsy.com (I would tell you the shop but I wasn't really impressed with them, I had to cut some pieces off when I opened the package.)

 
 
Now that the decal was on I used a spray polyurethane to seal everything.The one I found was meant to be used on outdoor items to protect it from the sun and rain.
 


Next I wanted to add some corkboard drawer liners in the three drawers. This will keep everything from sliding around when the drawers are opened (they are kind of old in sticky) and when we move it around.


Lastly, we added wheels on the bottom on the legs and handles on the sides so it'll be easy to move from one side of the deck to another. Plus, also easier to wheel into the garage before winter.

 
 
The first most exciting part of this whole thing is we now have a place to set all of our food to serve when we grill. There just isn't enough room on our patio table for that and eating. 
 
 
 
The second, and most important is storage!
 

From grilling tools to can koozies, and paper plates to bottle openers this unit will take care of all of our entertaining needs. I'm really excited to keep plastic ware and paper plates in here too! I'm still working on finding plastic bins to put those in just to make doubly sure they stay dry after a good rain.

I hope I've inspired you to take your organizing outside too! Totally worth it.



Thursday, August 30, 2012

My Bathroom Vision

After spending two years and hundreds of hours on Pinterest I have finally compiled all of my inspiration for the bathroom remodel. If you read my post 10 Things I Hate About My Bathroom you would have some background for where these ideas are coming from.

The floor.


This beautiful floor came from for the love of a house blog. I love the classic look of the 2 inch hexagon tile and the gray. Oh the gray. Now if I can just find similar tile closer to my budget.

Lighting.


We have a ceiling light above our sink which is not very common for bathrooms. I found this one at Lowes. Not sure if it will be the best because it only has one bulb and I already think its too dark in there, but if I can find something similar but bigger it would be perfect!

Vanity Top.


Ok, I already bought my vanity top last Black Friday so its sitting down in my basement. This is pretty similar to that one, found on A Country Farmhouse, but maybe alittle darker. Just wanted to give you an idea of what we're working with.

Faucet.

I'm dying for a new faucet so I have to put this on here. A leaky faucet can drive a sane person to the nut house. This one is from Lowes, has a decent price with pretty good reviews.

Backsplash.



As much as I like tile I wanted to make sure to add some beadboard into this project. Our vanity built in and I'd like to have the back backsplash be an entire wall of beadboard. This is a pretty good example I found from House of Turquoise.

Vanity.


I'm planning on refinishing our existing vanity. I love the color of this vanity from DecorPad, so I just need to figure out how to get this look without having to put in too much work. Thinking gel stain...

Shower.


At first I was just going to get the same ol' fiberglass shower surround but I've decided that we need tile. If I can find a tile close to this shower from Houzz or even a white tile I will be happy. If we're doing a remodel we should atleast put in that extra effort.

There are a ton of other details that are going to need to go into this but you get the jist. Now I have to consult with Ryan to make sure we're still on the same page and I can really start shopping around. This has drug on long enough so it's on the calendar to rip that shower and tub out come October!

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

My Lucky Stars

One of the finishing touches that has been driving me up the wall is my dining room wall. Ever since we did the kitchen/dining redo it has been blank and dying for some attention. I had a ton of ideas up my sleeve but everything I came up with Ryan hated. I don't depend on him for decorating, however, if he hates something I won't do it. So I pushed aside my ideas for picture frames and white plates and decided on tin stars. And guess what. Ryan didn't hate it! I was inspired by these stars on The Yellow Cape Cod post of 31 days of building character

 
My only problem was now finding the stars. After some research I came to the conclusion that my budget would be around $60 to get three stars on the wall. Ugh. Lucky for me I came acrossed a great deal on Amazon.com for a set of three for just over $30! The only thing was that they weren't black. Oh well, I've got a can of black spray paint right down stairs! I ordered them and they were here in 4 days. I opened the package and got to work.
 

I laid the stars down on the box they came in...


Spray paint is like magic. While I waited for the stars to dry I went inside to figure out exactly how to hang them. Before I painted them I traced the stars on some extra cardboard and cut out the pieces. Put some tape on the back and started rearranging the stars all over the wall. I finally decided on this.


So I pounded some nails in at the top of each star and headed back outside to get my stars.


Much nicer than the cardboard huh?


I can't believe what a huge difference this made and the project only took 30 minutes!


Hanging a star on your house symbolizes pride in ownership. I think that fits our home better than anything. I'm so happy Ryan challenged me to think a bit more outside of the box.