Flea Market Finds

I went to a flea market this past weekend and found a few fun items I could use to decorate our shelves along with a couple of frames.

I plan on painting the rocking chair, foo dogs and tea pot to match everything.  I still have to decide where to hang the frames....

The Mirror Wall

Although I'm not writing these posts in chronological order, one of the most major transformations in our house was the removal of the mirror wall.  When we bought the house, the living room contained a wall of full length, floor to ceiling mirrors.

We first tried to condition our offer on the old owners removing the mirrors, which they of course rejected.  We then had a contractor take a look at the mirrors and he thought it was possible for us to remove them ourselves.  We clearly had no idea what we were doing but thought to give it a shot anyway.

The day we closed, we took a crow bar and literally smashed it against the first mirror pane.  The thing didn't even shake, let alone crack.  It took several more whacks until we finally got it to splinter.  Although we tried taping the mirror to prevent it from breaking into a million pieces but we soon learned that the tape was more of a hinderance.

After a few hours, we had removed most of the mirror off of the walls.  The good news was that the dry wall behind it was fully intact as we found out that the mirror was secured to the wall with large wooden pillars which were screwed into the wall and tarred onto the mirror.  The bad news is that we now had large and small jagged pieces of broken glass and no way to discard it.  We called 1-800 Got Junk which had no problem hauling away a thousand pieces of broken glass.

We were left with a purple wall with long wooden pillars screwed into it.  It took us sometime to finish removing all of the pillars.  Mostly in part because some of the screws holding it down were stripped and hard to remove.  The other road block was that some genius tarred the mirror directly over the screws so we had to get through hardened tar to get to the screw.  I guess whoever put the mirrors up didn't think someone would want to take them down.  Of course while we were dealing with this, there were tiny shreds of broken glass that we constantly had to watch for.

When we finally removed all of the pillars and patched the holes, we had to sand and paint. With the wall re-painted and the mirrors removed, the wall looked like this:

It's not the greatest shot in the world, but you get the picture.  The paint color is Natural Wicker by Glidden.  The wall is now in need of some wall art.

Craigs List Find- Patio Set

With summer just around the corner and spring already here, I started thinking a lot about our patio and garden.  When we purchased the house last year, it was nearly the end of summer and with so much work to do on the inside of the house, we didn't spend too much time on the outside.  The only exception was pulling out the 6ft weeds that were growing in the garden and trying to clear out as many other weeds so it didn't look so much like a jungle.

Here is what the patio and garden looked like when we moved in.

You could barely see the gate and fence let alone make your way through all of the weeds to get to them.  After we cleared out all of the weeds, and planting two box cutter bushes, the garden and patio looked pretty much like this for the rest of the year:

Now with the weather warming up, I know we'll be looking to spend more time outside.  The first order of business was to try to find a new patio set.  The old owners left us a bistro table and chairs but it's too small for the space and ideally we'd like a table that would seat at least four.  After some initial browsing on-line at Target, Walmart and K-Mart, I turned to Craig's List.  After looking through the listings, I found an estate sale where I scored four metal patio chairs.  The owners were asking $10 per chair but I was able to get all 4 for $30.  About a week later, I found a table made of the same material that was being offered for free.  Score!  I just picked up the table and finished putting it together.  Here's what the patio looks like now:

Not too bad for $30.  I have plans to spray paint all of the pieces black so it looks cohesive.  Then I have to tackle the garden. :)

New Floor Registers

One of the items on my endless list of home improvement repairs was to purchase new floor vent covers (I later learned that they are called "floor registers").  Of course nothing in our house is standard so it wasn't as simple as picking up a few new ones from Home Depot or Lowes. 

The floor registers which were originally in our home were old and rusted and just plain gross. 

After some shopping around on-line I found a site which carried floor registers which would fit our home and they finally arrived.  Luckily they all fit and I wasted no time throwing away our old ones.  Here are what the new registers look like

And a side by side comparison of the old versus new

I think most would agree, the new ones are much better.  One more thing crossed off the list!

Changing the Guest Bathroom Faucet

Today I reached a personal victory in my journey of home-renovation/diy- I changed a bathroom faucet.  Our house was built in the 80s and while all of the faucets are perfectly functional, the aren't as attractive.  As an example, here's a photo of our guest bath faucet.

I figured while I have a little bit of time, I would try changing it.  I had never successfully changed a faucet before- I had tried once before on our powder room bath and I was never able to remove the old faucet, let alone change it.  This time around, I read a lot of directions on-line before getting started.

After running into a couple of roadblocks- success! The old faucet lifted right out.

The vanity underneath the faucet wasn't too pretty but after cleaning it with some goo gone, most of the junk came off.  The next step was to install the new faucet.

I took a quick trip to home depot where I picked up a new faucet and supply lines.  We already had plumber's putty at home (no doubt from my powder-room faucet experiment).  When I got back home, I spread everything out and read the directions.  They were pretty easy to follow.  I decided not to install a new drain since the old one was still in good shape but saved it in case we ever decide to do this in the future.  After cleaning up excess plumber's putty and tightening the mounting nuts and supply lines, I held my breath as I turned the water back on and turned on the faucet.

Yay!

Dreaming of Bathrooms

So far we've gotten our house to the point that we're comfortable enough living in it but there are soooooo many projects left to do. One of the projects that tops that list has to be our bathrooms. Right now, the bathrooms are a lot of beige- beige tile, beige toilet, beige shower. You name it, pretty much everything is beige. Not that beige is bad but they're screaming to be updated.

The powder room is the smallest of the rooms and I don't think it will be too tough to update because of its size. Here some pics of what it currently looks like



Right now we can't even have guests use it since I tried (unsuccessfully) removing the faucet and ripped off the towel bar and toilet paper holders. Even though it's functioning, it's just too embarrassing to have guests see it.

The other bathroom that desperately needs an update is the master bath. It has a lot of the same things as the powder room- old tile, vanity, light fixture- pretty much everything.


It's also tiiinnnnyyy and the shower stall is soo small it will make anyone claustrophobic.




Right now I'm researching different types of materials and trying to keep to a strict budget. More to come later :)

Finally Done

At last, our kitchen is finally done. Before showing the final product, I'll go over the last few projects that pulled everything together.

After painting the cabinets and putting in the counters, we were able to finish installing our new appliances came in. Not the most thrilling thing but I was so happy to see the rusted hood go away. We then add a backsplash. I'd like to say we did this ourselves but at this point, we were pretty exhausted and it seemed like such a better idea to hire someone to install the backsplash and come home to the finished product. In choosing the type of backsplash, I knew I wanted to go with white subway tiles but picking out the grout color was a different story. After debating between gray and white, I finally decided on gray and picked up a bucket of Delorean Gray at Home Depot. But with buying grout and subway tile came buying spacers- something that I did not do enough research on. Faced with so many options, I didn't know which size to buy. I ended up buying 1/8 inch spacers but after seeing the final product, wish I had gone with a slightly smaller size since the grout is darker. I can't say I totally regret it though as I'm pretty pleased with how everything came out.

After everything was installed, DH surprised me by taking a day off and painting the kitchen while I was at work. Lastly, and more recently, we installed new lighting fixtures. Before we had an ugly fluorescent light and a huge oversized fan. I was not sorry to see those things go and see a pretty chandelier and ceiling light take their place.



Here are some photos of what the kitchen now looks like:





Here are a list of our resources:

Kitchen Cabinet Paint: Cabinet Coat Cabinet and Trim Enamel White
Wall Paint: Sherwin Williams Sensible Hue
Hardware: Ebay
Lighting Fixtures: Lowes
Subway tile & related materials: Home Depot
Oven, Dishwasher & Hood: Lowes
Faucet: Overstock