It Failed :)

Just kidding - it didn't really, but I decided to merge my blogs into one and I decided to merge this one into the older one. . .

So, I will no longer be posting on this blog but will be at http://backtothelandmama.blogspot.com/ (Back to the Land Mama), so hope to see you there!

Living Room with Fireplace Converted to Dining Room

So, I took a really long posting break, and I have a lot to catch up on. But I figured I would start out with something easy.

The dining room has been done (well, mostly done) for a really long time, but I haven't posted about it. When we bought the house it was originally the living room, with what was the formal living and dining on the other side of the house and the kitchen in the middle.  But the layout really didn't work well - it would have been awkward to put sofas in there because the room is so narrow and there was definitely no good place to put the tv for maximum viewing enjoyment. So the formal living and dining became the family room and office/playroom and the living room became the dining room.

It was actually a very simple change - all it involved was changing out the existing ceiling fan with a chandelier, which we got done a few weeks before Christmas.

I looked all over the web for inspiration pictures of dining rooms with fireplaces, but I eventually just did what I did and didn't worry that I will probably never use the fireplace. So here are some before pics - these were before we moved in and so contain the previous owners things:

And here's what it looks like now (well, with a few minimalist Christmas decorations in the mix. . .)

Bam! Instant dining room! I love that the only major thing I had to do was have an electrician install a chandelier. Here's a few more pics:

My husband was doing yard work the day I put up Christmas decorations and so I snagged some branches from the throwaway pile. I was proud of my wintery, Better-Homes-and-Gardeny display.

Because I hate it when I see something in a picture and I have no idea where it came from, I will not put my few readers through this same torture. Here's a quick breakdown:

Chandelier - Home Depot
Rug - Joss and Main
Chair Covers - World Market (and by the way, you may have noticed they don't fit perfectly, which is because they are regular old wooden back chairs but I wanted to break up all the wood in there with some color)
Mirror and white pitcher on fireplace - Homegoods (as did the awesome table and lamp that you totally can not see in any pictures - I'll have to post some some day)
Curtains and candle stands on fireplace - IKEA
Cat - from Hell (she can actually be very sweet, and she is kind of cute, but she does belong to the Dark Side)

Stay tuned! I am *still* working on the kitchen (winter/spring planting is going to put me behind on that one) and I did a quick redo of the upstairs bathroom, so I will post that soon!

Kitchen Progress: The Rest Can Wait Until After Christmas!

We are FINALLY at a good stopping point in the kitchen redo. And between the appliance deliveries (and redeliveries, and pickups and re-redeliveries - oh yes, it has been ridiculous), the electrician, the cabinet guy, and the drywall guy, I am ready to have my house back.

So the only things left after Christmas will be painting all the cabinets and bases, painting the walls, figuring out something to hang under that edge of soffit to the left of the window, and making a decision about the backsplash. Not too bad.

So here's where we are at so far:

I am not sure if this whole process has been a test of my ability (or should I say inability) to not be such a perfectionist. I usually like to do things myself because of that - if it gets messed up, it's my fault and I can accept that (or I can go back and fix it). But I do recognize that I have limits - I am no electrician, for example - so we hired an electrician. Did the electrician measure and make everything correct by the ruler? Yes. Does it look good to my critical eye? Not exactly. I'm trying to get over the fact that, in my opinion, two of the can lights were placed WAY to close to the air vent, and the holes were already cut and lights installed before I saw this and I was not about to have them make yet ANOTHER hole in my ceiling that would take the drywall guy yet another 23,984 days to fix and would leave behind a noticeable patch (if only to me, but noticeable nonetheless). I also feel that the pendant lights over the bar are too close together, but again, it just doesn't look horrible enough for me to pick a fight about it - it's just not exactly right. So I will try to learn to let go of it. . .

The ceiling pattern is also not exactly right - it is noticeable. Maybe if it really bothers me, I can go back and touch it up - because now I know how. Before this whole process, I had no idea how to do drywall or make ceiling texture and so mine would have probably looked like crap. But now I know how to do it from watching the guy do it and talking to him about it (for the, like, week that he was here). So that's definitely a benefit.

We've come along way, and the finish line is in sight!!

Kitchen Progress: Bye Bye Soffit!

I guess I have been watching too much Mad Men on Netflix, and I got bored waiting on the phone dealing with stupid Lowes (see below), therefore you are treated to the beautiful masterpiece above. But seriously, the soffit is gone!  Here's the update on the kitchen reno:

We originally got a quote from a contractor to do a lot of the stuff in the list below, and when I got back the quote, I think I choked or cried or a combination of the two - it was more than the entire budget for the whole kitchen including appliances! Needless to say we nixed that idea, and decided to be our own general contractor for the things we couldn't do ourselves. Big money saver!!

These were the things left to do:

1) New cabinet doors installed (These will be installed tomorrow! I am super excited, and yet I am not super excited because I will still have to take them down again and paint them. Yea for saving money. . .)

2) New stainless steel appliances (These were installed last week and of course the oven was broken and started filling the house with smoke - a new one has been on order for a week and I will finally get it Thursday (I hope). Don't get me started, Lowes. . .)

3) Electrical (pendant lights above bar, recessed lighting to replace fluorescent light in kitchen, second switch for kitchen lighting, and random putting up chandelier in dining room to replace ceiling fan) - scheduled for Friday morning!

4) Soffit removal and repair of ceiling - stage 1 DONE! (Pics are below if you just can not contain your excitement.) I am really glad we found someone to do this - we had no problem destroying the soffit, but doing our first major drywall patch on a ceiling with a crazy texture was a little over our heads (ha ha, no pun intended). So we kind of chickened out a bit on this one, but I can live with that.

5) Painting of cabinets and walls

6) Backsplash - unsure what we are going to do about this at this point

7) Some sort of shelving on other side of window below lonely piece of soffit. I am considering a wine glass rack or shelving for cookbooks or something.

This past Sunday we decided we needed to get the soffit down because we weren't going to have the opportunity this week before the electrician was to come on Friday. So first step, we poked some holes and took a look around to make sure there wasn't anything in there that would thwart our grand plans:

We were good to go! So husband goes to store to buy drywall stuff. As it turns out, there is more to drywall repair than attach it to studs, tape and paste around edges, done! It is an art.

So I am frantically reading tutorials online and calling him with updates on what tools we need, the different kinds of joint compound, etc, and realizing this may not be the best idea. Well, as luck would have it, as husband was questioning an employee about drywall tape, a dude came up and said "hey, I'm a drywall guy. Call me if you are interested." My husband appreciated the hustle in Home Depot and decided to give him a shot - he was reasonably priced and very nice, so that's what we did! He will be back to finish the other mud coats and texture/ paint tomorrow but here's a couple pics of what went down (again, no pun intended. . .)

Here's right after the soffit came down and we had a nice hole in the ceiling.












And before I show the after, here's a picture of what it looked like at the very beginning:

And after. . .

Another before:

And another after:

It is amazing how much bigger and more open the kitchen is with that one simple thing!

It's starting to look more and more like my Microsoft Paint rendition, right? (if you squint your eyes. . .)

More to come very soon!!

There Are Two Sides to Every Story or How NOT to Paint a Cabinet Door

Sorry for such a long delay since the last post - this "little" project took me just a bit longer than anticipated. . .

So a few weeks ago I decided I would like to spruce up the ol' powder room. It looked boring, the wall color was dingy and discolored. . .no one wants to use a bathroom that looks dirty even when its clean.

Since all anyone wants to see these days are the before and after pics, I will oblige:

And here's a better picture of the old outdated oak vanity after a paint job and some added hardware:

I wish I had taken a better close up of the oak cabinet before, but I kind of didn't know I was going to paint it until much later. . .

It really all started with "I'd like to paint the bathroom gray". I had seen a picture on Joss and Main that had the exact color I had in mind -

(FYI - the actual color of the bathroom is exactly the one in the above picture but it is so hard to photograph correctly to bring out the yumminess of the color!)

Anyways, headed down to Lowes, got me some paint sample in Valspar "Opal Slate". (I'm telling you, it really is the same as the color in the Joss and Main pic!! I swear!!)

(P.S. This was actually not the paint I intended to get - I wanted the Olympic No-VOC paint mixed in a Valspar color - they are both brands sold at Lowes so I thought no biggie. The Lowes employee proceeds to tell me it is impossible. I say, how can it be impossible when I have had the Olympic paint mixed in colors from Behr (which is sold at Home Depot btw) and other places, you just pull it up on your computer thingy, right? We go back and forth, when she finally tells me that for some reason, the computer won't let her pull up Valspar colors to mix in Olympic paint because they are competitors. This is beside the fact that Behr, Sherwin-Williams, etc. are also competitors of Valspar and Olympic and yet they can be pulled up on the computer. Sounds like a load of crap to me. But she tells me that Valspar now makes a low-VOC paint called Valspar Ultra that also contains primer. Fine, whatever, I'll take it. As it turns out, I actually really liked this paint - consistency and coverage were very good and it didn't show brushstrokes hardly at all, and so it worked probably better than the Olympic paint would have anyways. So I guess it was worth the hassle.)

So I started painting. It took forever because the previous owners, instead of taking down the wallpaper in there, added crazy wall texture that can actually draw blood if you brush against it and painted over it. Texture = Takes FOREVER to Paint! I got one wall done and thought it was way too dark. My husband suggested to go bold and keep it. I was unsure, so I left it up there on the wall to consider.

The next logical step I take in a situation like this, when I am in the middle of a project and lose my vision and am unsure how to proceed - why, I start a new project, of course!

I'm thinking, maybe it would look good if I "updated" the vanity by painting it a nice espresso brown and add chrome hardware. Plus, it will give me an opportunity to try out the Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations stuff before I try it on my kitchen cabinets. (Let me tell you, it is a good thing I did this. . .)

So I buy the small version that ended up being more than plenty for the bathroom vanity - and for $30, it worked for me! Got the paint it comes with mixed in "Espresso".

So I take the doors and the drawer fronts off, and I read the instructions. It says that if you don't want to see the wood grain, use a wood filler, then proceed with instructions. I know I want a smooth finish so I say, ok, lets do this wood filler thing. I buy some at Lowes, I'm set. (So I think.) I proceed to coat my cabinet doors and drawer fronts in wood filler. It takes FOREVER. And it looks something like this - 

I get them all done, let them dry, and then spend more HOURS sanding them to as smooth a finish as I can manage, all the while becoming coated in dust (I was wearing a mask, not sure what good it did though). And I'm looking at this thinking, this just does not look right. So here's my womp, womp moment:

CABINET REFACING NO-NO #1:  Wood filler is not the same thing as wood grain filler. Wood filler is not an appropriate substance to use for filling wood grain.

Ok, so you may be thinking, well, yeah, duh they are not the same thing. But to be fair, it did not say anything about wood *grain* filler, only said to use wood filler, and Lowes didn't even have wood grain filler, so the thought didn't even cross my mind. It was only after some research online did I discover that wood grain filler is a brush on deal that would have been more appropriate to use, but too late for that, so moving on . . . just glad I figured it out before I spent probably 1000 hours doing that to the kitchen cabinets only to find I had destroyed them.

Although, at this stage in the game, I didn't know I had destroyed the front of my bathroom cabinet doors and drawer fronts. I realized this once I had painted everything.

(BTW the Rustoleum paint went on great - it really did have a nice finish!)

So I'm looking at the doors thinking the front looks like crap whereas the backside looks great - I should have never done anything to the doors to begin with because the grain is hardly noticeable!! So, I get the idea of making the backs of the cabinets the fronts. Easier said than done.

First I carefully measured and drilled pilot holes for the hinges on the other side of the doors. I had to then patch up the old hinge holes with, ha, wood filler (apparently this is a more appropriate use for the stuff), and then I had to repaint. I also had to drill hardware holes, since my vanity did not originally have any hardware. Then I applied the final glossy top coat and reassembled everything. It was here during the hours it took to do a job that should have taken 30 minutes, I realized another thing:

CABINET REFACING A-HA MOMENT #1: Label your doors and drawer fronts not only as to where they go but which side originally faced up. 

Didn't originally seem like I would have a problem with this, seeing as though there are only 2 doors and 3 drawer fronts, two of which are the same size, but oh does it matter and how! I spent hours installing, then uninstalling, then installing again those stupid drawer fronts every which way until I finally got them to where they weren't crooked. During this process I discovered the following:

CABINET REFACING A-HA MOMENT #2: Yelling $#&% or @*#& at your cabinets does not make them go on straighter or faster. Tough lesson.

So they are finally DONE!! I sit on the toilet and admire my work (the lid is closed, people! To loosely quote Marge Simpson, "when the lid is up, it's a potty. When the lid is down, it's a chair".  I regret spending the last few minutes trying to find the exact quote and a picture to go with it. *Shudder*.) Anyways, the vanity (sorry about the weird lighting in this pic):

At this point I was still unsure about the wall color because I was afraid of it being too dark in there. I found this inspiration picture, however, and thought it could work:

So I went for it! So after spending 2 days painting and touching up, it's done! All that is left is to add some artwork to the back wall above the toilet!

Decisiveness Has Never Been My Strong Suit. . .

So here I am, deliberating yet again about the kitchen.

I did however decide to start a brand new project in the midst of, like, 30 other "in progress" projects. I decided to start redoing the downstairs powder room. In so doing, I thought, wouldn't it be great to paint the old oak cabinetry a warm rich espresso color? And what a perfect opportunity to practice the Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations on something less expensive if I mess up smaller. I decided I didn't want wood grain to show through so I used some wood filler and sanded which was a serious ordeal (which I will post about when one of these days I decide to finish the project), but that's when it hit me.

The kitchen I have been planning on doing is really more of a compromise in working with what I've got and not really what I want. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. . .but when SO much work and precious time is spent on it, I thought, wouldn't it be worth it to spend a little more and go for something more like what I love?

So I see the following kitchen in a magazine today:

I adore this.

It is warm and homey, yet classy, sleek and modern. Love.

I want this to be my inspiration kitchen, but a lot of questions have to be answered:

1) Painting Two-Tone Cabinets: I can no problem physically paint the cabbies white on top and grey on bottom, but I think part of the reason it works is because the cabinet doors are of modern styling with the clean Shaker lines. Remember, our cabinets (on the top only, for some reason) have an arch like this:

So I am very unsure if the cabinets would just end up looking more like a crappy DIY project than a snazzy modern kitchen. Below is a realization of my fear:

I really do not want my "after" to look like someone else's "before" (I really hope the above picture was a "before". . .)

So do I go back to my original idea of hiring the cabinet maker to make the Shaker style doors or will it really matter? Is it worth the something like $1200 for new cabinet fronts? (that come unfinished that I still have to paint, mind you)

2) The countertops. So in the inspiration pic, they are a light-colored poured concrete. I don't necessarily want that but our countertops are the Uba Tuba black granite that are very pretty yet go with nothing I like (hence why I was straying from my design loves in the first place - to work around the granite). The lighter countertops do look great with the other colors in that room, but would black work? I whipped out my trusty Microsoft Paint for a mock up: (I think it may work. . .)

3) The Bane of My Kitchen Existence - the floors. This is my greatest conundrum in the whole kitchen remodel thing. So all the pictures I like have wood flooring in them. Problem: the entire house, save the kicthen/ laundry room complex is a light-colored cheap laminate. The kitchen floor is a gray tile, which makes the kitchen a very dark, cold place whereas the rest of the house is very warm and bright. So what the heck do I do with it? I can't find matching laminate (nor do I really think laminate in the kitchen is a good idea) and I especially don't want to tear out ceramic tile to lay down more crappy laminate. I don't want to rip out the whole first floor and replace with something new and cohesive (well, yes I do want to do that but that is not in my budget). I have looked into vinyl wood planks a bit but the color will be different from the laminate, and the tiles may not stick right because the tile floor isn't even. Or I could rip out the old tile, and put a warmer colored tile in. This is looking like the most reasonable option, but a) I didn't want to have to rip out tile (mess and expense) and I really like the wood look. What's a picky girl to do?

4) Soffits - I originally was going to DIY remove the one above the peninsula myself but looking at this maybe I want to get that one and the one above the sink removed to put in cool lights above the sink, but then same problem I discussed before - suppose there's something in the soffit above the sink (I hear dollar signs adding up. . .)

5) Backsplash - I was just going to be lazy and try to cover it up with something, but I should probably just have it taken down and do it the right way. (More dollar sign sounds. . .)

Sigh. I don't know. But thanks for listening. :) Let me know if you have any ideas!

Insert Tongue Into Groove (Part Two)

I could subtitle this post so many things. . .

   "Why Spackle is Your Friend," or

   "Installing Molding Sucks," or even

   "#&@^%#^%$@#!!!!!!!!"

All I can say is that I am glad I am done with this part. Cutting and installing the molding was a complete pain in the butt. Of course many of the problems I had could have been solved by using power tools instead of a plastic miter box, but again, surprisingly I did not lose any blood, so I guess it worked ok.

Because of my complete lack of mitering skillz I ended up with horrendous corners that sported large gaps that didn't even come close to lining up.

(P.S. Yes that is a fossilized cornflake - I unearthed it when I took off the previous baseboard and shoe molding.)

(P.P.S We don't eat cornflakes, so I don't even want to know how old that is.)

I somehow forgot to take pictures of the worst gaps and cracks between the boards on the peninsula, but you get the idea.

So this is where the "spackle is my friend" optional title comes into play. Like a sculptor, I carefully filled the cracks with spackle using a screwdriver and my finger (rather than the suggested putty knife) and voila!

Yes that is the same area! Spackle is my friend, folks. I even got it to work where it really shouldn't have. Exhibit A:

Here is laziness at it's finest. I had already spent an inordinate amount of time on the other two areas where the bead board meets the wall - trying to cut a sliver of the existing baseboard out with my stupid humongous hand saw (again, I am impressed there was no bloodshed) only to be forced to pry off the whole thing, which of course won't go back on after cutting it, and the baseboard doesn't slide in there as perfectly as I expected so the gap is then excavated with screwdrivers, utility knives, you get the picture. Wayyyy more effort for minimal effect. So I get to the last one with the board that is a leftover scrap that I mitered the wrong direction for its original spot, and I just said ^%#$ it. I will spackle it.

And it worked - just don't take a magnifying glass to it or anything.

Spackle saved me one last time by filling in the gaps between the bead board and the cabinet (due to my faulty cutting . . . again. In my defense, this was where I had to rip the boards down the center of the plank with just a hand saw, so it turned out good considering.) Anyways, here's the before/during spackle:

and the after spackle

The finishing touch involved caulking a few of the seams and then I was DONE!!

So let's take a look back to our kitchen before anything was done. . .

And what the kitchen looks like now. . .

It's starting to look like my Microsoft Paint rendition, don't you think? My South Park-esque kitchen drawing is coming to life WAH HA HA!!!!!

So next on the list is my cabinet transformation!!! (aka painting the cabinets white and adding hardware) Stay tuned!!