Saturday, August 28, 2010

A chair for 2

This chair in our bedroom is usually covered in towels or bedding that is folded and waiting to be put away. When it was finally cleared off these 2 jumped up and spent some time looking out the window and hanging out. Later Zeke snuck back into our room and took a nap in his new favorite chair. They are cute, those doggies!


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Friday, August 27, 2010

Garden pretties

There isn't much in bloom in our garden besides the lavender and a lone flower on the african daisy plant but my camera and I still found some beauty.

The lone daisy next to the lavender. Purple is not a favorite color of mine but I love the look of this photo.

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The sun was low in the sky and cast pretty rays across the garden.

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Elephant bush after being watered.

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There's a bit of a caterpillar infestation on my sweet broom. I only use earth friendly 'pesticides' and so far nothing is working. They are slowly but surely eating the entire plant.

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See all those munched leaves?

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They are kind of cool looking though.

Monday, August 23, 2010

This past weekend Josh and I decided to test our patience and finally install the crown molding that has been sitting in our garage since March. I got it one day when I went to Home Depot with my boss and could take advantage of her truck. Those contractor packs are an amazing deal and I just couldn't resist!

We've heard how hard it is to install so we were prepared to not be talking to each other by the time we were done but it actually went fairly smoothly and there were no arguments. That said, we don't want to install any more any time soon - it was pretty tricky!

We put it in the guest room and craft room (and then had just enough left over to put some in our closet of a laundry room - yay!) and I'll post entire room pics eventually but for now I just have to say that I am so thankful for caulk and paint.

Without it this:

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could never look like this:

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So far I've only caulked and painted the guest room so I still have some work to do.

There were 3 injuries on this project:
1. I dropped a pointed piece of molding onto my baby toe - it now has a gash, and is swollen and bruised
2. I stepped off the chair I was using as a ladder and rammed my thigh onto the top of back support (or whatever its called) - I have a huge bruise and a hard lump
3. While pulling the painter's tape off the wall I forgot the ceiling fan was on and my hand went into the spinning blades - so 2 of my fingers have a few little slices in them

Guess who the clumsy one is?? :-)

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Guest Room: Time crunch!

So my brother is coming to visit in a little over 3 weeks and as of a few days ago the guest bedroom was filled with boxes and other miscellaneous junk. Not exactly a place someone would want to stay for 10 days. Are you noticing a trend? Remember the 'before' pictures of the loft with all the piles of stuff? Well guess where a lot of that stuff landed up? Apparently I am one of those people who just moves things from place to place instead of finding a permanent place for those things.

Our house has 3 bedrooms. Our master bedroom is a decent size and the other 2 are on the small side - 10 ft x 10 ft to be exact. One of the rooms will be a guest room and since we don't have any human kids the third room will be a craft / sewing room - yay! The craft room is also a hot mess right now but that will be another post for another day.

So the guest room. It was one of the only rooms that the previous owners painted and they selected a blink-inducing shade of green (that didn't really come out in the photo). The lovely green walls were also very dirty and the flat paint made it impossible to wash the marks off. Then there was the monstrously huge ceiling fan and the blinds that fell out of the brackets every time we tried to raise or lower them. Oh and the pillow case tacked over the small window.

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I wish I'd taken a better 'before' picture but this is the best one I could find. I should have stepped back and maybe waited until daylight - apparently I wasn't thinking.

We had leftover paint from the upstairs hallway and loft so we just used that. Yay for free paint! I don't remember exactly when we started painting this room but I know it was a looooong time ago. And because it was a low priority room we didn't finish painting until about a week ago. This past weekend we had a fun time taking all the junk out of the room and moving it to the future craft room (because that's what we do around here, remember?). I really don't want to spend much money on this room so I looked around and found things that we could use in the room. Luckily I have a (bad) habit of buying things that we don't really need if I think I can use them at some point in the future and the item is a good deal.

This is after bringing everything into the room:

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That box sitting by the pillows is a ceiling fan. I'm embarrassed to admit that we bought it over a year ago. And then it sat in a box until Sunday. Procrastination anyone?

I got the bedding and mirror on clearance at Home Goods last year, the cute little chair came from a thrift store, the side table came from Marshall's, the lamp was on clearance at Target, and the bed used to be in our master bedroom before we got a new mattress and made a snazzy headboard out of a door. The queen sized bed is probably a bit big for this small room but we have to work with what we have! I can't believe I had all that stuff just lying around. I think I might be a hoarder.

Obviously its not done and I am planning on doing a few little projects in here to make the room look more put together and less like a bunch of random crap got thrown into the room last minute.

Hopefully I will get things done more quickly than the painting and ceiling fan hanging took. 3 weeks and 2 days until our visitor arrives!

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

The Deck: Its done!

After so much work it is SO wonderful to finally be about to sit outside and relax in our outdoor space.

I honestly never thought our rustic mess of a deck could ever look this good ... and I'm so glad I was wrong.

Its hard to believe we started with this:

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And now have this:

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Much better, huh?

I was lucky to find the furniture for a steal at a summer preview sale back in March. The fabric color didn't exactly scream 'summer' but I really liked the style (and color) of the metal frame so I went for it. A couple of months later I was looking through the Restoration Hardware (love that store!) outdoor living catalog and saw the 'Carmel' collection and I couldn't believe how much it looked like my set. I'm sure theirs is better quality but we got an entire set for quite a bit less than just one of their chairs - I love it when I can get the look for less!

I couldn't find any pillows I liked so I bought some indoor/outdoor fabric and made my own.

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The white garden drums came from Big Lots back in February. I thought they would make great side tables and for $20 each I couldn't get them in my shopping cart quickly enough. Since then I have seen them in a bunch of stores but always for quite a bit more.

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We added drapes to give us a little privacy from our super close rear neighbors. They don't completely obscure their view but its better than them being able to see and hear our every move. Instead of getting special outdoor drapes we just bought some inexpensive cotton panels from Ikea. We don't get any rain in the summer so all they have to deal with is the intense sun and they're already white so we don't have to worry about them getting bleached out.

I got pretty creative with the rods because after pricing outdoor drapery rods I decided they were way too expensive. I work next door to a small hardware store so on my lunch break one day last week I wandered around to see what I could find. I ended up getting electrical conduit and pipe straps for under $10. They made perfect rods and we like the slightly industrial look!

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In the end we decided against a shade cloth 'roof'. We thought it would look better without it, and anyway its not like we're sitting out there in the middle of the day when the sun is overhead.

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Its really cosy at night with the lanterns and string of lights lit.

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We tried it out with the curtains down (oops I guess I should have ironed them) and it made a nice cosy little room.

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Wanna come over and hang out?

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Saturday, August 7, 2010

Supervisors

They watched, while we did all the work.

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Why sit on the floor when you can sit on a rug on a coffee table?

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The Deck: we're making progress!!!

Last time I posted about the deck we still had to replace the removed boards and then power wash everything. Oh how many hours of labor ago that seems now ...

But first here is a picture I just found. I took this when we went back to look at the house to see if we really wanted to put in an offer. Very, ummm, rustic!

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So back to the present day. After replacing the boards, removing the shade cloth, and power washing we got to this point:

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Definitely an improvement but still not the look we were going for. The deck is made of (old, weathered) redwood and I think most people would go the route of buying a redwood colored deck stain and going to town but we just weren't feeling the red tones. In fact, we didn't even really love the brown look. So we thought we'd create a lot of work for ourselves and do this ...

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... and we LOVE it!!!

We did 1 coat of stain blocking primer + 1 coat of solid stain in white on the pergola, and 1 coat of semi-transparent stain in gray on the deck. I got stuck when we were choosing the deck color and had it narrowed down to 2 grays so Josh made the final choice and he definitely made the right one. The brown shows through a bit and almost makes the deck look a bit like drift wood, which I love.

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I always hear decorators/designers say that paint (well in this case stain) is the cheapest way to transform a space and that is definitely true in this case. I couldn't stand the deck before and now I love it!

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There are a few spots that need touch-ups, and we still need to put the trim back around the bottoms of the pillars but most of the work is done. And by work I mean almost 30 hours of painting - sheesh!

Also, I love how it looks without shade cloth but we really need it out back so we'll be reinstalling it sometime this week.

I cant wait for the weekend when we'll be setting up our outdoor room with goodies I've been collecting since the winter!