“you left a stain on every one of my good days”

In this case, the stain was left on one of our good days – in a very good way. If you didn’t get the Matchbox 20 reference, it’s ok. Moving on…

The best part if DIY’ing is that you can move at your own pace as your feel motivated or inspired. This past weekend, JC felt the motivation mojo for the office floor upstairs that has been neglected its whole life… the office floor was exposed hardwood that never had a finish put on it so it had been beaten down and become sort of grimy and dull with time.  For some reason I wasn’t feeling the mojo, maybe it was my upcoming Lasik eye surgery that was distracting me from enjoying the project. Whatever the case, this was JC’s baby.

All it took was a little sanding to rough it up and whip it into shape to be stained.

Here I am power sanding like an outlaw skier… in jammies:

I like JC’s ninja style, it’s tough being married to someone who is so much cooler than me.

Back to the point…
After we sanded and cleaned up the dust (BEFORE my surgery, mind you), we were he was ready to stain! This is where I stepped back and JC had to tackled staining the floor all by his lonesome. He was so spellbound by this project, he didn’t even mind doing it alone. I did managed to sneak up for a picture. Here’s my hunny making our house pretty:

Meanwhile, in the living room, I recuperated from my eye surgery with the cutest couch potato ever:

2 (very chilly) days later, JC had applied a coat of mahogany stain and 4 coats of polyurethane onto our bare naked floors:

ta daaa!

Pretty, pretty mahogany.

We love, love, love it.

Now I just need to get back up there with my favorite short-handled angle paintbrush and finish the mopboards. Now that there’s some polyurethane on there, any accidental paint drippings will wipe right up instead of immediately soaking into the untreated wood like before.

I’m picturing a reading nook with a little white desk and a snuggly beanbag.

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Kitchen Inspiration

I’ve been in a kitchen state of mind lately. I suppose you could say that I’m in the “heavily thinking” stage. I’m pretty much consumed with cabinets, counters, floating shelves, and shiny appliances. So, how am I are we going to turn this into our my dream kitchen?

With lot’s of patience, research, good ideas, and good deals. It’s coming together very nicely in my head.

I’ve been telling JC for a while now that my plan is to ditch all the upper cabinets and put in some open shelves. The look on his face told me he was picturing fur and grease covered dishes and maybe this image jumped to his mind:

Needless to say, he was completely against it. Lately he’s been warming up to the idea, especially since I started showing him pictures of what I was actually talking about:


The open shelves on either side of the window are a big YES.

Love those chunky shelves:

Mmm, yellow accents. I’m not a huge fan of counter to ceiling tile but we’ll definitely do some sort of back splash behind our cook top and the length of that counter.

We went over to a friend’s house the other night to check out their recently renovated kitchen and their custom-made cabinets. They were fancy shmancy and gave us LOT’S of great ideas. I’m glad we’re taking our time with this, it’ll be worth the wait. I’m sure I will have thought/talked all the details to death by the time we actually start.

I’m just trying to hold myself back at this point. Everything within me wants to attack my cabinets with a paint brush but I know it will just be a waste of my time since they will be completely replaced in the semi near future. Gah, patience.

Office Transformation

This just may be my favorite room in the house. I love the fact that it has 2 windows even though it’s so tiny.
Here’s what it looked like in December back when it wasn’t my favorite room in the house:

::gasp:: the clutter! the horror!

Well, that’s all taken care of now and let’s just say our spare bedroom which was recently cleaned out has been completely filled up again. Ah, c’est la vie.
Now, because the office has the same amount of light as the livingroom and the 2 rooms are connected by an open stairway, we decided to go with the Burnished Metal up there as well. In this room we carried the paint color onto the ceiling. The ceilings are undoubtably low, so instead of ultimately failing at trying to raise them by keeping them white, we thought it would be best to embrace the small space and cozy it up by making the whole room the same color.
Here’s the before & after’s:





I don’t know how to describe it just feels almost whimsical. Mmm, I can’t wait to sit up there in my over stuffed chair and read a book.

Painting Our Blues (and yellows, and greens) Away

We did it. We painted our livingroom, diningroom, and office.

So now instead of our livingroom looking like this:

meh. cringe.

It’s painted a light, soothing, airy, grey.

Here’s the diningroom before & afters:

I love how the white trim makes the windows pop.

Believe it or not, we actually used 2 different colors between the livingroom and diningroom. For the livingroom we used Stone White by Glidden. The dining room we chose to paint a darker shade of grey, we used Burnished Metal by Behr. We didn’t want the two rooms different paint colors to clash or compete with each other so we went for the subtle layered look. We tried to settle on the same color for both rooms when we were testing out colors via paint swatches but the Burnished Metal was waaaay too dark in the livingroom and the Stone White was way too, well, white in the diningroom.

There you have it! Our house already feels bigger. It’s amazing what a little paint will do.

New Outlets

You have no idea how exciting this is. We’ve been using those handy little 3 prong adapters FOREVER… somewhere along the line we named them “nipple things” not sure why but it stuck.

JC installed all the pretty white outlets last weekend. (yes, we shut off the breaker first.)

Ah, MUCH better.

Sayonara “nipple things”!

Primers, Mudders, and Sanders

That’s who we were all last week. Because our living room was 2 toned in bright colors and there were a lot of cracks in the dry wall, we taped, mudded, sanded, and primed everything. At first we started with drywall tape which bunched all up on us and turned out to be incredibly frustrating. So, JC turned to facebook about his “crack in the drywall” woes and tons of people suggested the fiberglass mesh tape… ta da! What a difference. We had the living room and dining room taped and mudded in one evening.
First we went around and scraped all the bumps and crud off of the walls, especially around the windows.

JC handled all the big stuff and I went around driving the nails that had wiggled their way out back into the drywall. Then it was mud, mud, mud, scrape, scrape, scrape.



Sanding is disgusting. Luckily, JC didn’t mind doing this part and I conveniently found other things to do like laundy and dishes, you know, things that just can’t wait.

By the end of the night, our house was a hot mess. We ended up tearing off the wall paper in the old dining room and the DUST from sanding was incredible. Oh my, my, my.




The dust covered everything, but mostly it covered JC. Here he is sporting his “intense and creepy” face. The dust adds the creepiness. Spookay.

…and here we are at the evening’s end. Notice that I’m not so dust covered?

Ahh, happiness.

Spontaneous Demolition

While prepping for the mudding and sanding process, I went around the livingroom and scraped off any little tid bits of wall paper that were left behind aka I think I know what arthritis feels like now.

This included getting behind the door frame where there was a whole strip of floral wallpaper just hanging out in there. NOTE: this is an old picture, you can see that the wall is still there through the doorway but it’ll give you an idea of what I was doing. Also note that the only wallpaper left at this point was the one strip in the corner by the door jam.

So, I pried off one trim board… then another… then another… before I knew it, drywall was flying everywhere and I was standing in a mess.

JC wrestled out the door jamb and eureka, a wider doorway:

Speaking of my handy man…
Remember our drive-thru window that connects our bathroom and living room?
Classy, right?

I came home last Sunday after visiting my grandmother for a few hours and JC had it all patched up!

Well, halfway patched… We wanted to enjoy the foral wallpaper for a little while longer so he repurposed it for us. Ha! Seriously though, he wins most crafty award for reusing the old but sturdy drywall that we already had.

Patching up a giant hole in the wall made me want to throw my arms around his neck and jump up and down all giddy like while saying things like “You’re amazing!” “I love it!”… who am I kidding? I totally did that.

It’s nice to know that someone can’t randomly peek/climb through the wall at you while your doing your business. Mostly we would just swing the cubby door open and yell “Bah!!” or “ellooooo”. It was fun while it lasted.