Home Tour

On Friday we had a little neighborhood party to celebrate the completed patio. I had such a good time, I completely forgot to take pictures.

Several people mentioned that I needed some sort of tour of the house for you all. So, I will walk you through it with pictures. I'm working on a video for you, but it's not ready yet.

This is not to scale, but I sketched the floor plan so you could see the layout. The main floor (click it to get a bigger image in another window):

and the basement:

We have a tiny entry 

and then you are in the living room.

I have some plans for this room including new paint, ceiling beams, and just a bit of polishing up. You can see this room is home to the burlap wall which will stay when I make changes.

Here's the hall that leads to the bathroom and the bedrooms.

The bathroom needs work.

It's slowly changed and not for the good. I have to end the crazy hodge podge and get that back into something nice.

The master bedroom hasn't been touched. I keep putting it off so we can do other projects!

Gabe's room is a mess (as always! I've given up.) 

He is now in a full bed so we rearranged since I last posted on his room.

Chi also got a bigger bed, a twin now instead of a toddler bed. 

But otherwise it's pretty much the same.

Back down the hall, off the living room is the dining room which is connected to the kitchen.

I have a pantry with pull out shelves which is so nice. The fridge is too small. We plan to replace it.

The cabinets were new when we bought it. We still need to add hardware.

This is the recycling area near the side door. It's almost always full. When it overflows we finally take it to the bin outside. :)

This leads to the basement stairs - the ongoing saga of refinishing the stairs.

And the finished side of the basement.

Sort of. It's a work in progress. We've painted and carpeted(but yet to put back the baseboards), and the far end will be built-in with base cabinets and bookshelves.

Hopefully Matt will complete this project this fall. It will look something like this:

We miss our books. That's what all those boxes are. And of course, furniture would be good. But I would like to move the loveseat from upstairs downstairs and buy something new for the living room. It's all just kind of on hold until I figure out the living room.


The unfinished side is just a mess. I imagine you have an idea what an unfinished basement looks like. Part laundry room, part workspace, part storage. Eventually we will finish half of that into another bathroom and more finished laundry space.


So that is the tour.

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Four to Fix and One I Like

Howdy! I thought I'd show you a few things that need some attention around here and one success. Good? Good.

First up, my crazy coat closet. There is virtually no point to having this closet. You can see in this picture that there is hardly any space between the front door and the closet. The closet is directly across from the front door in the picture.

Not much room to maneuver, but then, here's the real kicker, the door opens the wrong way! It opens into the flow of traffic so you can't get people in the door and hang up their coats. 

This leads to gathering guests' coats and tossing them in a bedroom, and, unfortunately, leads to a pile of coats on the floor in front of the closet when our family tries to all get in at once. Oh, who am I kidding. I throw my coat on the floor even if I'm the only one coming in.

It's not just a space issue on the outside; it's a space issue on the inside as well. Teeny tiny. Hanging space is okay, but because the ceiling to the downstairs steps is on the other side, it's shallow and there is only enough floor space for boots my size, not even my husband's size. 

(This is the best I can do on the pic without standing outside my front door, it's that tight of a space, and it's much too cold out right now.) 


I'm going to knock it out. I will turn the lower space into a bench, possibly with a lift up lid for storage and then add hooks. It won't help make the space any bigger, but it will look bigger and hooks are faster to use than hangers which should eliminate the whole pile of coats issue.

Here are my pillows. They are okay. 

I still like the colors, but these are just very tired (and don't look too closely, they're stained too). I've had them for about four years now. I have these beautiful orange curtains so I intend to keep the general color scheme, but I will be hitting up the fabric store soon to diy up some new cheery pillows. 

By the way, I love the bright days we are having, but the glare off the snow is making it difficult to give you guys decent pictures. Anyways, I'm keeping the orange and green and maybe tossing in some sky blue. I'll see what I find. I'm also planning to make them all different. They'll "go" together, but they won't match. Then I hopefully won't feel ocd about how the pillows need to be placed on the couch to "look right."

This wall has been in need of help since we moved in. 

I didn't have a piece of art big enough and so it remained bare. I also didn't want that movie stand there, but I had few options. After the built-ins are done downstairs, the movies will go away and the stand will be moved to the dining room and converted into a bar. Stay tuned for that.

I was happy to add color when we moved in, having lived with rental white for so long, but even after adding color, it still felt bare in here. I need texture! So, I'm not going to spill the whole story yet, but let's just say : burlap. I can't wait. 

Numero cuatro is the spice rack.

It has turned on me. It used to be tucked into a pantry and was so wonderful with it's deep shelves (it was really designed for a laundry room), but this tricky beast has been attacking me. Whilst picking up things from the floor I have concussed myself on this more than once and those wire shelves really dig in and keep the pain a-comin'! It has to go.

I want to punch into the wall and build shelves between the studs, then put a door on it. I can't really take any floor space in that area, so I think this is the best way to tuck all those spices away. Maybe some day I'll clean up all those coupons stuck to the side of the fridge too, but that may be dreaming too big. :)

So, that's a taste of some of the small-ish projects that I'm contemplating. One small project that I am in love with is this:

My chalkboard wall. I had this problem. I painted my living room this creamy yellow color and I loved it. It's bright and warm. I painted my kitchen a spring willowy green color. It's pale but not pastel and I'm in love with it too. (Did you know that the color you paint your kitchen will affect your appetite? Blue suppresses your appetite while warm colors enhance it. I pick green because green, in nature is pretty neutral.) The problem was when I looked at this short little wall where my green kitchen meets my yellow living room and groan! it looked like a gender neutral baby room. Blah!

I had to fix it. But I didn't want to give up either color. I decided the little wall had to be a different color so that the green and yellow weren't really next to each other. My mom was skeptical when I told her I was going to paint the wall black, floor to ceiling. But so far everyone likes it. It works perfectly to break things up. I hung a picture on that wall to break up the black, but it never really is just black anyway because the boys always have some drawings up there which is a happy thing. 

Box Valance Thingy-Mabob

Alright, time to post about that box valance thingy I've mentioned. (Oh, and Mateo would like me to say that it did not take six months as previously stated, but more like two because for the first four months we couldn't make up our minds what to do. My mistake.)

Dilemma: large patio sliding door, wanted some kind of covering and nighttime privacy. But I abhor, abhor I tell you!, vertical blinds. The devil should take them. Oh, sorry. I'm back. Just a bit of passion there. Anyways. I also have my gas stove right on one side of the door. Flames plus curtains...well, you get the idea.

See the genius placement of the stove? And the mess, just keepin' it real.

So a regular curtain rod has a brace in the middle for large expanses. If I did that I'd have to open curtains one panel to each side. Thanks to the stove that wasn't an option. I needed to pull the curtains all the way to the side opposite the stove, and then beyond to the wall space so that people could get in and out without fighting with curtains. Although that could provide entertainment, not so practical.

Solution: steel cable and ring clips.
But, I was worried about what it would look like. Ikea makes a cool affordable cable curtain rod, but my closest Ikea is three hours away. Mateo came up with the idea to hide the cable inside a box valance. Ours needed to span from the upper cabinet to the wall, so we had no visible sides, just the front.

A view behind the magic.

So Mateo bolted some eye hooks into what would become our braces, and added as much tension as possible so that the cable wouldn't sag. Oh, and we slipped the rings on before he bolted it all down.

Uh, yeah. He had to tighten that up. No worries.

Then he mounted it to the wall and I clipped the curtain panels on and voila! 

Open...

...and closed.

  Some day I'll tell you all about how much I (sarcasm power on)love my white ceramic tile kitchen floor (sarcasm power off). It's nice feeling like we are not some strange performers at night anymore. We like our neighbors and we want them to not be weird-ed out by us. :)

Sharpie Solution

Okay, dear Readers, prepare for some bad pictures. I need a better camera. My hallway does not have good lighting, but I figure having some illustration better than nothing.

Dilemma:long, narrow hallway. What to do? A few pictures didn't help. Any more pictures would have just closed it in. Then I saw some beautiful wallpapers and I thought, maybe I'll use a nice graphic wallpaper on the one wall. But then I choked on my coffee when I saw the prices of the really beautiful wallpapers. I didn't think so.

I could paint or stencil the image, but that's messy and takes awhile.

Solution: Sharpies!

I marked my verticals with a level and pencil. Then I just free-handed the image in black sharpie. (I had to do this when the kids were in bed so they wouldn't get any ideas!) The wall took about 5 markers. The wall eats them up pretty fast. But still 5 sharpies was cheaper than paint even. And bonus, no clean up.



Don't be afraid. You can paint over it if you don't like it. I made a mistake when I started and I just went over it with my wall color, let it dry and tried again. Easy peasy.



Linking to:

It's coming alive

I've begun to organize my art space. I have all the supplies pulled out of big Rubbermaid-style totes. It's a wonder I've done anything artsy or crafty over the years since it's been a pain to dig out the right supplies. But now things are going up on shelves. I'll post a pic soon.

Mateo tells me I will have my work surface by this weekend. But I'll believe it when I see it. I usually add a month to whatever time frame he gives me. :) (Our curtain/box valance only took six months.)Hopefully blogging about it will keep him on track too. (Love you, honey!)

The work surface will have vertical dividers underneath, perfect for storing large pads of paper and canvases. We are making it out of an old closet door that we found on the curb last fall. We saw it, it was in good shape, and thought we could at the very least make a work table out it so we snagged it. Matt will have to add on some wood, and I'll paint it, but all in all this should be cheap.

Organized accessible supplies, storage, and space to create in, I just may faint...