Progress: The Girls' Room

On to the girls' room.  Their room started out with the same green as the lr/dr and a blue accent wall, also the same color as the lr/dr.  One of the colors may have been ok for a nursery or something, but we needed to make this room girly!  Again, the walls needed a lot of spackling and caulking tlc before we could paint them.  And cleaning.  The two kids' rooms had really dirty walls.  I finally realized that what looked like blood splatters was probably kool-aid or something.  You get the idea.

We let the girls go at the walls with paint brushes.  They stuck to it long enough to paint the three pink walls with their paint brushes!

Bart really wanted to help, but he's not quite there yet.

After they did their part we finished up rolling the walls ourselves.  The big feature in the girls' room is the color blocks we did on the fourth wall.  We'd seen this in another house we looked at and they loved it.  So we took a picture so we could recreate it for them.  We started by painting the whole wall white.  Then late one night (like most nights that week before we moved in) my mom stayed and helped us tape off squares and paint the first coat of each color.  The next day the squares just needed a few touch ups.  When it was dry we pulled the tape off and had the big reveal!  We all love it!

We didn't realize how small the girls' room is.  We hadn't planned on setting their beds up as bunk beds, but once we got them in there it became painfully obvious that that's what needed to happen.  They were super-excited for bunk beds!  Rebecca was excited for the top bunk and careful Emma was perfectly happy underneath.

Here's a shot from the other direction.  You can see that even with the bunk beds, I put one of the end tables that Emma keeps her jammies in in the closet.  But now it feels plenty spacious.

This room was pretty straight-forward, although I think my mom thought we the squares wall was going to take forever.  It really wasn't bad!  Oh, we also did a quick coat of white paint inside the closet since, as with most things in the house, it was just sort of dingy in there.

Still to do:

1.  The second picture shows more than any of the other pictures I've posted the trim and door color that was used throughout the house.  I didn't think we'd have time to kilz and paint all the doors (we didn't!) before moving in.  And it'll be pretty easy to do a door or two at a time as we go.  So the bedroom and closet doors are on this list for this room.

2.  I've got a couple things for their walls that haven't been hung yet.  All in good time...

3.  I'd like to make matching bed skirts for the girls out of tulle.  I saw it on pinterest and I think they'd love the ballerina look.  Plus then they could be matching but each girl would still have her own color (pink for Rebecca and purple for Emma) on her bed.

4.  The underneath side of Rebecca's box springs are ripped.  Not very attractive.  So I need to re-cover it with fabric.  Walter had the idea to put posters up there for Emma to look at, so maybe we'll do that instead.

Progress: The Playroom

The playroom.  To review, it had painted paneling that was a weird pinky-mauvy color.  Not my style.  Also, the paneling was really dinged up, not to mention the random paintbrush strokes from when the former owners painted the wall with the window.  There was a lot of work to be done to the walls to prepare them so they'd be smooth when we painted.

Here's the other view.

I had a really hard time choosing a color for this room.  It's a playroom so my idea was to make it a fun color.  But I already had a pretty bold color in that blue that's in the lr/dr on the other side of the playroom wall.  I didn't want them to compete or for the house to start looking like a circus!  I wanted to do green, I though, so I chose tons of green paint samples and tried to figure out what to do.  I like bright colors, so the greens I liked were brighter, kelly greens.  But I had a feeling they'd be a little loud on the walls, so I'd also chosen some more subtle greens, more in the sage family.  I just couldn't decide what direction to go.  I asked my friend, Kim, over who has a degree in interior design.  She suggested I do mostly neutrals with an accent wall.  So we chose a few greens and I got small samples of them.  I still didn't love any of them.  They were actually some of the more subtle greens, but when I put them on the wall they looked a little minty!  Not what I wanted.  From there I tried different colors of paint I already had from the kitchen (that's grays) and the blue from the lr/dr.  I got the idea that I'd paint the walls a light gray that was from the same color sample as the colors I'd chosen for the kitchen, and then add green and blue stripes on top of the gray to one paneled wall.  Now that there was a plan, we could start on the room.

To give you an idea of all the spots that needed to be fixed on these walls, here's a picture of one of the walls after it was spackled and before it was painted.  It looks like a kid with chicken pox!  And when I was painting I found more spots that I'd missed, although you probably wouldn't notice them if you're hanging out in the room.  You can also see all the colors I kept putting on the wall before I figured out what I wanted to do.  In addition to the spackling and sanding, we again caulked all the trim to make it look nice.  Oh, and by this point I'd taken to using our electric sander over every wall we painted to make sure that we smoothed out not only the divets, but also the rough spots that were all over the walls.

Here's the room now.  This is definitely a "progress" shot!  There are still boxes of books to be unpacked, which are waiting on the bookshelves to be built.  Some of our toy bins haven't been found, so the toys aren't fully organized and put away like I'd like.  Plus, this room was one of the dumping rooms for stuff when we first moved in, so there's a random thing here or there that needs to find its final home.  But it's livable and somewhat put together!

Once I got the gray on the walls I really liked it.  I realized that (as everyone had been telling me!) the colors of the toy storage, etc., would bring in plenty of color.  So after my insistence on having green in there, I stuck with neutral gray.  I also found a rug, the other part of my house-warming gift from my Grandma Brooks, that I really liked.  It had the same taupey-gray that I was using in the house and some fun turquoise and green that I'd wanted to incorporate somewhere anyway.

As you can see, not exactly totally organized, but the toys are accessible and mostly put away and there's an area for the kids to play.  I really should have taken a before shot with all the boxes in there for you to really appreciate how much work it was to get to this point!  :)

Still to do in this room:
1.  Organize Walter's little office area.  Additionally, and along with the doors and inside trim of the windows, it needs to be painted white.  It's currently the pale greenish-gray that can be found on the trim throughout the house.
2.  Curtains!  I like the window treatments on the doors right now.  They're wood roman shades.  But the other windows need something eventually.
3.  I'm planning on making a foam pad to go on top of the white bench that's under the window.  That bench will also be closed in on the ends with bead board, if things go my way.
4.  I want that window area to be a reading area for the kids.  The bench already had baskets under it with books.  But on both sides of the window Walter is going to build some bookshelves that attach to the walls made out of wood pallets.  Gotta love a free project!
5.  Somewhere down the list we'll attack the fireplace.  Walter wants to head up the mantle and I'd like to whitewash the brick.  I don't want to paint it because I like the texture and warmth of the brick, but I'd like to do a little something to it to brighten it up.
6.  Oh, and obviously we need to finish moving out boxes and getting the toy bins and other junk in there set up so it's not so cluttered all the way around the room.
7.  As I find things I like for the room I'll decorate the walls.  I have no plans for that yet.  We'll see what I come up with!

Progress: Living Room/Dining Room

For a while I had the idea that I'd be posting before and after pictures.  Now that we're a month into owning and updating our home, I realize that I may never have true "after" pictures.  I've been holding off until we got this project done or that project completed.  In some cases the project is just unpacking boxes!  With that in mind, I realized I needed to do "progress" pictures.  

Let's start with the living room and dining room.  That's the space where we started working and it was the first to be fully finished.  Well, the painting was fully finished first.  Nothing in the house is fully, fully finished.

As a reminder, her are the befores.  There were things I loved and didn't love in this big room.  Although not traditional, I loved having a fan in the dining room.  It's obviously new, and as a Southern girl, I know the value of a good ceiling fan, even if every interior decorator out there might beg to differ.  I loved the chair railing in this room and the crown molding that we are lucky enough to have throughout the whole house, even the basement!  The floors, while laminate, are a pretty color and are pretty perfect for us with little kids.  Maybe someday down the road we'll put in hardwoods, but at this point they'd probably just get ruined.  So a pretty wood laminate is perfect for us.  

What I did not like about the room was the colors.  Baby blue on bottom and a yellowish, minty kind of pale green on top.  I'm also not a big fan of popcorn ceilings, although throughout the house.  While scraping the ceilings was on our original list of things to get done before we moved in, my parents convinced us to put it off for fear that they are likely asbestos ceilings.  We finally agreed.  I'm actually glad that we did because we ended up having no extra time to tackle the project that popcorn ceilings would have been.

Here's a quick shot standing in the dining room and looking into the living room and beyond that, the foyer.

Oh, and here's the cute picture of Walter and me, excited for our new house.  Now you know our secret that hidden under some blue paint is the date we bought our house, painted on the wall in the same blue paint.  :)

So here's what we ended up doing in there.  Basically, we painted!  Actually, that makes it sound a lot simpler than it was.  As I've mentioned before, the walls weren't in great shape, although this room was much better than others.  Still, we did a fair amount of spackling and sanding to smooth the walls and went over all the moldings (three sets in this room!) with caulk so that they looked seamless when painted.  This is the one room that has the window trim painted, too.  It's really not noticeable in any of the before pictures, but most of the trim in the house was a pale grayish/greenish color.  Not pretty.  And the problem was the color under that was an oil-based paint, so the grayish-greenish color (a latex-based paint) was peeling off.  As a result, we had to kilz all the trim before we put on our paint/primer combo.  These are all steps that I hadn't planned on and reasons why it's good we didn't take on those ceilings.

For this room I went with this dusty blue on top and bright white on the bottom.  I love how crisp it looks.  I had already thought that black accents would look nice in the room, so it's lucky for me that the couches and ottoman we've had for 9 years happen to be black.  We set up our kitchen table in the dining room.  We decided the kitchen would feel pretty cramped if we our table for 6 in the eat-in area. Next we set up two short bookcases (you can only see one in the picture) in the nook area of the living room where our t.v. and t.v. stand will eventually go.  We are still living in the dark ages with old-school t.v.s, so we have decided it's time to update ourselves to a flat-screen.  (Actually we bought it today for Walter's b-day!  But this picture was taken a few days ago...)  Next, my grandma offered to buy us a rug as a house-warming gift.  Within the budget she set, I found this navy and off-white rug for in here as well as a more durable rug for the playroom!  I was worried that the off-white would look dingy in the room with the bright-white on the walls, but it doesn't bother me at all.  You can see that although we cleared out the work station that was in here for a while even after we moved in, we still left out some basic tools that we're keeping in the bookcases for now so that we can have quick access to them while we work on other projects we want to complete before Luke is born.

So far I love this room.  It was the easiest one for me to choose the colors for and I'm really happy with what I chose.  Here's what we still have on our list for this room:

1.  Eventually clear out the remaining tools in the bookshelves and have something, well, prettier there. Prettier, but still baby-proof.  Ideas?  :)
2.  Curtains!  We kept the curtain rods they had up.  They were gold with white lace curtains stapled to them in swags.  I want to spray the rods black and find some slightly sheer white curtains.  I found some I like but the curtain rods are actually pretty big in diameter.  So I don't think the rings will fit on the curtain rods well.  Still working out my options on that...
3.  Get the t.v. set up and figure out what we're going to do for a t.v. stand.  I found a t.v. stand that I really like that I would love for Walter to build.  :)  It has faux apothecary drawers that would match our end tables.  Walter is definitely up for building things for our house, but I don't think he loves it as much as I do.  I think he wants something more modern.  So we'll see where things fall on this one.
4.  Get things up on the walls.  That will happen over time, I suppose.  It's going to be hard to stop working on projects after the baby is born and I need to rest for a while.  But I figure I can do a little of this during that time.  For one thing, I have a big, black frame that has spots for lots of pictures in it.  I've never filled it with pictures, so that seems like a good post-baby project for me.  :)
5.  I found some stick-on ceiling tiles that we talked about using.  They can be painted to look like tin-tiles, but I'd paint them white to match the room.  I think they'd look really nice in here and would add an architectural element.
6.  Oh yeah, we need to put the plates back on all the outlets and switches.  We would have done that already, but we'd like to replace the tan ones with white ones, which makes it a bigger project than just replacing the plates because we actually have to get a little into electrical to replace the actual switches and plugs.

I think that's it.  Well, until we find more things we want to do, of course!  :)

Befores

At the beginning of August we bought our first home.  It was a whirlwind of an experience!  We'd been planning on waiting almost a year longer to start house hunting seriously, but several factors changed our minds.  The biggest factor was finding this spacious house for a good price.  In fact, the price was so good I was wondering what was wrong with it.  We found it online Thursday night, I looked at it Friday morning while Walter was at work so we could rule it out if there were real problems (there weren't) and then Walter saw it for the first time on Saturday.  We also looked at other house options, not wanting to buy the first house we saw, but in the end this house won.  We've talked about buying a fixer-upper since we were married and this was the perfect one for us.  It was well-maintained structurally, electrically, plumbing, etc. but basically was ugly.  We can fix ugly.

So on Monday we put in an offer on the house.  It was accepted the same day and 2 1/2 weeks later we closed on the house!  We started working on the house that afternoon.  We had a baby due 5 weeks later and school starting in two weeks.  So I gave us one week to get as much work done on the house before we moved as we could.  That way we could move in a week before school started and be at least a little settled for the girls' sakes.

After we got started a little I remembered to take some "before pictures.  Some work had already been done but it was pretty much just laying stuff out and spackling the walls where there were dinks, etc.  Also, I only took pictures of the upstairs because that's all we'd have time to work on before moving in, and even that was pretty ambitious.

Let's start the tour.  This is the dining room.  I'm standing in the living room taking the picture.  The two rooms are really one, but the living room portion is recessed, making it a little deeper.  I wish the colors turned out better.  The bottom is clearly a baby blue and the top is a sort of pale, yellowish-mint green.

This is the view of the living room from the dining room.  Same colors.  We set up our work station in there, as you can see.

Here's the kitchen.  Honestly, this picture blows my mind.  It actually looks kinda nice!  The same thing happened in the listing online.  It looks like the cabinets, countertops and floors are all fairly new, in good shape and much brighter than they are in real life.  I would have probably left the kitchen untouched if this were true.  In fact, the cabinets were a cream color, the countertops off-white and the floors a sort of grayish green color.  We're pretty sure they're asbestos tiles, too.  The countertops are corian countertops and are in very good shape.  The color wasn't so bad, except that everything was dirty/dingy and the other colors in the room made the countertops look old and yellowed.

Here's the other side of the kitchen, the eat-in area.  Once again, it doesn't look too bad in the picture.  The yellow is a little softer than in person and the whites are brighter.  Plus, and this is a theme throughout the whole house, you can't see the paint job itself.  The paint jobs were generally bad.  Sometimes they were only one coat where there clearly needed to be two.  Sometimes paintbrushes had obviously been used, leaving the walls very not smooth.  Speaking of not smooth, when they patched the walls I don't think they sanded down the spackle.  So the walls were the opposite of smooth.  This is in addition to the millions are areas that probably should have been patched and never were.

 Here's the den/playroom.  We call it the play room now.  The living room is the adult room.  It's not formal, but I try to keep toys out of there so we have a place to relax that stays generally clean.  The playroom is where we keep all the toys and, well, the kids play.  To translate the picture, the walls are sort of a pastel pinky-mauve color.  There's paneling on three and a half of the walls (The wall that's not visible has chair rail with no paneling on top.) and the walls look as if someone hit them with a chain.  There were little dents all over the place!!!  To the right of the fireplace is a little nook with an office built-in area.

 Here's a view of the playroom while I'm standing to the right of the fireplace.  On the very right in this picture you can see Rebecca walking out of the kitchen, to give a little perspective.  The doors on the left in the picture lead out to our sunroom(!).  Oh, and the doors resting against the wall used to be hung between the kitchen and dining room.  They were two doors and they automatically swung closed when you opened them.  They were finger pinchers waiting to happen is what they really were.  So one of the first things we did was to take them down and just have a doorway sized walkthrough there.

This is our front entry.  This is the view from next to the playroom.  To the left you can see the entry into the living room.

Now we're heading back down the hall to the bedrooms.  This is the kids bathroom.  I love the layout because the sink and linen closet are separated from the toilet and tub by a door.  I'm sure we'll be very happy to have that separation as the kids get older!  However, the wallpaper will be leaving us and the cabinets need some freshening up.  I don't love the old shell sink either, but that's definitely a down-the-road project.

Here's the other part of the bathroom.  I wish you could see the state of the walls in here.  Not only are there dinks in the walls, but there are raised parts where they must have painted over whatever was on the wall, like perhaps pieces of old wall-paper still clinging to the wall in some places, or in others large clumps of dust.

This is the girls' room.  It's got the same green and blue the living room/dining room did.  But in here most of the room is green with a blue accent wall.

This is the boys' room.  It's mostly cream with the pinky-mauve color from the playroom as the accent wall.

The awesome part of the boys' room is their closet.  It's wallpapered with different kinds of what appears to be comic book shelf paper.  It's actually really neat.  We're keeping that!

This is the master.  I think it was also the green with a blue accent wall.

This is another shot of the room from the far wall.  You can see that our walk-in closet door is right behind the door leading into the bedroom.  I like having a closet door, but the two always hit each other.  So Walter finally convinced me to take it down and it's a lot better.  I'd still like to figure out some solution so we can't always see into our closet.  All I've come up with is to hang a curtain.  I don't love the idea, but we'll see.  On the left in the picture is our master bath.

And here's the close up!  Once again the paint-job is really bad, although you can't tell in the picture.  The cabinets are new, as is the toilet.  Very nice!  The medicine cabinet mirror is also new and offers excellent and needed storage in this little bathroom, but is an awkwardly large size!

Gotta love those floors!

Oh, and here are the floors in the hall bathroom.

While I'm on the floor kick, here's a view of our floors in the front of the house.  That's right.  We've got three different kinds of wood laminate.  The foyer is sort of rustic, the living room/dining room is a darker, almost cherry laminate and the rest of the house is a lighter laminate.  And they all three meet right here.

 Oh!  And I can't forget what is probably the most awesome part of the whole house!  We have a faux drawer that houses a built-in, pull-out ironing board right between the sink and the refrigerator!  Now that's not something you see every day!  And how efficient!  I can do my ironing while I stir pots for dinner!

One last shot:  Walter and me as we were working well into the night that first night.  

So that's it for the upstairs, folks.  Coming soon: progress.

Also, a little explanation on the name of this blog:  One thing that I thought was cute about the house was that it's on Peacock Dr.  I can't call it a major selling point or anything, but I do think it's a cute street name.  And as we considered houses (Ya know, over a two-day period.) we always referred to this one as the Peacock House.  So, in honor of beautifying this house, I thought "Peacock's Plumage" was a good analogy for where we're hoping to take it.