Let the Renovations Continue!

After taking a break from fixing-upping, I'm back in the saddle. On Saturday Eric installed our new kitchen faucet. We had been planning to wait until we could buy a new cast iron sink, but decided to go ahead with the faucet when the old one started dripping incessantly. Here's the old one (forgive the dirty dishes, I had just made rolls):



The pull-out sprayer was nice, but I've heard from a couple of different sources that they are well known for not being very durable. Here's the new one.



All of the hardware in the kitchen now matches! Yay!

Next up: Figuring out how to get a huge felt board off the wall in Sawyer's room, priming and painting the walls (I still haven't picked out a color, I'm going to Home Depot to pick up samples right now), and installing new baseboards. When that's done, we can move his furniture and toys in and we will finally have our master bedroom back! It's starting to feel ridiculous having our whole family sleep in one room with three empty bedrooms just sitting there. I have an iron wall hanging that will go above the pantry in the kitchen, and one that goes over the back door. I also have more curtains and rods coming for the family room - I decided we needed them on the windows next to the fireplace too. More befores and afters to come!

Yard Stuff

One thing we learned quickly is that buying a house with a big yard = doing a lot of yard work. We've been spending a lot of time outside. I love it. I can't seem to keep up with the weeds, but I guess we're going for a "natural" look. Yeah, that's it. Anyway, here are some pictures of what we've been doing.

Here's the front flower bed before:
I wish I had remembered to take a picture before we started weeding, because this whole area was completely covered in weeds. You couldn't even see the brick pavers. We couldn't tell what was a weed and what was a "real" plant, so we decided to start from (almost) scratch. At this point we had ripped out pretty much everything except for the hostas and a large bush. Eric is in the process of cutting down a tree that was blocking the front windows.

Here are the flowers I've put in:
In the forefront are vincas (annuals) and behind those are blanket flowers (perennials.)

I repurposed the off-white planters that were on the stoop - you can see one in the first picture, they were pretty shabby looking. I gave them a good scrubbing and painted them black. Here's a closeup of one, surrounded by my container herbs - sage, thyme, basil and parsley. I moved them out front because that way I remember to water them!

And the front stoop from farther back (I should have taken down that flier in the door, whoops.)


Next steps: Replacing the brass lights and house numbers (that's pretty much the theme of all our decorating in this house!) and get a new welcome mat that won't fade in the sun.

This is a before picture that's prettier than the after, because it's not blooming anymore.
Sawyer watering the giant hosta. It's doing great considering it was neglected for a year. I love its blooms. You can see the black-eyed Susan I tried to plant right in front of him but it doesn't look like it's going to make it.


I hung some geraniums in baskets on the pergola in front of the house. I've loved red geraniums ever since my mission - all the houses in French villages have them in their window boxes in the spring.

And...Indoor Stuff

Our indoor improvements were at a standstill for a while because of illness, travel, changing jobs, and working outside. But no more! The past couple of weeks we've been doing a lot of work. Here's the proof.

Breakfast Room: To refresh your memory, here's the before before:
After:
And after with drapes:
It's a subtle change but it makes a huge difference in how cool the room stays during the day. All those windows can really make it heat up. We kept the custom fabric blinds that came with the house - it's nice to be able to open the drapes and let some light in and still have privacy. Our table looks smaller in the last picture because it is - that's what it looks like without the leaves in.

I also put up some art and a new entry rug by the back door. That's Penny's bowl on the floor, it's not usually there but I had to move it temporarily because my soapmaking oil buckets are blocking the usual spot in the kitchen.

Our next big project was changing the sewing/craft room upstairs into a bedroom. The previous owners had cabinets and counters installed on two walls. We'd like it to be Sawyer's room (it's the biggest room other than the master) so we can use the two additional rooms as guest rooms and an office.

Before:

And after, but obviously still incomplete:
Eric and I took down the cabinets and managed to keep them in pretty good shape so we can sell them on Craigslist, although so far they're just sitting in the basement. A few days ago I took down the track lighting and filled in the holes in the drywall left by the cabinets (dozens of them on 2 walls and the ceiling.) Today I sanded and discovered 1) I don't look all that bad with gray hair and 2) duct taping a piece of sandpaper to a Swiffer actually works pretty well when sanding the ceiling.

A project I did a while ago but is still incomplete: replacing all the doorknobs in the house. They were all bright brass and we're swapping them out for oil-rubbed bronze.

Before:
After:
All the closet/pass-through doors have levers and the privacy doors have knobs:

The bathrooms have brushed nickel.
I'm now realizing that changing the knobs was the easy part - now I have to change all the hinges, one by one. Ugh. It's taking longer than I expected.

I've halfway through changing hardware in the bathrooms to match the doorknobs - previously all the drawer pulls were the same brass ones as in the kitchen.
Oh, how I hated those! Especially next to the chrome fixtures (which we're also changing, but that's a bit further down the list.) This is in Sawyer's bathroom. Before:
After:
And our most recent change, taking down the brass light fixtures upstairs and putting up oil-rubbed bronze ones. We've had them for months but just got around to installing them.

Before/in progress:
After:
Still to do upstairs: Paint everything, get new carpet in Sawyer's room and the tiled room (photos forthcoming), replace the ceiling fans (they are HIDEOUS), change bathroom mirrors and fixtures, finish replacing all those hinges (ugh), and get new furniture for Sawyer's room, guest rooms and office.

In progress downstairs: Replace carpet in family room with hardwood, paint foyer (we'll have to hire someone for that because it's 2 stories), install new chandelier in foyer (ditto), paint living room and dining room, move piano from my grandfather's house into living room, repurpose chandelier in dining room (I'm going to try painting it), mount TV over fireplace and install in-wall home theater system, install built-in bookshelves in living room/dining room, buy new couches for family room, change fixtures and mirror in powder room.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Before and After

After a lot of work and some camera drama (USB cables got lost in the move) I finally have some before and after pictures of the decorating we've done to the house.

First here's the kitchen before.
All the cabinet knobs were shiny gold, which really didn't go with the gray/white/silver quartz counters. And the wall color was much too warm and light.

This is after changing the cabinet hardware and before painting:


And the finished product. Well, almost finished. I still want to replace the sink and the appliances.


The walls are Restoration Hardware's Silver Sage. I got the cabinet pulls very inexpensively on eBay (less than $60 for all of them.)

Next, the breakfast room, which is next to the kitchen. Before:
Notice the lovely circa 1980s brass chandelier. Not my fave. In this room I painted, replaced the chandelier and got a new table and chairs. After:


I got the chandelier online, the table from Ethan Allen, and the chairs, believe it or not, from Walmart. They are surprisingly well built and sturdy, and they were much cheaper than buying them from a furniture store (or even used chairs on Craigslist). The walls are Silver Sage just like the kitchen - the color in these is much more accurate since they're daytime shots.

And finally, the family room. This one took the longest because we had to cover up the cranberry red on the walls.

Here's the room after three - that's right, THREE - coats of Kilz primer:




The color we chose was Restoration Hardware's Flax. I painted the mantel white to make it look more continuous with the trim and to "pop" more against the darker walls (incidentally, I don't think it's possible to talk about decorating without using the word "pop." Just watch HGTV for 5 minutes.) I got the drapes from JC Penney and curtain rods from Target - since this is our TV room we needed a way to block out sunlight from the wall of windows


We still have a lot to do in here - we're going to mount the TV above the fireplace on a tilt mount and install surround speakers. We also want a couple of new couches to make a U-formation around the TV/fireplace. And I can't wait to get rid of the huge white and gold ceiling fan, as well as move Eric's hideous (but extremely comfy) recliner into another room. It's really nice to have the red walls gone. I like red, but it was just too much since it's such a large room. At night time it felt like we were sitting in hell.

So that's phase 1 of my decorating plans. Next on the list is the 2 weird bedrooms (the tiled one and the sewing/craft room), my soaping space in the basement, and the bathrooms. I'm going to take a break first though.

The Scoop

Thanks to some friendly/gossipy new neighbors (my favorite kind, as long as they're not talking about me), we've learned the history of how our house became a foreclosure. The couple who lived here were in their 60s. He was a retired naval officer and very handy - he had a wood shop in the basement and he built the deck and fenced in the backyard himself. She was a seamstress (one of the bedrooms is a sewing room) and showed dogs (poodles I think) and she had about 10 of them. That explains what the tiled bedroom was all about - it was the doggies' room. And that's why all the carpet in the house is new; I guess the dogs weren't house trained very well. Apparently the hubby told her "it's me or the dogs"...and she picked the dogs. So when they went to try to sell the house, hubby discovered that it was only in wifey's name and that made him so mad that he decided to walk away. She was unable to keep up with the payments, hence the foreclosure. So our house is the product of a bitter divorce. It sounds like the owners were interesting and fun people (bitter divorce notwithstanding) and they definitely took good care of the house - they even left us a note to let us know the code to the garage door opener. I'm just glad no one died here.