one year later: part 1 - downstairs

Ok, it's really hard to believe that we've been in the house for a year as of today.*  This also means that it's been approximately 15 months since I've held a paying job.  Both facts are odd in a way but good too.

I haven't been that great at posting our progress on the house.  So I'm going to try to just keep this quick and dirty.  When we moved in and what it looks like now.

Outside front THEN:

Ok... and actually the front of the house looks nearly identical except that my car goes in the garage and it's Will's that sits in the driveway.  And I redid the house numbers but actually, I'm not going to show you a close up of that.  I've been toying with 2 ideas though: 1. paint the garage door green to match the front door which you can't see and 2. spray paint the light fixtures black.

oh, here's a picture of the front door.

Backyard THEN:

I actually don't have any pictures of the deck pre-"awesome craigslist teak deck furniture" since we went out to Golden to get it the day after we moved in.  We haven't done much out here either though we need to repaint/stain/take your pick the deck badly.

Kitchen THEN: 

Ah, the kitchen... It needs so much work that it hasn't even gotten touched yet.

Kitchen NOW:

We've done basically nothing. And there's so much that I want to do.

Living room THEN:

Living room NOW:

Obviously better with furniture and sans gross country curtains and wood trim (not that you can see much in this picture.  Take a look at the window sills).  There are only a few things that we know we need here: mantle, a picture over the TV (it arrived yesterday!), a slipcover for the chair in the corner, and Roman shades and wood blinds for the windows (shades have been in the works since September but they're out of my hands so.... we'll see when we get them).

Guest Room THEN:

Guest Room NOW:

I have a few plans.  I'm going to paint the walls to match the bathroom below, maybe a headboard, maybe a window treatment, and a few accessories.  Well, and finish my gallery wall.

Downstairs Bathroom THEN:

Downstairs Bathroom NOW:

This is one of the more completed rooms in the house.  Mostly achieved through paint and accessories.  We finished laying the floor this weekend and then it's just touching up the baseboard paint (it's amazing how much baseboard that nasty carpet covered) and adding some quarter round.

Dining Room THEN:

Dining Room NOW: 

There's not too much more I want to do here.  Wood blinds.  Crown molding.  Maybe wood floors to match the kitchen and foyer and then area rugs as appropriate down the road.

Laundry Room THEN:

Laundry Room NOW:

All I've managed to do is get new machines since the ones they left us were literally shrinking our clothes even though they were on the lowest possible dryer setting.  I've got plans.  Most of them start with putting a slab of counter over the top of the machines.  But that's just the beginning ;-)

Foyer THEN:
















































Foyer NOW:

You might say it hasn't changed much and it's just the foyer but I painted all those dang spindles myself!  And the army of doors that you can just partially see some of in the second picture - if you include the front door, we have FIVE doors marching in a row.  I swear I'm going to get cutesy signs to put on all of them one day.

* I really did start this on the 12th, the anniversary of the day we moved in but then I realized I didn't have any pictures that were even vaguely current.  So now it's 2 weeks later.  oops.

Oh and I seriously HATE the online blogger interface - I have no idea where all that space came from or how to get rid of it!

living room…

or maybe family room… we have issues with what we are calling some of our main living spaces.  It becomes confusing when trying to tell one another where to find something. 

It’s a good size, 2 story with 2 nice skylights, has a fireplace and backs up to the kitchen.  The layout is going to need some work because there is a fireplace, 2 slightly oddly placed windows in the corner, and a double door going into the study/guest room.  We also can’t move the TV because that’s where the DirecTV comes into the house.

 
From the kitchen.  Those are the doors into the study/guest room on the right.

 
a nice shot of the fireplace and you can see how the loft overlooks the room.  This is also the only room that has a ceiling fan – for the time being.

Here’s the view back towards the kitchen after the movers brought everything in.

It got a little better and a little worse after we started unpacking.

 
It only got mildly better after a couple of weeks.

If you were really paying attention to the pictures of this room and the front room, you just might have noticed our issue with the movers.  One book case in here.  One in the front room.  The chair in the front room and its ottoman in here.  No biggie.  ARG.

 
In the never-ending shuffle of things, this happened but as you can tell, I haven’t committed to it yet.  I can’t until Mom comes to visit and approves my placement :)

Ok, the plans…  nothing huge:
- get professionals to remove the popcorn ceiling and paint the ceiling and walls. I am NOT taking on a 2 story room for either project.  There are limits to my crazy.
- paint trim.  I will, however, do this.
- get a mantle piece for the fire place.  If you look really closely at the picture of the fireplace (maybe even blow it up), you might notice that 2 of the bricks are actually pieces of wood.  Presumably these are in place to attach a mantle.  This is the one and only project that has a specific deadline – December 1.  I must have a mantle before I decorate for Christmas!
- somewhere down the road, we’ll get new carpets.

kitchen…

When we looked at the house originally I thought the kitchen was decent, if a little dated.  It’s WAY bigger than what we had in VA, lots of cabinets, a full size dishwasher, a gorgeous french door refrigerator (that sadly they wouldn’t let us keep :( ), built in microwave, an island… It wasn’t until I started trying to put stuff away that I realized how incredibly cheap and dumb it all was.

Here’s most of it on move in day (that’s our realtor cooing over the baby).
The rest of it, including our eat-in kitchen for which our table is too big but we knew that when we bought the place so eh, no biggie.

Ok but why do I think it’s dumb.

First off, there are exactly 10 drawers.  I had 5 in my tiny kitchen in VA.  Drawers are super handy for keeping things corralled so you better believe that I don’t think there are enough of them.  Oh and the widest one is, oh about 10-11” max and oh they’re all about 3” deep also super helpful.  Awesome. 

Second, the cabinets all have doors that don’t meet together in the middle which means that there is a strip of wood between every set of doors which makes them rather awkward.  And they are ALSO super narrow.  I couldn’t get our dinner plates in the ones by the stove and they just fit in the ones on the other wall.  The lower cabinets are just big open caverns with a shallow shelf at the back.  Again super handy.

Third, that little desk like nook up there in the second picture.  Looks great.  Actually has the widest drawer in the kitchen.  Too bad that it’s about AN INCH AND A HALF deep.  Yep doesn’t fit any of our desk supplies.  Hence it’s nickname – the stupid drawer.

Here’s a few pictures if it’s various levels of disaster over the last few weeks.

After the movers unloaded.

After we sorta started unpacking.  It looked like this until after Liz had been here for several days and made me deal with it.  So it was a few weeks like this.

See…. so much better now, right? Friends who can make you do stuff that you don’t want to are the best :)  Well, when it’s stuff that you should be doing, of course.

 
This is what it looks like right now.  I’ve mentioned the on-going shuffle action of stuff around the house, right?

As for our plans…

Long term:
- all new cabinets (with way more drawer space)
- a gas stove (induction is for the birds)
- double wall oven
- a new built-in microwave (the one we have doesn’t even have a turn table in it)
- new sink (the black Microban is just kind of weird)
- butcher block countertops from IKEA
But that’s probably going to be several years down the road.

More immediate plans:
- paint the cabinets
- add cabinet hardware
- replace light fixtures over the non-existent table and the sink
- replace dishwasher (that’s a story for another post.  ick is all I will say for now)
- get a table to go with our existing chairs
- paint the walls and trim
- remove hideous country curtains
- refresh the panels in the main light fixture (they look burned or stained)

dining…erm, living…

I thought that maybe I should outline the various rooms and our tentative plans for them beginning here.

Ok, this house has this weird room that has a door into the kitchen and a wide doorway into the entryway and a chandelier and a bay window on the front of the house… so it’s supposed to be the dining room but it’s too big to be all dining room but not big enough to truly be a dining room and a full living room.  We call it the front room around here.

View towards the front.

Same room looking in the other direction.  Nice and empty before we let the movers in with the stuff. 

After the movers left – so things were still nice and neat.

It became laundry staging ground after our 10 days on the road.

Starting to unpack…

 
It got so much worse as I really started to unpack things and continue my game of shuffling crap around the house to move for more furniture or for a project.

 
After we had the fancy furniture delivered from NJ.

It looks a little different right now but I’ll get to that later… right now, didn’t I say something about talking about our plans for the room when I started this whole thing?  I did.

So here they are in no particular order for now:
- remove boring curtains
- remove popcorn ceiling (spoiler alert – that’s what I’ve been up to for the last 2 days)
- prime and paint ceiling, walls and trim – different colors, of course.  A nice Benjamin Moore Ceiling White for the, uh, ceiling, color-matched BM White Dove for the trim, and Restoration Hardware’s Silver Sage for the walls.  I’m hoping to do this soon so that the furniture can be put in its final home and filled with a lot of the stuff floating around the house.  Those antique pieces are gorgeous but horrific to move particularly on our bizarrely plush carpet.
- move chandelier – not the whole thing just removing the dumb hook that it’s on and pulling it up to the proper height
- reupholster (or recover really) the dining room chairs
- get furniture for the more living room portion of the room
- maybe some crown molding or would that be weird because there’s no molding framing the windows?
- some day I’d really like to extend the wood floors in the kitchen through this room as well.

I know that it probably seems like a weird room to focus on but getting it all smooth-ceiling-ed and painted will allow me to find homes for a lot of the random objects that are in our house right now which will make me happy.

Maybe I’ll post another room tomorrow.

crap, we have a house now…

um, so yeah, we have this huge, to us anyway, house now.  It’s literally 4 times as big as our old condo (which we are closing on week after next – yippee!) and it needs a little bit of help.

I’ve added a tab up there under the header called “house tour” in an attempt to corral the blog posts that I’m planning to write about all the projects I have planned of which there are many. 

We’ll see how I fare!

after 10 days on the road (this pic really is from the day we got the keys), you might notice that Sweet P and I are very much dressed down while Will is dressed up – well, kinda.