My Closet!

This is the first "room" that is complete.  It actually isn't complete, but it is as close as it is going to get for awhile so I'm labeling it complete for now.  It's also not an actual room, it is my closet, the master bedroom closet.  The previous owners had built a closet system that didn't look finished.  It featured unpainted, unstained, rough looking wood, too long for the shelf - shelf holders, lots of visible screws and it wasn't very sturdy. 

The plan was to make it pretty and make it sturdy, but on a small budget.  So we very carefully disassembled the previous shelving system, as we wanted to use some of the same materials. We saved the shelving sides, rods, top shelves & rod holders.  The rest was unusable, for this project atleast, so down to storage it went. 

Once everything was removed, I painted the walls a fun aqua color.  

 

I also painted the previous shelves, rods & rod holders.  The rod holders I used the same nickle spray paint I used to paint our bathroom hardware.  The wooden pieces all got a couple coats of white paint that I had on hand already. 

The only thing besides the wall paint that I purchased was some additional shelves and the wood to hold to create shelf ledges.  While at Home Depot, I spotted the shelving planks that were pre-drilled to have adjustable shelves, but for the sake of our budget I utilized the materials we had and bought the 94cents wood for shelf ledges instead.  Thanks to the guy at Home Depot, I left with 8 perfectly cut shelves & 16 shelf ledges.  

Once I got home, we measured, assembled and painted the ledges & shelves to end up with this:

You'll noticed I decided to leave the left side as hanging room only.  We have enough drawers in our room, I didn't need the additional shelves they had installed before.  We ran in to one road block, which is the reason for the missing 3rd shelf (from the bottom) and hopefully that will be remedied soon! 

And here is the closet, full of my clothes, shoes & accessories:

(left side)

 

(right side)

Like I said at the beginning, it isn't quite complete, but close enough.  Ultimately, I'd like the trim to be white - but that won't happen for quite some time.  

Storage Chest

When I was a young girl, my grandparents gave me a storage chest (which I believe was hand built by my aunt's father) as a gift. It's special to me because it wasn't the typical store bought gift, so it is one piece of furniture that I have moved with me every step of the way. It has gone from my childhood home to college to apartment after apartment and finally to our new house. It works perfectly at the foot of the bed for some extra storage. The only problem was that the honey oak doesn't match our style, so it was due for a make-over.


Once again, I forgot to take before pictures. I dug through tons of digital pictures thinking I had to have a picture somewhere, but I couldn't find any with the whole chest pictured. O well, the below will have to do, you still get the idea:

(click on the picture to make it larger)

The chest still sits at the foot of our bed, and the new upholstered top matches our headboard perfectly! To complete the project I followed these steps:
- removed back rest & top
- sand, prime & paint the body of the chest
- got a new top cut at Home Depot so the lid would be the same size as the chest (previous top was hinged a few inches in from the back)
- upholstered the top, following the same steps as I did for our headboard
- attached hinges to the lid
- lined the lid with a fun fabric by simply folding the edges of the fabric under and stapling to the correct size
- attached the hinges/lid to the body of the chest


We love the new look! More pictures to come of the chest in the master bedroom as soon as we complete the room!

It's the small things

Over the past few weeks we have been unpacking, organizing, arranging and rearranging.  Everything is coming together nicely and the house is starting to feel like a home. We've also started to make a few updates here and there. 

I'm terrible at remembering to take before pictures.  I get so excited about the project, I just dive right in before snapping a picture. 

The larger picture of the bathroom shows the bathroom with the old owners' stuff and the old gold hardware.  Some spray paint and a small fraction of my time and we've made one minor update to the bathroom.  Buh-bye gold handles, hello nickle! 

We recently purchased 2 Ikea dressers to act as nightstands.  They fit our style and provided the extra drawer space we were looking for.  But the drawer fronts just didn't look complete to me.  With the addition of some hardware, they look much better and more complete. 

And a sneak peak of what I'm currently working on.....the closet:

Stay tuned for more, there is plenty to come! :)



We Are Homeowners!

We closed on our first house last Friday and couldn't be more excited that we are no longer property virgins! 

The whole process has been almost comical as we've had plenty of  "adventures" already, but are so overly excited that nothing is really bringing us down! Just to name a few:

- It was negative 26 the morning we woke up to close (and move into) on our house - so moving got pushed back a day.
- My car wouldn't start due to the extreme cold
- When we went to pick up our moving truck, the computers didn't work so what should have taken 5 minutes, took 45 minutes.
- When we tried to return the moving truck, the truck wouldn't start.
- The furnace stopped working the 2nd day we were here.  3 days & 5 repair guys later - our furnace is working!  Thank goodness we opted in to the MN Energy Service plan - whew!
- Internet was installed and 5 minutes later, it quit working
- I forgot all of our groceries in my brother's car on moving day - my brother doesn't live very close to us!

On the upside:
- We are homeowners of a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom walkout rambler with a nice sized yard!!
- We had awesome help over the weekend!!  We can not be thankful enough for all the people that helped us move, unpack, clean, assemble, etc.

Here are just a couple pictures of the house, with the old homeowners stuff:

Front of the house:

  

 Backyard:

Deck:

 
Kitchen: 
 
Master Bedroom:

 

Walk-through Master Bathroom: 

We have been busy unpacking and organizing.  Stay tuned for some "after" pictures!

Master Plan

We are exactly 2 weeks away from closing on our very first house!  We are beyond excited (and a little nervous), happy (and a little scared) and ready to own instead of rent!  I've been playing around in photoshop dreaming up what our rooms will look like.  We currently have a black, white, gray and yellow color scheme in our bedroom.  Dan suggested adding another color besides yellow, so I whipped up an example for him in photoshop and he gave me two-thumbs-up!

Here is the room that will be our master bedroom (photo taken from the doorway):

And here is our plan (top portion is one side of the room, bottom portion is opposite side):

 

Our bed will go on the same wall as the current owners bed.  In the top photoshop image, the big white space to the left of the bed is the door to the bathroom.  In the bottom image, that is the door to the closet (walk in closet...yay!!). 

What do you think?  Do turquoise and yellow work?  I sure hope so, because we love it!

Quite a few DIY projects will go in to this room.  And a couple projects that have already been completed will leave the room.  But that is OK, they served their purpose while we lived in our apartment.  Part of the beauty of re-purposing items is that they are generally done on a low budget, so if they don't stick around all that long, I don't have to feel guilty about it! 

My first project is going to be painting and upholstering a wooden chest that I've had for years.  I got the chest as a Christmas gift when I was a little girl and it will work perfectly as a bench at the end of our bed.  It is currently honey oak, but I plan on painting it white & doing a tufted upholstered top to match our headboard.  

The 2nd project will be refinishing this dresser:

 

We picked this up at Savers for only $15, and it is sturdy!  So sturdy that it survived being dropped by the employees as they were bringing it out to our vehicle!  I debated if I wanted the dresser to be black or white and I ultimately decided on black.  I want the trim and the doors to (eventually) be white so the black will provide a bit more contrast on that side of the room.  This project will probably have to wait until Spring, when I can do the sanding and painting out in the garage.  

A couple weeks ago, Dan picked up the small side table (shown next to the chair) for me.  Any suggestions on what color to paint it?  I can't decide if it should be white, black, gray or even a fun color!  

And the last (at least planned as of now) project will be the wall art above the dresser.  I'm thinking I will get a big white frame, turquoise matting and simply frame some of the same fabric I used to make the bedskirt. What do you think?  Yay?  Nay?  

This post got long :) But so far, this is our plan for the master bedroom. If only we could move in today and get started!

Cork Board & Exciting News

I have been slacking in the blog posting department.  Mostly because I don't have anything exciting to blog about.  That will, hopefully, be changing very soon........we are buying a house!!  All the negotiations have been made, now it's just waiting for the bank to do their thing and then we will be closing on January 21st.  Once we move in, I will be in project mode!  We have started to plan out our rooms, we've done a little window shopping and picked up a few paint chips.  We can hardly contain our excitement and January can't come soon enough! 

I have done one project for the new house already.  I jazzed up our boaring cork board.  I didn't take a before picture, because I forgot, but you all know what a standard cork board looks like.  Here's what it looks like now:

I apologize for the poor picture quality, it is taken on my cell phone in bad lighting - the camera was dead. 

And here's a sneak-peak at what we are planning to do in our office:

Happy Halloween

I love Halloween and dressing up!  Even more so than that, I love creating my own costumes.  This year I sewed my cavewoman costume. 

And a close up of my attempt at making myself look dirty - excuse the facial expression, apparently I thought cavewomen can't possibly be happy and must be mad ;) 

Here's a group picture from the night out...I partied with Brett Farve, Winter, Spring, a bloody man, Fall, and a pimp!