Living Room Before and After

I promised you a few weeks ago to finally show you the Living Room before and after photos. The previous owners had a lot of furniture in the living room including a couple of really big pieces. The color on the wall was a blue-gray. We went with Benjamin Moore's color Stonington Gray.

The coffee table is an old piano bench which makes hiding remotes and storing small games really easy. I didn't want a big coffee table because they seem to attract clutter and it would be in the way. There was a chair where the baby's swing is now. We moved that chair into the nursery so that we both can be in there if we want to. Can you spot Theo in this picture?

Here's our entryway setup. The hooks on the wall came from Anthropologie (we have the yellow ones). My awesome in-laws recovered this gossip chair. I found it at an antique store and got a great deal on it. I want to make a mail organizer for this area. I am thinking about something like this.

New Back Door Curtain

I saw this curtain at World Market and thought it would be a fun replacement for the dirty plain sheer curtain that was on the back door. Sorry there's no picture of the dirty plain sheer curtain. I think you get the idea.

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It turned out to be too long, so I sewed the tabs down (on the wrong side... whoops) and hemmed it. I got this curtain last week. Be impressed with how fast I accomplished this. I think it is still a little wide so I might cut it. This will have to do for now.

Our Glass Kitchen Cabinet- The Remix

When I showed you the kitchen curtain I made, I told you that I wanted to use the fabric on the trim to wallpaper the back of the glass cabinet. Well, four months later, I did it! Is this what they call nesting- finishing old projects and starting new ones?

So here's the cabinet with the doors closed. 

And here's a close-up.

I covered poster board with the fabric, used fabric glue to attach the fabric to the poster, and attached the whole thing to the cabinet with some permanent stick foam tape.

I think it adds a little something to the cabinet, and it ties the purple in from the laundry room.

Dining Room Before and After

This first photo shows you how blue the gray paint was in the living and dining rooms. You can also kind of see the light fixture that was in the dining room. Same one as in the kitchen above the stove.

And here's my better half checking out the wax on the walls.

Annnnd here's our dining room after a fresh coat of Stonington Gray and a fancy chandelier that Michael and his dad wired and hung. I am getting new chairs from World Market for the two end chairs. They were on sale the other weekend and I dashed there to buy them, but they were on back order until November. They rain-checked them for me and I'll still get them at the sale price.

I bought some super fun Amy Butler fabric to make some new placemats. They'll be reversible so one side will look like this and the other side like this. I'm trying to decide how to make them (read: procrastinating).

These two etchings are on either side of the window in the dining room. We bought them in Venice. I had them framed at Hobby Lobby and I'm really happy with the job that they did.

 Ah, Italy. I think of you often.

Kitchen Before and After

I bought a card reader! This means I can easily upload photos to the computer! This means blogging will be easier! YAY!

So I said I was going to make the curtain for our kitchen window this weekend. Michael's parents came over to spend the day with us on Saturday so Michael's mom helped me figure out how the curtain should be made and then she helped measure and cut the fabric. I did a whole lot of procrastinating because I was nervous. Cutting the fabric seems so final. Anyway, I finished the curtain on Monday.

I did not, however, start on the final project for the kitchen which is using the border fabric on the bottom of the curtain as "wallpaper" for the back of the glass cabinet in the kitchen. The cabinets are kind of cheap and I'm not sure exactly how to affix the fabric to the cabinet. I'm thinking about attaching the fabric to poster board and then using that foam tape in a few places to hold it in place. I bought the tape but forgot to buy posters. So hold your breath on that one.

Since I'm nice, I decided to show you the kitchen even though it's not completely finished. So here's what it looked like before:

Here's the super fun surprise we found when we moved the fridge. Yay! Mold and a hole in the floor!

I called our realtor because I wasn't sure what one does when they find this two days after buying a house. In her New Orleans accent she said "welcome to homeownership." (Not that she didn't care. She was awesome! Did I tell you that we looked at over 20 houses in 3 days?) No big deal though. Two men that work for my dad came over and fixed the wall and the floor in no time.

And after:

Somehow we ended up with less counter space that we had in Charlottesville. I'm definitely making it work. I'm enjoying having a gas stove but I wish we had four burners instead of two burners and a grill. Somehow I am also making two burners work.

For Heather

And anyone else that wanted to see this lovely duvet cover up close and personal.

I got it on super sale at Pottery barn several years ago. I will love it forever. Now you see the room color dilemma. I think a nice gold-brown would have been pretty. Like Benjamin Moore's Richmond Gold. But  the carpet is kind of beige and the curtains are brown so that would have been too much brown. Plus I like green. So there ya go.

Laundry Room and Pantry Before and After

I plan to make my kitchen curtains and finish decorating the kitchen this weekend. So hopefully you'll have a more exciting before and after than our laundry room and pantry. At least it's more exciting for me because I waited for months for the floral fabric to be back in stock, and it's really going to take the kitchen to the next level.

In other, completely unrelated to the laundry room and pantry, news, I think I've finally thought of a painting I'd like to make to hang above our bed. This makes me happy because as you'll eventually see, we have more wall space in our bedroom than we do in our living room and dining room combined. Also, I kind of started a painting a la Orla Kiely's stem print to hang above our sofa. So the living room won't be completely decorated until then.

So without further ado, I give you the laundry room and the pantry before I entered their sad white walled lives.

And after. I love purple! It was my favorite color when I was little. Pink couldn't be my favorite color because it was my sister's. Then I went through a phase in high school when I realized that I could love pink. But now I'm back to purple. In case you were wondering.

This space is kind of awkward since there's no place for outside shoes. I think I'll put some hooks on the wall behind the outside door for coats and Theo's leash.

I'm so glad I painted the pantry.

Look how much fun this contact paper is! Our food is happy for sure.

We don't have a whole lot of counter or cabinet space in the kitchen so the wine rack and wine glasses were relegated to the pantry. Which I guess isn't so bad since the pantry is so awesome. This is the only organizational bit of the pantry that I'm showing you because the food part kind of looks like a mess. The shelves are just so far apart. I need to get more of those wire add-a-shelf things.

Guest Bedroom Before and After

Thanks for the comments. I'm glad to know you stuck around.

So here's the guest bedroom. It's a really nice size and the closet is huge. Closet space and decent room sizes were other things that were hard to come by. If it should happen that we have a kid or two while living here this room will become the guest room/ office/ craft room. So I'm not going to put any other furniture in here.

Have I ever told you that I hate the color yellow? Which is funny because I painted my room at my parents' house yellow, but that was just to match my Mickey Mouse sheet set.

And here we are after a nice coat of Sherwin William's Clary Sage. I had quite a difficult time picking a color for this room because I needed it to match the duvet cover that I love and I didn't want to paint the room pink or red or brown.  Are you noticing a trend here? Anyway, I am super happy with this sage color.

This was the last room that needed to be painted. My sister's impending birthday bonanza forced me to get this room finished. I'm glad for that because now it really feels like our home.

Guest Bathroom Before and After

Look at me, I'm a sad and dark little guest bathroom.

Yay! Now I'm a happy guest bathroom.

This is the original bathroom in the house. I'm sure it was the one and only bathroom before the house was renovated over 10 years ago. We saw a lot of houses with this built-in glass door cabinet and laundry hamper. The original doorways (I don't say doors because I don't think the doors themselves are original) have those vintage glass doorknobs! And the black and white tile on the floor made me love this bathroom at first sight. And that's saying a lot because I hate bathrooms. All this little bathroom needed was a fresh coat of happy paint. Oh and the grout in the shower needs to be redone because it's falling out. At least it looks happy, right?