Before and after... The Living Room

We really didn't get any good pictures of this room before... They had it more set up as an office/study, though. The color in here wasn't terrible...much better than the rest of the house. But I'm not a grey person. I much prefer tan, so...in the spirit of painting EVERY SINGLE room in the house, we decided to go with another shade of a gorgeous Benjamin Moore tan. :)

All of the downstairs has these neat little glass doors. We keep them all open, but it's neat to know that if we want to close the pupskis of we can...and I'm really thinking about keeping the great room closed off. Those dogs think they own our furniture. I never in a million years thought I would have an inside dog that would get on my furniture...and now there's TWO. :)

Here's after. I LOVE this room. Really quaint and cozy. Mom and I will sit in here and drink coffee before everyone else wakes up. Really neat room. There isn't any overhead lighting, which at first I thought was really weird, but now I think it's great. Lots of lamps, comfy couch and chairs. It's a great room!

Plantation shutters in this room, too. The previous owners had shutters along the front of the house on the bottom windows. We added them on the top windows. Makes a big difference! Mark loves that it keeps our bedroom so dark in the mornings...although it makes it harder on me to get him out of bed!

See how cool those doors are! :) The carpet isn't terrible in this room. Better than upstairs for sure...y'all will get to see that in a later post, but I think I'd love to have hardwoods in this room. Just to keep it quaint and cozy. Hardwoods with an oversized rug. That sounds like a later down the road plan, too.

This old chiffarobe almost went on the trash when we moved. I had in the basement of the old house and just used it for storage. But when we moved in here I thought it worked well with all the other antiques in the room. Nothing special to look at, but it fits in well in the room. And it's full of serving pieces and table linens, so the storage part is great, too.

This piece came from the old house. The people we bought our old house from left this piece in the kitchen for us. It worked as a really nice panty and fit the space really well. We weren't so kind...we didn't leave it, we took it with us. I guess that's not playing fair, but I really love the look and feel of it. So instead of using it as a panty, I've got all of my Blue Ridge dishes in it. My grandmother started collecting it for me when I was young. Then my great aunt started picking up pieces for me, too. Now I've got all kinds of neat pieces and patterns. We're having Thanksgiving at our house this year, so I think we'll put the dishes to good use here!

Before and after of the living room. Sad I don't have more before pictures. Not a ton to tell about this room either. A good coat of Benjamin Moore paint and ta-da. Looks like a totally new room!

Before...and After. Dining Room.

So here it was before...with all its glory. We were afraid our furniture would look dwarfed in the room, but it looks pretty good. They had a really large table and it was a good size for the room. Our table wasn't as big, but I think it looks a-ok. No fake ficus tree for me, though!

Here was the room empty...dingy walls, awful light fixture. Needed a little sprucing. Bill and Sandy (Mark's sweet daddy and stepmum) came up the weekend we moved in and did TONS of painting. They were the painting pair! Sandy would cut in and Bill would be right behind her to roll. They were AWESOME! Mom and dad came up, too, but Dad's too impatient to paint an I had mom helping me unpack, keep sane, etc. :)

So post-spruce... Really awesome wall color. New creamy color under the chair rail. Everything looks great! We eventually want to do some trim work underneath the chair rail, but that's for later. We have lots of those "that's for later" projects. Gotta prioritize! We replaced the switchplate covers, too. It's really amazing how little things like that really make a difference. Other than new paint, new switchplate covers and a new light fixture, this room really didn't require too much!

Here was our fun find for this room. If any of y'all know me at all, you know I love a good bargain. I got this light fixture at a garage sale in the neighborhood. It had great lines, but it was brass. I don't do brass. So...leave it to me and mom to get a few cans of spray paint and wa-la! Looks pretty good if I do say so myself! Still need to find some new shades... something with some fun beaded trim or something to jazz it up...

Here's mom's contribution to the room. She found this mirror at an estate sale for CHEAP. I like it in the room...adds a neat vintage look. We needed something for this wall and so when mom brought it up to see if I like it...that's where it ended up! :)

Make-shift buffet. I had the buffet and mirror in the foyer of the old house. I needed some more furniture in the dining room of this house, though, and there wasn't a good spot for it in the foyer, so it was the perfect size and piece.

And here' s view of the front wall of the dining room. I loved the arched windows. That's one fo the things that really stood out when we were looking at the house. We had to get over the cluttered, dated, not-our-styleness of the house when we looked at it. As I told Erin over and over when I showed her pictures of the house...it's got good bones!

I got the cool painting at the Buy for Rise sale here in town. Awesome sale that I made mom come up for this year. I think she'll agree, it was worth the drive to T-Town.

So, that's the before and after of the dining room. I'm a little partial to the after. :)

Long time, no blog...

Okay, so I haven't updated this in a while (sorry Ms. Catherine! :) ), so I'm going to do a mega-update today. Football season is nuts for us...company in town every weekend for the games, traveling to away games, tailgating, etc etc. And when we're not watching football we've been working on the house, so...the blog has taken a back seat. Hopefully I can get back in a routine of updating. I'm all about some routines! :)

We leave for Puerto Rico in a week and a half, so this may be the last update for the month of October, so Happy Halloween!!

My parents came in town this weekend, so when mom comes to town I put her to good use! She's super crafty, so I put her up to making some new, fun Halloween decorations...and ta-dah! Looks good, huh??

So that's the front door...here's the garage door...my personal favorite craft/project/ta-dah of the weekend:

We went to Tannehill State Park's Trade Days. They do it the third weekend of each month from March - November. It's like a big arts and crafts festival/flea market and it's lots of fun. I got those ornaments there...the elephants are the cutest things in the world and then I found the houndstooth ornaments at another booth. Roll Tide Roll!! Although...that game last night was less than stellar....although I'm not blogging about football, so back to the house.

Okay, I think I'll post about each room on it's own. Still haven't taken pictures of the two upstairs bedrooms or the kitchen...or the breakfast room for that matter..still a work in progress there.

Happy September! Here's how we spent our summer!

So we took last night off working on the house. Mark was in Orlando for an Alumni Chapter meeting and I was not feeling so hot, so I relegated myself to eating a baked potato, watching some early round US Open play and hitting the sack by about 9 or so.

So...as summer's drawing to a close and football season is here (yes, that is a season. For me it's tax season, summer and football season...no spring, fall or winter.) I wanted to post what we've been working on all summer long.

Here's a picture of the house the second time we looked at it! No landscaping, faded blue shutters, a terrible brass kickplate, etc. etc. etc. We knew this house was a definite project house, but as I told my sweet Erin on the way to Destin..."it has great bones!" It's in a wonderful neighborhood here in T-Town, so we knew it would be a good investment!

Here's the house this afternoon! We've painted all the shutters black, painted the door black, taken the brass kickplate off the door, painted the light fixtures black (we wanted to replace them totally, but those bad boys refused to come off!), and started the gargantuan job of landscaping. The previous owners had no beds planted in the front yard...only overgrown holly and cleyera. We also had a huge pine tree taken down in the front yard. You can see it in the picture above. I'm not a big fan of pine trees, as a rule, but this one was killing the grass, the roots were messing up the driveway and the pine needles were clogging the gutters. So needless to say, it had to go! Our old house had beautiful landscaping. We planted all kinds of gorgeous things, had window boxes, Mark made a mailbox planter. So to leave that house and come to a house with no landscaping was pretty hard to do. We got an estimate for planting the front beds, but it was almost $4,000... a LITTLE out of our budget. And we enjoy working in the yard together, so we thought we'd do it step by step. We planted gardenias and indian hawthorns in the beds and then some yellow and red coneflowers that look really good. We didn't plant anything until the end of July, so our water bill has been re-donk-u-lous, but it's worth it. To come home and see progress is a very happy feeling. We've also planted some temperamental begonias in the front planters. Mums to come soon! And mom has made me a fun football wreath to go on the front door...made from that cool netting that everyone (including me!) uses for Christmas decorating now. The wreath is made of crimson netting. I just need to find a houndstooth "R" to put in the middle. Surely Etsy will pull me through in finding that. Love me some Etsy.com!

As I type this Mark is in the master bathroom painting the walls a GORGEOUS shade of blue. Benjamin Moore is not the cheapest paint, but they have the most fabulous shades! I think Pottery Barn stalks my color choices, too, because everytime I pick out a color it ends up in their next catalogue. I picked out this Buxton Blue back in May when we moved and it's in their catalogues right now.

Anyway, pictures to come of the bathroom soon. The before and afters will blow you away...or at least they blow me away. I hope it turns out as beautiful in real life as is does in my crazy head.

Time to help Markie with painting. He only lets me roll the walls...not help cut in around the trim. He says I'm too impatient and rush too much. I can't disagree. :)

Happy September folks!

New house!

So Mark and I finally made it into the 21st century and got internet in our house. I know, I know, Justin and Cory...insert smart comment here. So I was thinking that I needed to start updating our blog more. Since I've had the blog for almost a year now and I've had all of two entries. I was considering what I could blog about that people would want to read about and couldn't really think of much. I'm still not sure anyone really cares about the remodeling/refacing/renewing of our new house, but if not, that's okay. At least I'll have my own photo diary of the progress. :)

Okay, so here's the scoop. We had a lady present us with an offer to buy our house (that we loved!) on April 16th. For those of y'all who know what I do for a living, you know that April 16th is a very important day for me: the first day to begin my recuperation from tax season! :) So we get a contract from this really nice lady, who just loved our house and loved the privacy, that she could walk her dog on the golf course that our house backed up to, etc. etc. etc. And while we weren't at all even considering selling our house before this offer presented itself, we thought it would be a great time for us to move to a larger house in more of a child-friendly neighborhood. So long story short (and I do mean long), we closed on our old house and new house on May 25th. Just in time for a lovely Memorial Day weekend move. Mark's dad and stepmom and my parents came up to help us and it really was a super-easy move with all their help. Since then, we've done lots. I'll try to do before and after pictures so it's more effective. And lots of the projects are still in progress or to be done at a later date.

So here starts the journey of the house. We'll see how it goes. And if I actually start posting on a more regular basis. :)