To talk about what we’ve been up to, I suppose I need to let this cat out of the bag…
We have been busy over the past few months changing the guest bedroom into a nursery for the baby girl we are expecting on June 15th!
Here is the guest bedroom that has now been turned into the baby’s room. It has welcomed many friends and family visitors – and the bed has now been moved into the office (lots of changes in there as well). So visitors are still welcome!
For kicks, here is a side by side before and after. On the top is the room when we bought the house in October 2009. And on the bottom is the renovation we did to it in 2010.
And here we are in 2012- a sneak peek of the nursery!
More coming about the nursery details!
Over 11 months ago, I posted about this little janky cart I picked up at the local Goodwill.
https://brickandbrack.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/bric-a-brac-again/
It was a sad looking cart and both Michael and my Dad told me it looked like a piece of junk.
But I went to work on it anyway.
This project was so darn long ago that I really can’t remember all the details – but I gave it a good sanding down and then proceeded to take off the two winged parts of the trolley. Also, turned out that the bottom piece was covered in fake wood, so I chipped all of that off. The wheels were in a terrible state, I did my best to polish the brass and clean the wheels with Bar Keeper’s Friend and brass cleaner.
After a good sanding down, I primed the whole thing and then painted it in a Martha Stewart Blue color we picked up from Home Depot.
Here she is as her newly refreshed self. I STILL have not put the bin handle I purchased on the side drawer…
My very talented and close friend has started a sewing blog and etsy store and I just wanted to do some obvious promoting here as I am so proud of all her projects. I am constantly impressed by her patience and artistic talent. Ever since the birth of her daughter, she’s gone on a sewing frenzy and I urge you to take a look at her amazing stuff! She also has the cutest model ever.
Here is her blog with great sewing tutorials for baby items to housewares.
http://youandmie.wordpress.com/
And here is her newly opened Etsy shop!
http://www.etsy.com/shop/youandmie
photo by you and mie.
I don’t really even know where to begin with this post, as I had nothing to do with any of this.
I knew the next house project was a shed, and that there were some sketches and plans underway, but I didn’t partake in the how and when, and one day I came home to this:
And the next day it was this:
And in less than 1 week it was this:
Unfortunately, this is a fully paint by picture post- I am sure if Michael sat down – he could say what cuts he made and what pieces he used – but in all honesty, he never actually made full on plans. He is kind of a self educated, construction rain man of sorts. (Don’t take offense to that Arn, I think you’re a genius). And he doesn’t read these posts anyways.
All I can contribute is that the wood is Redwood.
Okay I lied, I did contribute one thing to this project – my favorite part, the inside, in which I could organize to my heart’s content. Now, we happily and very luckily do not have a storage problem at our house, but the garage is only a single, and it’s filled to the brim with all our diy tools, paints, bikes, etc. So having a space dedicated to gardening is pretty key. Especially since Michael is our personal gardener.
Sorry for the massive delay in this post, we both have been so busy. The shed was finished in August!
Just a quick story about what we did to the side entrance of the garage. We had purchased a generic door a while ago to replace the old one with the pet door in it – and finally got around to hanging up the new one.
At first we were going to just paint it white…but then decided to get all crazy and paint it an olive green.
I had pinned this image a long time ago because of the olive door in the background.
http://pinterest.com/pin/14850710/
And we followed the inspiration and decided to test it out on our new side door.
We are both really excited with how it turned out (even though it might not look like that much of an improvement in the photos). We might even carry this color on to the other side door that leads to the kitchen…
Since I did a little backyard update last week, I wanted to keep with the flow and do a front yard update. Above is a picture from way back when in October 2009, the month we moved into this place. You can even see the for sale sign post still stuck in the grass, and the fancy pieces in the garage windows that we immediately ripped out the moment we pulled into the driveway.
Then in August, we finally got around to ripping out some of the hedges and going with a more leafy theme. It was looking pretty sad, but there was hopes for growth. This is the part that makes me super impatient, I just want to see progress. Like right NOW.
But right NOW doesn’t work with plants, unless you want to drop a mortgage payment at the garden center on the fully grown plants that need a UHAUL truck for transport. So here we are, a full year later. Is it weird that my favorite part is the new hose holder?
I went out into the yard this morning with the purpose of taking some photos to update the blog, but what I hadn’t realized until I loaded the photos, is how different the yard actually does look. I guess when you see it everyday, you just don’t notice the difference. But seeing the photos from the past couple seasons has really surprised us as to how much our garden really has grown…
Landscaping is something I realized I just don’t have a knack for. I always thought it would be similar to doing the inside of the house: move this here, that looks good over there, knock out this wall here…But for me, I have found landscaping to be one of the most difficult tasks. It’s much more difficult than I thought to pair up the right plants, and to choose the right ones that will grow in it’s environment. Even to find one’s we like has proven difficult.
I have a new found respect for landscape artists.
Oh how does your garden grow? Nice and slow it seems. Only took 3 years to get it to start looking presentable. Well, at least we think it is…
In July, we posted pictures of the Kitchen renovation, sans countertops. We had been waiting about 3 months for the Numerar countertops to reappear at IKEA. I probably checked the website at least once a week, and slowly the countertop had become available in other parts of the country, but not here in LA. Bummer.
But then suddenly last week, the magic words appeared – IN. STOCK.
The countertop comes in 3 different sizes. To buy enough for the three areas we needed to fill (2 for the kitchen and one for the laundry room), we bought two of the 96 7/8″ x 25 5/8″. Then cut them at home with a circular saw into the three pieces we needed.
As we have found out with a lot of projects, not all walls are built to be straight in our home. And even though the countertop was cut as a straight edge, there was a gap between it and the wall. A little joint compound on the wall fixed that problem right up, and below you can see how seamlessly the butcher block meets the wall now.
The small gaps were filled with a little wood filler to finish the job.
We went with the Numerar Ikea Butcher Block in Oak, and had purposely made the shelves in oak as well, knowing that someday we would be staining them both with Tung Oil to match.
We bought this Dark Raw Tung Oil by Real Milk Company online, and put the first two coats on this past weekend. We plan to do about five coats total on the countertops to help create a water resistant coating. It will be a few days till we can put anything back onto the shelves/counters, so check back soon for after photos!
** When doing research about other kitchens with Ikea’s butcher blocks, I stumbled upon this great tutorial by This and That. It’s definitely worth a read if you are thinking about doing this yourself.
Brick and Brack 