Refinishing

This specific bedroom set is very important to me. I spent a good-sized pile of $$ to fly to VA, drive it down to Atlanta, and pick up a ton of refinishing products from Home Depot to make sure it never gets into this condition again. 

The furniture was actually my great-grandmother's. It was given to her for her wedding.  The last time it was used, it was in my father's house when I was in 2nd grade. It has been through a hurricane, basement flooding, multiple moves, and now it has a permanent home in my blue guest room.

Initial Sand Down

Love these little wood details.

Continental Furniture Company from High Point, North Carolina.
This company was founded in 1901-2, and High Point was one of the main hubs for the furniture industry in the South.

Primer stage

First coat of Black High-Gloss

Not a bad clean up. I experimented with the nightstand, using semi-gloss instead.

Refinishing the dresser is my project for this week/weekend. We've ordered new veneer for the top and sides, and I've already done an initial sanding. Once the veneer is affixed, it's ready to prime and paint. Sadly the hand-painted flower detail will not be staying. 

The individual drawer fronts will also be refinished, as well as sanded down to alleviate any warped or swollen wood. The last two drawers took a good pry to get out, even though the drawer boxes are in fantastic shape.

The top hutch will be repainted, and actually has spindles that need to be reattached. They hold a face mirror above the dresser, which is in very good condition. 

Stripping the dresser.

The "To-Do Now" List

To Do now or To Do later? That is the question. 

I go to sleep at night with a million and a half ideas running through my head. A million and half tweaks and purchases and things to Google, all because of this house. I've never been the "go slow" type, but my BF and my bank account have the final say. So all of these projects I want to start are being sorted into To-Do Now or To-Do Later lists. 

1) Finishing the Office
After the weekend, I picked up a couple new prints at the Atlanta Arts Festival. That will bring my count to 9 prints to be framed and hung on for my office gallery wall. The office is dark grey and  in addition to the frames, we are waiting for black and white curtains that my "mother-in-law" has volunteered to make. 

Since we both share the office, it will be an even split down the middle: my glam prints to contrast with his anime swords. Quite the Match made in heaven, or Bento Cafe in Gainesville…

Office Gallery Wall Inspiration

I know there are many DIYs for these curtains online.

2) Finish Kitchen (still)

With everything that we've done to the kitchen, it's still not quite finished. To fix our lack of kitchen storage, we've picked out a table/cart from Ikea. When we eventually buy it, it will be our bar cart and cookbook shelf.

The Forhoja Kitchen Cart from Ikea.

Here's some other Kitchen/Bar cart inspiration:

Style Me Pretty

Apartment Therapy

We still need to buy a new kitchen rug, cabinet and drawer pulls, and some form of spice organization. 

3) Landscaping
October is a prime time for prepping our yard. It's too late in the year to be planting, but we've got our work cut out for us as far as winterizing. The turf builder is going down this Sunday, thanks to the seed spreader our friend is giving us. Troy will also be getting rid of the monster patch of ivy that is our side yard. This will give me the time to rake up all the leftover pine straw in the three front flower beds, and replace it with mulch. 

Next month, we are tackling the back and side yards: planting grass seed, trimming low-hanging limbs, and possibly having a very big maple taken down. If we can get the grass to sprout by the spring, we will build in raised flower/vegetable beds. 

We will also be tilling, since there seem to be a lot of dead things on the property. We are very much still novices at landscaping, so any advice would be very welcome. What can we do now, and what can be left for Spring?

Since the cat doesn't like indoor plants, kitchen herbs will go in this on the back deck.

A House with Stuff in it

Our new Driver's Licenses came in the mail last week, so it is official. We live here.

I wanted to name this blog post "Finishing Touches", but everyone knows nothing is ever really finished. The renovations are finally done and everything has been signed off, inspected and broken in. For the most part, everything has it's proper place, and we have an extensive list of even more stuff to buy and projects to schedule.

The real judge comes today, my grandmother.

Guest Room #2 Before and After

Dining Room Before & After

Front Door and Finished Kitchen

Living Room Before & After

My favorite room so far, The Office.

Putting each room together is a big puzzle. There is still a long way to go before things start looking and feeling complete. At the same time, we have ideas for future remodeling and landscaping layouts, ranging from drawer pulls to tree falling to adding square footage. Here is the down and dirty plan:

The First Two Weeks

The first two weeks have been abnormally slow going. The BF said that it seems more like a vacation house since we are have been half unpacked, waiting for the rest of the carpet and cabinet fronts to be installed. In the meantime, we had a few projects of our own to work on.

The first was a memory board for my office. This was a DIY I found online. I picked a quality canvas that had a solid wood frame. The purple material is heavier and very durable, and I used white fabric ribbon. Everything was stapled with my brand new staple gun, and the gold buttons were sewn in to keep everything taut. Nail in some claw fixtures, and it's ready to hang.

   

The second project was a hidden litter box. There are no convenient spaces to keep a litter box, so we created one. We googled some ideas, and found this toy storage bin at Ikea. Using an electric handsaw, we cut a Shorty-sized door. He had no problem adapting, and the litter box is perfectly concealed and odor-free. 

You too can pick this up at Ikea.

Finally the custom cabinet fronts are in! Clean white fronts with seeded glass panes. 

A nice Before & After shot, but disregard the silverware and kitchen gadgets.

My plan for this coming week is to refinish the furniture set we brought down from my parents house, and to finish unpacking. I'm hoping that once that is done, I can show B&A pictures of all the finished rooms. Stay tuned!

A Quaint Housewarming

We picked the date of our housewarming based on two factors: our moving day and our first house guest. Troy's cousin has been staying with us for the first week, seeing friends and helping us around the house. Aside from the late night Magic games, everything has found its place. 

The housewarming was a potluck/banana split party, also to celebrate my upcoming 28th birthday. We went from worried about too many people, to not enough food, to having way too much food and just a small group of 8. Perfect balance. 

A quick tip: If you don't have banana split boats, use aluminum mini-loaf pans. They're the right size, and disposable. 

Much prettier than my banana split.
Source: www.completelydelicious.com.

I've never had a housewarming, or even a party based around me/us since I was 8. Presents are never mandatory, but these gifts I was excited to open. We received a gift card for Crate&Barrel, which I used on new wine glasses and an extra set of silverware. We also got a new whiskey decanter and serving dishes, something we are tragically low in. We also received our very own hookah for the house. Don't get all judgmental. It looks like it's out of Arabian Nights, and it's only a once in awhile thing.

Mostly from Crate&Barrel. Perfect fit in the new kitchen.

First breakfast in our nook, with our new table from Craiglist.

The final carpet installation is today, almost two weeks after move-in. The cabinet fronts are supposed to be installed today, too. I'll finally get to post pictures of a semi-furnished house. 

Design Inspiration

I admit to being an early Pinterest adopter. Some of the pins on my home design board have been in my mind for YEARS. 

So when it came to making this house our own, these were my main source of inspiration.
The photos on the left are my favorite pins. The ones on the right are our place. 

Grey office with Sherwin Williams "Software".
There isn't any overhead light in the office, so it's hard to capture the color.

Dark blue and white dining room. 

Guest room #2 in Sherwin Williams "Resonant Blue".

The very popular "Palladian Blue" from Benjamin Moore, Guest Room #3.

Our kitchen cabinet fronts are 2-3 weeks delayed.
Hope our party guests enjoy seeing all our plates...

We originally chose a sample from Martha Stewart Living. Since it was out of our budget,  our contract found some close samples. The first floor will be done on Monday. Second floor next Monday. 

Final coat on the Radish accent wall. It's a nice cranberry color, and perfect.

In case you're feeling curious, you can check out my board on

Pinterest: Our Little Corner of the World.

Instant Facelift

We put in another day of landscaping to kick off the last week before the move. According to our new neighbor Deb, the previous owners didn't do any yard work. 

I'm predicting it will take another solid weekend to get the yard in shape. That includes: 

tilling a side patch that is the current home to five dead woody bushes, 

raking up a ton of matted pine needle straw, 

ripping out an obscene amount of overgrown ivy (below), 

and trying to resuscitate 6 hydrangea bushes and 7 knockout rose bushes.

We are a few preview pictures of the renovations so far:

I attacked the ivy much more frantically than Troy. 

Guest bathroom.
The contractors are putting in a pocket door, which requires taking apart the actual wall.

My view from the office floor.
The hallway walls need a double coat of Sherwin Williams "Snowbound".
The trim and all the wainscoting was done in oil paint, so they will take an extra day of priming and painting.

The cabinet boxes, kitchen and backsplash all whitewashed.
Goodbye to the muddy pumpkin walls.

My accent wall in it's first coat of Sherwin Williams "Radish". It's not pink, don't hate.

Dining Room in Sherwin Williams "Blueblood".
One more coat so it's not so Captain America.

The worst thing we found in our closet so far: a seashell hat box that my mother gave me last year. On it's way to Goodwill as we speak.