Nick & Christina's House: December 2012

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Holy cow, I am exhausted. With the help of some good friends (that we owe big time) we got 99% of the living room done in a single weekend!

Things we learned: Tiling is messy, we are good at looking like we know what we're doing, wood tile is awesome, grouting is going to suck.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Master Bathroom Before & After

We weren't really intending to do too much in the master bathroom (like lipstick on a pig), but just a little paint made such a huge difference! It's the quirkiest room in the house to be sure, with all the textured glass partitions and steps up to the commode, but it's not lacking character. Right? To refresh your memory, here is the before...

The only thing I really wanted to do was paint those nasty, boring cabinets white and remove all the weird textured glass. As soon as we took the one by the sink down it instantly felt better! All the yellow was covered by pretty avocado green; the cabinets, mirror frame, and ceiling got semi-gloss white (two to three coats!); and most of the brassy fixtures got sanded down and painted with oil-rubbed bronze.

Now, some after shots! They are from my phone, so hopefully they are sharp enough to see the awesome difference. Just ignore the mess and the blue rug, I was too excited to about taking pictures to clean up first.

More pictures to come after it's cleaned up. Still on our to-do list in here is:

Add some handles to the cabinet drawers and doors
Paint the rest of the brass (shower stall, sink faucet, tub faucet)
Find a reasonable color for rugs that won't compete with the rest of the colors in here
Figure out what to do about the wobbly glass toilet partition

Paint colors:
Purple is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Dewberry (Flat)
Green is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Gleeful (Satin)
White is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Extra White (Semi-Gloss)
Bronze is Rust-oleum Universal Metallic in Oil-Rubbed Bronze

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Tiling Phase II: Hallway Transitions

We started tiling in the hallways today! I had an idea for the corner transition to make it sort of like herringbone in the corner but then instead of continuing in the pattern it continued straight down the hall. I'm really excited about how it turned out!

I was worried that the complicatedly cut piece at the end of this hall was going to be the death of John! It was outrageously frustrating getting a piece cut that would fit perfectly.

Full disclosure: I stole these pictures from Andy. I forgot to take progress pictures!

Friday, December 14, 2012

Gleeful Green Closet

Something I really wanted to do in each room is paint the closet a different contrasting color to add some interest -- who doesn't want MORE COLORS? Angela definitely agreed with me and has already painted her closet a fun color, too! (More on that later.) The color is called Gleeful, which feels so fitting for a room that makes me so happy. I've already hung up my dresses in there because I was just too dang excited to wait any longer!

You can see my curtains for this room's window at the bottom of this picture. It was a super happy (gleeful??) coincidence that these curtains that have been sitting unused in a cabinet in our rental were such a good match for the room.

Paint colors:
Purple is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Dewberry (Flat)
Green is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Gleeful (Satin)

Monday, December 10, 2012

Tiling Phase I: Removal

As soon as I stepped onto the crappy laminate floors in the living room, I knew I wanted to replace it. We really wanted wood but we knew there was no way in hell we were going to put up with all of the upkeep required to maintain nice wood floors. Clearly, if we're removing laminate we definitely don't want to put more laminate in. We have always liked the idea of stained concrete but decided it wouldn't really work with the style of house that we were looking for here, so tile was really our only option. There was tile already in the hallways, but it was your basic white foot-by-foot tile with sad gray grout that was about as dull as it gets. So, out it went!

This adorable guy would have destroyed wood floors in about a week, if I had to guess.

Boring! I won't pretend it was easy to get this stuff out, though.

So, we stopped at Lowe's to ogle all of the fun things we finally have a reason to buy and checked out the tile section while we were there. The very first thing we saw was some really pretty wood on display in the featured flooring section. "Next," we thought, but wait! It wasn't wood... it was tile!

Photo from chron.com

At least the ugly floating laminate came out super easy.

Got it cleared out in under an hour!

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Living Room Before Tour

One of the big selling points for the house was the living room! We know it needs a lot of work (giant mirrors, badly stained wood trim, laminate floors, ugh) but it's a great size and shape and has interesting features that we can make over to be totally awesome.

A whole wall of windows and doors! I do love French doors, and this house has three sets!

Corner fireplace and the dining nook.

We have no idea what to do with this mirror. Yikes.

Tall ceilings, yea! Dim-able track lighting, eh. SO MUCH LIGHT, yea!

The fireplace again, this time from the dining nook.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Eggplant

Somehow I convinced Nick that painting the master bedroom purple would be a good idea, and even after seeing the sample on the wall he still didn't think I'd lost it, so we went for it. Our bedroom is eggplant!!

Now we just need to slap some crown molding around the room (and closet) and hang some curtains and we'll be able to check this room off the list! The lovely eggplant purple is Sherwin Williams HGTV Home in Dewberry (Flat).