09/16/13

spray paint and a project from my YHL book

Originally published on May 14, 2013 at twentysixcats.com

Today I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time… It involved spray paint and a project from my Young House Love (YHL) book! I gave our old brass chandelier an update.

It seems that I don’t have a “before” picture, boo. Well here is the closest I have:
Ugly chandelier

One of the glass globes broke a while ago, so we took them all off.

First I collected my spray paint. I used stuff that I already had from a previous project. I ended up buying another can of the metallic spray.
Spray paint

It was pretty dirty, so I cleaned it with a damp rag.
Before!

I covered the light bulb sockets with painter’s tape so they wouldn’t get paint in them, and then I started with the primer. I don’t think this is always necessary, but since I already had the primer I decided to go for it.
Coat of primer...

After the first coat of the metallic spray. It’s somewhat of a charcoal gray – I really love this color.
First coat

Closeup, while waiting for it to dry.
Waiting to dry

I just love the metallic finish.
Waiting to dry

Once dry, I took off the painter’s tape and put the bulbs back in!
Finished!

Hanging up! (Sorry for the not great picture – it was getting dark, and if I waited until tomorrow to take a picture I’d probably never get around to it!)
In place!

Here it is with the lights on.
With lights on

I really like it! Definitely an improvement. Now I need to get some pictures of the entire dining room with the “new” light fixture…

09/14/13

Well, hello there!

Almost a year of silence on this blog. Many of you noticed that it disappeared for a while… A lot has happened in the past year and I wasn’t sure what the future of this blog was, so I was hesitant to invest any time into it. However, I think this blog is good for me to chronicle just how far we’ve come in regards to this house.

I am going to try to update with some of the projects we’ve done in the past year. They have mostly been decor-related and not anything major.

Over the past year, we have tossed around the idea of selling this house and buying another that needed less work. We did a lot of number crunching and options investigating. We have tossed around a lot of ideas, talked about our dreams and goals, and did some soul searching. We’ve been uncertain for a long time. We contacted real estate agents and talked to our neighbors to get a feel for the current market. However, it came down to the fact that we need major foundation work and the market just hasn’t risen enough to support that. So, we have decided to stay put for the time being.

When we were talking about selling, I made a list of all the little things we could do to help make the house more attractive. I was surprised at how many little and inexpensive items there were… it made me wonder why I hadn’t bothered to do them yet. I have really struggled with my feelings towards this house, and I think a lot of these little details would go a long way in helping me feel more positive.

So, I decided to resurrect this blog. I am hoping to continue to chronicle our adventures, but I also want the reminder to be positive. I’ve been updating the before & after photos pages (I’m about half done at this point), and I always forget what this house originally looked like, and how much better it is now. I think I just focus on the imperfections. Going forward, I hope to:

  • Not focus too much on the future. It’s fun to brainstorm, but I think I will reserve that for private off-line. If we’re actively planning a project, I’ll share that, but if it’s just hopeful “someday” dreams… I’m going to try to avoid doing too much of that.
  • Not talk in depth about the problems of this house. For one, it gets me down. I want to explain issues that we run into, but I don’t want post after post listing all the reasons why this house is a fixer-upper.
  • Be positive and use this blog to motivate me to take care of the small things. I might resurrect the Project Tuesday or whatever I called it. Or maybe I’ll find my own pace.

And as always, I’m a busy mom of two little children. If weeks (or months!) go by without a post, I’m not going to feel guilty. Sometimes I’m not actively doing things to our house – I’m just trying to maintain the current state!

10/11/12

Welcome, fall!

The weather is definitely cooler here, and fall is in the air. I would love to be the person who decorates the whole house for the season, but to be honest I’m doing well to get my fall-themed wreath hung. :-) I picked this up a few years ago, and I like how the vibrant oranges look on our front door.

Welcome, fall!

Fall wreath

Welcome, fall!

10/10/12

New Mailbox

When we last left off, we came home from vacation to find that someone ran over our mailbox. It took several days to get a new mailbox. I opted for inexpensive at Home Depot and bought a kit that included the post and all necessary pieces, and the mailbox portion separately. Our neighbor offered us some leftover cement and a post hole digger, and actually he helped us get the post in the ground. That was very helpful, because Paul had injured his hand and was having trouble with the manual labor portion.

New mailbox

I went with a black mailbox to match our shutters, and white post to match the trim. I really would like to do something with plants around the mailbox (perhaps some flowering vines going up the post?), but it’s a very shady area. I tried a flowering vine at one point (you can see the pot in the cinder block at the bottom right of the picture), but it quickly died. I hope to move those azaleas to another part of our yard this winter, so maybe after that I can do more with the mailbox.

10/10/12

Well hello there!

I haven’t blogged here in ages! I’m going to try to highlight a few of our projects that we’ve done, but mostly we haven’t really done much to our house recently. Here is the main reason why:

Caroline

Caroline joined our family this past July. She was born in our home and is now almost 3 months old. How did that happen?? Time just flies.

We had to take updated pictures of our house for our homeowner’s insurance, so I thought I’d share here.

Our house

Side of the house

Back of the house

My sister-in-law is doing a 31 Projects in 31 Days Challenge for the month of October. I love the concept, but unfortunately this month isn’t going to work out. Between having events taking up our Saturdays and Paul’s work schedule preventing either of us from being productive during the week, I think 31 projects would just be too stressful.

However, I did make a list of 31 projects and I’ll see how many I get done this month, and I do hope to put them here. I should get two projects with each one – one to actually do the project, and one to update the blog. :-)

05/28/12

Coming home from vacation

We went on a little jog down to Orlando this weekend for my nephew’s 1st birthday! We had a wonderful trip. My brother and sister-in-law just moved into their new (old) house and I look forward to seeing what they do with it! Perhaps it will inspire me to work at decor in our house.

Coming home we were greeted with a slew of issues, which is frustrating.

Shortly before we left, we noticed our bathtub is leaking. We didn’t have time to deal with it before, so we need to figure out the problem and best solution now. The downside of having only one bath/shower! Fortunately our local Y (where we are members) has showers available.

Speaking of plumbing, we also came back to a dripping kitchen sink faucet. It wasn’t dripping before we left, and it isn’t bad, but it’s still something that needs to be dealt with.

We came home to find our mailbox on its side – apparently someone decided to take it out with their car, and drive off. Sigh. So today I went and bought a new mailbox, and now that Paul is home from work for the evening we’ll figure out how easy it will be to put up. (I’m 7 months pregnant and he has an injured hand – we’ll see!)

The last annoyance is our stairwell light is burned out. I know, very minor, but involve dragging a chair upstairs and taking down the light fixture. I’m mostly exhausted all the time which makes these types of projects difficult.

I’ll post pictures of our new mailbox once it’s up and my camera is back from the repair place.

05/23/12

front yard daydreams

I spend a lot of time daydreaming what I’d like to do with certain problem areas around our house. It tides me over while we’re in a position that we can’t really do anything, heh.

One problem area: We live on a corner lot. Apparently, people seem to think that means that we are totally fine with them cutting off the corner and walking right through our yard. This drives me nuts. I feel like it’s rude and it makes me uncomfortable that they walk so close to our house. (How easy would it be to grab something off the carport?) Also, I worry a little that by letting someone on our property and not doing anything to stop it might invite a potential lawsuit later if they should injure themselves somehow and sue me. Yay, America and our court system. I’m sure that isn’t a very common scenario, but I’ve also been around enough people who have found themselves at the wrong end of a lawsuit to know that fighting something like that is tedious and expensive.

And just to illustrate, I added a blue line to approximate where people are generally cutting across:

Doesn’t it look nice and inviting to cut across?
From the edge of our yard

And by the way, 99% of the people cutting across the property are adults. I actually have only once seen kids cut across. So they are very definitely people who should know better!

I have been brainstorming about putting up a fence to take care of this problem. A fence would also give me some peace of mind about making it more difficult for toddlers to run into the street. I have gone back and forth, and have decided that a fence along the shorter side would be cheaper and still look nice. Here is what I’m talking about:

Our yard on the other side

Here are my thoughts about what we should do…

First off, I’d like to remove the two random bushes. I don’t know if they can be moved to elsewhere in our yard, or if we should rehome them. I’ll have to look up what kind of bushes they are. :-) On the left side of the picture, you’ll see some gorgeous azalea bushes. I think they’re beautiful, but they are not in a good spot in our yard. It’s very difficult (read: impossible) to see if anyone is coming when you are backing out of our driveway. Also, if a car parks behind them, I can’t see the car at all from the house or the driveway – which makes me nervous and a safety hazard in my opinion. So transplanting the azaleas is something that needs to happen regardless.

Once the bushes are gone, I’d like to put a fence along the road and up our property a bit to made a corner. (I need to research setback laws for our county.) I am leaning towards a white ranch fence, or perhaps a split-rail. Something like these:

(Images from here and here)

From the very brief pricing I have done, they would be about the same price for the 100ft. length (no gates) we’re talking about. I also have visions of a pretty flowering climbing vine along the fence, or just flowers, to make it appealing to the eye. Of course, I know nothing about plants so I’ll have to talk to someone about that. :-)

So what do you think? Do you prefer ranch rail or split rail? (Picket fence would also work, but it seems a lot more expensive.) What flowering vine would look nice?

05/11/12

Brainstorming our bedroom makeover

I mentioned in my post about our bedroom that I was hoping to sell our current dresser/nightstand and replace with something that fit the room a bit better. I am not sure when we’ll have the finances to do this, but it’s fun to brainstorm.

As a refresher, here are the pictures of our bedroom as it stands currently:
Looking into our bedroom
Nightstand, door, dresser
I want to get rid of the dresser/mirror, the nightstands on either side of our bed, the other nightstand, and probably get a headboard as well. I think a nice rug would complement our room well, and we definitely need to think about window coverings/new blinds. Those would be father in the future, of course.

After checking out all the dressers in Ikea, I think this is the one I want (the HEMNES 8-drawer dresser):

I also like the matching nightstand (the HEMNES chest with 2 drawers):

There is also a matching headboard that I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t have strong opinions on the subject. I’ll have to be creative about replacing the mirror, but Ikea has a lot of fun options.

I really like all these pieces in white, but I don’t know how well it would match our walls. They are a very, very light blue/gray color – they look white in pictures. I love their color, but it wouldn’t be enough contrast to white furniture. I have two options… One, paint the walls of the room to a darker color – perhaps the same blue/gray but darker? I don’t mind doing this, but it does add another cost to the room.

The other option is to get different color furniture. The HEMNES dresser and nightstand come in three other colors:

Unfortunately, the headboard only comes in white so I’d have to look for something else. I can’t decide which one I like best and will match our room. We have somewhat of a blue/tan/green theme going on, matching our quilt – I would probably continue with that color scheme.

I need to find something for between the closets and door. If we put a piece of furniture there, it needs to be narrow – I am always hitting my leg on the corner of the current nightstand. We also need an easily activated light, since the switch on the wall works the overhead fan. I was thinking a floor lamp, but at the same time I would really like to have some places in our room that are out of reach of little hands. I could put shelves on the wall over the dresser – on either side of the mirror perhaps? I still need to think through our options for this.

What ideas do you have?

05/5/12

some updates to our bathroom

I have been working on turning the before/after pictures into separate pages (instead of linking to past posts), and I noticed that even though we haven’t done any major updates to our full bathroom, it still has changed a little bit since I put the original pictures here. I decided it was time for an update!

We also made a couple of small changes this weekend. Our shower curtain bit the dust, so I bought a fabric shower curtain liner to replace it. We also were having some issues with our showerhead so we replaced it with a new one.

Here is the bathroom:
Our lovely bathroom

Comparing to the last picture, you can see that we no longer have a litter box and I also fixed the curtains. I simply cut off the valence and hemmed the bottom so the curtains sat slightly below the sill.

Sink area

You can see the curtains a little better in this picture (and compare to before). There are awnings outside over a few of the windows, which we’ll probably remove whenever we redo the windows – you can see the awning, though when you’re standing right there and look out you mostly just see the backyard (since you’re most likely looking down and not straight out). We also had to replace some of the lightbulbs, which did brighten the bathroom a little bit (than the previous one bulb). We look forward to someday replacing the whole unit to something prettier!

New shower curtain

Previously, we had a clear shower curtain liner. The shower curtain we got for our wedding is very thick and I was concerned it would make the shower area too dark. However, that clear liner was starting to wear out, so I bought a white fabric liner. So far, I’m a big fan! I was worried it would be too dark, but it let in a surprising amount of light. Also, it made the shower seem cozy like a well-lit cave.

New shower head!

I’m a big fan of our new shower head! I’ve only taken one shower with it, but already I’ve noticed a huge difference in pressure.

Still the same old mirrors

This part hasn’t changed really, as compared to the previous picture. We still have our lovely wall of mirrors. When we have the money to redo the bathroom I am excited to take these mirrors down. :-)

05/3/12

From Hovel to Home

I finally changed the name of this blog! I suspect this will also affect those reading via RSS subscriptions so hopefully I don’t lose anyone with this change.

From hovel to home…

A hovel is “a small, wretched, and often dirty house”. It’s also another name for a shed or something similarly simple. Now certainly our house doesn’t fit the strictest meaning of the word, but the idea is similar. Hopefully we’ll be able to turn this house into a beautiful home that is a pleasant place for all who enter! (We’re not there yet!)

Next up is a redesign – I’d like to find a nice theme that includes a picture of the house in the header. I am also working on my before/after pages so you can better see the evolution of each room. And someday I’d like to make an earnest effort To have a Project Tuesday feature, but I suspect that now (when I’m 6 months pregnant) is not the time to start!