From Nasty to Nice

The bathroom upgrades continue! We have really ugly hardware throughout the kitchen and both bathrooms. Seriously, gross. Maybe they were cute and shiny in their prime but today...

Pardon the poor iphone quality before pictures. My camera battery was dead. womp womp. 

Aren't they seriously disgusting? I tried to clean them but they still look gunky and gross. I thought about ORBing them but A. I thought it might be too dark with our cabinets. B. We have a nickel towel bar so I was hoping to tie into that. I decided to try out the Rustoleum Satin Nickel Metallic Spray Paint. 

After like 20 thin coats, here is the much cleaner looking finished product:

The overall effect is subtle but I like it. It's definitely an improvement over the grody old ones. Someday I'd like to replace them entirely, but for a 7 dollar can of spray paint this will do for now!

ORB TIME!

After painting our hall bathroom I've been itching to ORB our mirror.

The mirror itself doesn't bother me too much, but it's just kind of meh. It was here when we moved in and we aren't particularly attached to it so we figured there wouldn't be any downside to ORBing it. For anyone not familiar with the terminology, ORB= Oil Rubbed Bronze.

I propped the mirror up on some scrap 2x4's that were lying around and spread out some trash bags for overspray. To protect the mirror I just taped down some printer paper. Classy, I know. Gotta work with what ya got!

Here's what it looked like after I impatiently ripped off all the tape and printer paper:

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't do so great at the whole "thin, even coats" thing. It was more like one thick and uneven coat followed by a few thin and even coats. whoops. In real life it looks pretty even.

Here's a solid Before & After so you don't have to scroll up.

I approve. Although I want to shimmy it over a smidge to the left so it's properly centered. That sucker is sorta heavy though. I'll get there. The next step might be to ORB that hardware as well... too matchy-matchy?

Hot Tub Removal

I know... that phrase is blasphemous. Why would we remove a built-in hot tub from our deck? WHYY?! Well, if you recall, our hot tub looked like this:

This sucker gots to go! Back in October we finally made it happen!

First we had to dig out all the weeds, er, plants and re-locate all the dirt to the woods behind our house. When we got 2/3 of the way down we hit rock bottom. Literally. The previous owners filled the bottom of the hot tub with red lava rock for drainage. Getting through all of the rock wasn't quite as easy as shoveling out the dirt but we got the job done.

After digging came the fun part! Sawing the hot tub into pieces.

My dad cut the hot tub into 3 or 4 pieces and we lifted it out.

Afterwards we were left with a gaping hole in the deck and a pile of crap on the deck.

We then built in some supports and laid down some new decking.

Later we made our neighbors proud with a classy dumpster in our driveway. Finnigan enjoyed gazing out at it.

Fabric Photoshop

I recently ordered some fabric swatches from this fantastic website. Carousel Designs is a baby bedding company but they have some really cute graphic fabrics. I want to make some curtains to go in our living room so I ordered a handful of swatches and quickly narrowed those down to 3 favorites. Step one was to use Frog Tape to stick them to the trim around the windows. This allowed me to get a bit of a visual as to how the finished product would work (sorry for the different shades of green on the walls. My white balance wasn't agreeing with me).

Option #1: Gray Ikat pattern with a yellow center.

Option #2: Green Ikat pattern with a blue center.

Option #3: Navy blue graphic pattern.

At this point Phil's favorite was option 2 and I was leaning towards option 1. I decided that I needed some better visual aids. Enter my buddy, Photoshop.

Option #1:

Option #2:

Option #3:

Phil was watching Ip Man 2 while I took pictures.

After these imperfect renderings I'm leaning towards Options #1 and #3. I think Option #2 is just a little too much green for the space. #1 is my current favorite but there's something about that graphic navy pattern in #3 that makes me a little giddy. 

What do you think? What's your favorite?

Christmas Crafts... a few months too late

Every Christmas I say I'm going to make something crafty or Pinterest inspired. This year I finally got my act together and did something!

Here was my Pinspiration. A snow globe made out of a wine glass or goblet. How precious is that??

I know a number of family members that would have enjoyed something like this to display at christmas so I set out to make 3 or 4 of them. However it was surprisingly difficult to find christmas-like miniatures.

I tracked down some fake trees pretty easily but had a hard time finding animals or people that were the right size and whatnot. Phil finally picked up a packet of miniatures from Hobby Lobby that had an eskimo, wolf, dog, elk, igloo, etc. While most of them wouldn't work there was a little elk that I thought would do the trick. Some hot glue and and glitter snow later and I had a wine glass snow globe:

Overall a pretty quick and painless project (once I found the materials). Merry Christmas!

Bathroom Painting

Once I got the hallway finished I got the urge to paint something else! The main bathroom was the most tempting because it had the least amount of trim to paint. Last Saturday I woke up and just thought, "I'm going to paint the bathroom today!" So, I did.

Here are the Before photos. Although they are after I took down the mirror and towel racks. Whoops.

After a Saturday of painting here's what I ended up with:

                                                 

                                                 

The bathroom is small so I had to stand inside the shower for this photo. I'd like to do something to the cabinetry and mirror at some point. Maybe paint or stain the cabinets? Definitely replace the hardware. Maybe spray paint the mirror frame an Oil Rubbed Bronze? A new light fixture would be fun too. Maybe some cute dangly pendant?

Oh, the decisions! We'll get there. In the meantime I like the color. I was hoping for more of a blue-green but this is good too. I'm definitely not re-painting this room anytime soon. On to the next!

Painting Bug

The first painting project I took on was painting the living room back in July. I still haven't shared pictures but those will have to come later because I don't have any good ones right now. I began painting the trim in the entry and hallway a few months ago and finally finished it up within the last few weeks!

Unfortunately the only real before picture I have is a screen shot from zillow when we were in the process of buying the house. As you can see it has the same wood trim as the rest of the house and a pink-ish paint color. The same paint is used throughout all of the bedrooms and depending on the light sometimes takes on a violet quality. Mostly it looks pink. I don't like it.

I started out with the best of intentions: sanding down the trim, taping everything off, painting. I quickly learned that I hate the prep work. I wasn't getting anything done because I despise sanding trim. I decided to skip that (probably critical) step. I might regret that in a year when the paint starts to chip and peel but, oh well! Yay instant gratification! Once I made that difficult decision the process moved along much quicker. I got all the trim painted and my mom was kind enough to help me knock out the walls (not literally).

Here's a view from the living room. Doesn't the white trim make everything look fresh and crisp? We plan to do something about the dark wood doors at some point. Not sure if we'll end up painting them or just buying new ones... that's still up in the air! Look at those pretty, green living room walls...yum!

Here's the view looking straight up the stairs. The color reads a little pinkish in the foreground but that's just the lighting. The wall at the end of the hall is pretty true to life.

Here's the opposite view looking down to the living room. 

It's definitely a big improvement over the pink walls!

I'll leave you with another living room sneak peak: