Painting the House Exterior

After my disastrous running of the Georgetown-Idaho Spring Half Marathon (I don't want to talk about it), I headed home and that left time for Brian to go to Sherwin Williams and pick up 15 gallons of exterior paint for our exterior house colors (main color and trim).

I can't believe how excited and proud Brian is by his paint gun.

  

I can't seem to get the colors to come out right on the page, but we are going from beige to a more tan color for the main house color.

The trim will be a more of a white color, but Brian is doing the main color first. Our approved accent color is blue, so we are going to have a blue front door and back door. Maybe we can paint the doors of our shed blue, too.

He and his dad think that they are going to be able to complete the full painting of the exterior in a few weekends.

I will definitely post full before and after photos of this project (and probably some in between as well).

New Back Splash

After our new cabinets were installed, the back splash in our kitchen looked horrible. I gave Brian the authority to pick out our new back splash, so he picked medium to dark blue, subway style glass tiles.

Yesterday Morning:

Last Night:

I just love that this was completed in one day. It looks wonderful!!

We have a few small jobs finish before we can call the kitchen "complete."

1. Change out the outlets and plates.
2. Paint the pantry door a coordinating color.
3. Install under cabinet lighting.

I'll post about those items soon (I hope). I guess it depends on the speed in which my husband and his father can paint the exterior of our house.

New Basement Areas- How to Reuse Kitchen Cabinets

Source: http://kt.realmdigital.com/tb/ken/remodel/

I wish that our laundry room wall looked this good when we moved in. There wouldn't have had to be as much done to get it ready to paint and hang cabinets left over from our kitchen remodel. Also, our space is nowhere as big as the above photo. I would show you, but I completely forgot to take before pictures. For some reason I also forgot to take daily, progress photos as well. What was I thinking?? Nothing, I guess.
There were large gaps between where the joists needed to be and no area for the dryer exhaust vent if we wanted to hang the drywall ourselves, therefore, I hired a company to come in and "finish" it off that area so that we could make it sturdy enough to determine what we wanted to do with that area to make our laundry room a more usable space.



There were some areas that we were okay if it wasn't completely flush with the new drywall. We didn't want to pay to move any pipes or major electrical outlets. And since this wasn't going to be a "highly visible" space, we were okay with work that just met our bare minimum requirements (just the front and side wall- no ceiling).



The work was originally scheduled for a Saturday/Sunday time frame, but, once we heard about the scheduling of the kitchen cabinets, we moved the dates up for the framing and drywall to coincide.



The company came in on Tuesday afternoon and, unfortunately, didn't complete the painting (to finish off the job) until early evening on Sunday. Unfortunately, they didn't take any precautions with the paint, so the exposed pipes are painted and so are parts of the water heater.



Here is the inspiration that I will be going for when we finish of the rest of the area.

Contemporary Laundry Room design by Dallas Kitchen And Bath B&S Woodworking Inc.


The sink will be on the opposite side, but the cabinets and counter will be on the left.


I also like the baskets underneath the washer and dryer.

Traditional Laundry Room design


I like the table on the left.

Traditional Laundry Room design by Minneapolis General Contractor Stonewood, LLC

We are still in the process of completely finishing off our basement. For me, this meant that we have a nice laundry area and a place for me to do crafts and Sam to do his homework (once he reaches that stage in his life).


I wanted to complete this sooner, rather than later, so we had most of our old kitchen cabinets from our garage installed into our basement and laundry room. We also had the electrical outlets moved up to make them more accessible.


Here are the before shots of the basement and laundry room areas.

And here's what it looks like now.

I'm really excited about all the new storage and the way that the areas are more functional.
There are some more changes needed down the line (painted cabinets in the laundry room, chairs, shelves above the table, etc), but this is a great improvement.

Now, we can start working on the smaller items to start having our laundry room look like the photos above.

Have a great weekend!!

Kitchen Cabinets Reveal

Once we moved into our house, it became very obvious that the kitchen needed a lot of work. The cabinets were small and the linoleum was horrible.

Many of the cabinets were hard to access, didn't fit all of our serving items, the size was incorrect for the space (there was a lot of empty white space up to the ceiling) and the color was definitely not my favorite.

After having a few contractors come in and offer me estimates on refacing the current cabinets and replacing them completely with a bead board design, the best contractor's idea was to fully replace the cabinets with a cityscape style.

You've seen the before. Here is the after.

The cabinets are now (at least) 6 inches taller all around the room. There is a Lazy Susan that will allow us to have more room in our pantry for organization. The cabinet above the refrigerator is a lot deeper which lets us store larger pieces. We also have an appliance garage (to the right of the stove) for housing items that we want to keep on the counter, but not in full view, like the toaster and blender.

The next part of our kitchen renovation is adding blue glass tiles as a back splash. Due to the items that Brian wants to complete on the house, I better find someone to install the tiles, so it's not 2013 (at least) before it's completed.

Tuesdays Treasures