Beautifying a Bathroom {Bathroom Makeover}

So my hallway bathroom wasn't in the WORST shape when we moved in, but it definitely wasn't the least bit cheery either:

Blah, I know. And its only taken me a year to finally get around to doing something about it. There was nothing major that needed to be done. The toilet, sink, tub and fixtures are all Kohler and in excellent shape. The tile isn't what I would choose, but its not bad. Nonetheless, I knew this bathroom doesn't need a complete remodel, but rather simply, just a mini-makeover to bring it up to speed. I've had a plan in mind for awhile. I knew I had to get rid of those awful side-by-side medicine cabinets and replace them with a giant mirror. Yuk. Not only are they rather ugly but the corner of one is chipped and it makes me crazy looking at it. So did this eyesore:

It didn't look like that when we moved in, but it did have too leaky faucet valves (as did the master bath)! I don't know how the previous owners could stand it. Every time we turned on the water in both bathrooms, the faucet valves leaked at the base and pool water all over the top of the sink, leaving that nasty build-up over time. So after six months and several blunders with getting Kohler to send us the correct parts, and a couple no-show events from our favorite plumber, we finally found a new plumber to come fix the valves. He removed the sink in order to do so, which left that eyesore that you can see in the previous photo. I finally had enough of looking and that and the blah beige walls seen here:

So I made the trip out to Lowe's--(can you believe they keep closing the ones near me??) and picked up some caulk and a gallon of Zero VOC Olypmic Paint in Serendipty Semi-Gloss Finish and I was on my way. After 4 hours or so, I arrived at this:

After painting and getting those medicine cabinets out we were left with a giant hole in the wall, of course. Thank goodness my giant mirror covers the whole thing. No need to drywall. :) Also--check out my studly hubby, helping me with the drilling and heavy lifting. The mirror was another craiglist find that also came from the estate sale where I got this dresser. I think I only paid about $10 for it. It came with the dresser that I bought for $25... so I guess technically, if I paid $25 for the dresser, the mirror was actually free. It was super dark and dated wood, so I just painted it white and distressed it to give it a shabby chic feel.

My sister gave me this set of frames years ago as a gift. The colors scheme fit perfectly in here, so I just updated it with some bathroom photos of the kids in black and white.

The darling Good Morning Sunshine print on the left is from a shop called Gus and Lula on etsy. LOVE etsy.

The other print is some DIY art that I made myself after seeing something similar on Pinterest. Its the dates of all of our birthdays with our anniversary in the middle. I love making my own art. Makes it more meaningful.

So that's it. My cheery bathroom makeover. Did I mention I also DIYed the little step-stool too, by decoupaging some pretty scrapbook paper on top?Let's look at the before and after one more time. No more blah beige walls. I'm happy. Sigh.

Ch-ch-changes {Painting an Old Buffet from Craiglist}

So I found this old buffet on Criagslist for $125 but I talked the guy down to $75 because as you can see it was in pretty rough shape. He actually included delivery to my house in the price, but the timing didn't work out right and he delivered it when I wasn't home. It sat outside in the rain for an hour or so and the side of the buffet warped from all the water. So I mailed the guy my check but asked if he would consider giving me $25 back given that I bought it sight unseen all because he didn't arrive when he said he would. So he did. Mailed me a check right back for $25! Bam. An awesome antique buffet for $50.

Not that I didn't have to put quite a bit of TLC into it, but it didn't actually take the long to get it looking like this:

I HEART her. Did I mention I used Rustoleum Painter's Touch Satin Summer Squash spray paint? Then I of course painted over that with my faovrite eco-friendly lacquer, Safecoat Acrylacq to seal in the toxic spray paint fumes. I LOVE the turquoise on the inside of the cabinets and the sides of the drawers. Its such a fun surprise when you open her up to peek inside.

And I also lined the drawers with pretty paper. When I have time I am going to decoupage it in permanently and of course paint over that with my favorite, Safecoat Acrylaq.

Oh and remember the old dresser that I refabbed that used to live right here in my dining room. Well, she found a new home in my bedroom. She's a perfect fit:

Painting a Wood Dresser or Buffet {Furniture Refab}

So I got this beauty for $25 at an estate sale that I found on Craigslist! The day I purchased this was probably my most successful thrifting experience of all time. For $110 I got 6 dining chairs, two beautiful mirrors and two long, solid dressers. I bought this one for $25 and the guy was so eager to rid himself of the other one that he threw in the second identical one for $15! I gave it to a friend, but am actually kicking myself for not keeping it. You can see from this before photo that it was old, ugly and outdated. Nothing a little paint and some new (or even "refreshed") hardware can't fix....

This piece was actually in such great shape (no dings or scratches at all!) that I didn't even have to sand it down before priming. First I removed all the hardware and hinges and then I used Rustoleum's Painters Touch White Primer to prime the whole thing, inside and out.

Next I painted the sides of the drawers and insides of the cabinet doors and the faces of the cabinet drawers with Rustoleum Summer Squash yellow, giving the insides a sunny feel and a nice surprise when opened. It took about 3 coats of spray to get the right amount of coverage. Next I used Rustoleaum's High Performance Gloss White all over the outside of the dresser, again with about 3-4 coats of coverage. However, if I had it to do all over again, I would have used Rustoleum's Painter's Touch Gloss White, mostly because the spray tip is more ergonomically comfortable on the finger to use. Next, to seal the deal (and the nasty spray paint fumes) , the entire dresser, inside and out, got a coat of my favorite eco-friendly lacquer: Safecoat Acrylaq.

To refresh the old, brassy hardware, I sprayed my favorite Oil-Rubbed Bronze, (ORB) which I had left over from my Family Room built-in project.

Next for the bottoms of the drawers, I used scrapbook paper in shades and patterns of white, cream, beige and yellow and decoupaged the bottom of each drawer with a decoupage paste that I picked up from Michaels. Each drawer was customized with its own unique pattern-- So fun and my favorite part of the final product. I followed that up with a coat of Safecoat Acqrylaq and Voila:

For now, this piece has found a home in my dining room as a buffet, but I just picked up another piece (found on Craiglist or course!) that I will refab for use as a buffet and this beauty will take up residence in my bedroom and rediscover its identity as a dresser.

Family Time {Family Room Makeover}

SO now for a post about my first finished living space in our new home...

This was definitely the room most in need of TOTAL makeover....as you can see from the 70s style paneling and dark, dreary woodwork and built-ins, this room was so outdated and dark. You would think it would be impossible for a room that is virtually all windows to be so dreary, but this room actually managed to succeed at impersonating a cave. Yuk. It was my original plan to start my DIY home redecorating here immediately upon moving in. However, since the move happened in the middle of a frigid Wisconsin January, it was unfortunately WAY too cold to start, since the first step would be to paint all of that woodwork and we would need the windows open to do it properly and air it all out. Thus, the room had to wait for the winter thaw to commence.

Here it is in all its glory, pre-makeover:

Did you check out that weird tiled celing?? What IS that? We even pulled down a tile to check out what was hidden below, er, I mean above....and it was actually this really incredible deep-beamed ceiling. Why on earth they covered it with those crazy, basement-esque tiles we will never know. I would have loved to tear it all down to expose the original ceiling. However, with all the tiles glued on with this nasty blue adhesive, it could have taken days or even weeks of blood, sweat and tears....so we opted to just drywall over the whole hot mess. Then we added a narrow crown molding to top it off. I won't even get into the story of buying the crown molding and wandering around the store for what felt like hours, trying to determine if I was purchasing the right thing.... and the days following that fiasco of Mark and I trying to figure out who was going to install it. That was one of those times that you wish you didn't have champagne taste with a beer budget. I mean...who needs crown-molding anyway??? Well, apparently my husband does NOT and I DO. That is what we learned. We also learned that talking about crown molding makes us test our marraige vows. :) Enter Steve L. Our hero. A great friend of ours, who also happens to be the guy that gutted the bathrooms at our duplex, installed the molding beautifully in just an hour or two. I didn't see it happen, but I was pretty DAMN. THRILLED. when I arrived home from work on a Monday and saw it all looking so glorious, up where the wall meets the ceiling. These are the things that excite me. Weird, I know.

So, The Plan: to go white with all the woodwork, built-ins and window and door trim and then do a slightly green tinted cream on the wood-paneled walls and ceiling to give the whole room a light, airy, beachy feel. I've got to look back at the exact names of the colors but I used Olympic paint from Lowes. They have a no-VOC line that is just as inexpensive as all the other Lowes and Home Depot brands. Gotta love that. Non-toxic and cheap. Wish I would have discovered that sooner. Anyway, it was "Delicate White" and "Featherstone" from their Rejuvenate collection. I have now sort of taken on that collection as the inspiration for my color palette for the whole house. We'll see if it pans out that way.

Oh, yeah. See those AWful, bright brass knobs on the built-ins? I took those off along with the hinges and sprayed them all with oil-rubbed bronze spray paint fron Krylon. I actually plan to do that with all the fixtures, knobs, handles and hinges in the whole house. I can't stand brass and its all over this place! The bathrooms and kitchen have been updated with brushed nickel, but the rest of the place is infested with cheesy brass. Shouldn't be too tough of a fix to spray it all and give it a quick-easy makeover, but it will be tedious.

So. The plan in three 'easy' steps:
Step One: Wait for spring and PAINT PAINT PAINT.
Step Two: Buy crown molding (or bed molding as this was called?) and install it (and if you and your husband don't know how, find someone who does!)
Step Three: Flowy, beachy curtains.
(After hunting high and low and lusting over these beauties from Ballard Designs, I settled on some much less pricey, limey green ones from Target. At only 7.99 a pop, purchasing 8 panels didn't make too big of a dent in my pocketbook and I was able to justify some of the other truly needed purchases for our newly and still only partially furnised home. Oh--and since my windows are WAY longer than the longest standard rods you can purchase without special ordering at a high premium, the curtain rods on the wide windows are actually two curtain rods hung right next to one another so it appears as though they are one continuous rod. Genious, huh? Not my idea. Saw it on the YHL blog. My fave.

So--Check out this AFTER shot. I HEART this room. Seriously. What a difference a little paint can make, huh?

Oh--I almost forgot to mention what a steal I got on the rug. Its the diamond jute rug from Pottery Barn. Unfortunately, I don't think its available anymore. I am pretty sure I got one of the last ones available. It was orginally over $300 for the 8x10 size. Anyway they had it on sale online for $149.99 but it was on back order for 3 months! I might be one of the most impatient people alive when it comes to stuff like this, so that would be WAY too long for me to wait....so I called the local store at Mayfair Mall to see if they had it in stock and they did, only it was $199. I asked if they would honor the online price, 'cause it never hurts to ask, and I got lucky and they did! Booya. A HUGE, awesome, natural fiber rug for 150 smackeroos.

As you can see, I also added some interest with a bold color on the back of the bookshelf (Olympic's Caribbean Splash)and some accent colors via the pillows, curtains and accessories. Oh...and I have a post coming up dedicated to that amAzing craigslisted (did you know that's an actual verb?) coffee table.

So...tell me. What do you think??

The Coop {Boy's Bedroom Makeover}

So this is how Cooper's room looked the week we moved in:

Not pretty! Check out that faux chair rail. Apparently the previous owners had some affection for chair rails and painters tape. I guess its fine if you don't mind it looking like your room is chopped in half...or if its 1992. But fortunately or unfortunately, I DO mind and its NOT 1992. So anyway, as I mentioned, we had to do the same thing in Lucia's room and it was a PITA to sand down flat. In this room we had navy blue dust everywhere. I guess when I think about it, its not an extremely labor-intensive job, but you definitely have to make sure to wear a mask and some old clothes. The good ol' handsander did the trick. It took about 30 minutes of sanding time along the top and bottom edge of the stripe, pressing pretty hard with the sander...and when the not-so-lovely blue stripe was finally all sanded down, we added a couple of coats of some Behr Almond Toast on the walls and some Behr gloss white on the woodwork (For some odd reason this was the only room in the house-minus the family room-that didn't have white woodwork)........ and VOILA!

Here is what Coop's new "Coop" looked like after our DIY makeover:

I am pretty happy with how it turned out! I picked up the awesome flatweave rug at IKEA. The bed was a housewarming gift from Mark's mom which we bought at JCP online. It even has a built-in trundle bed, which you obviously can't see from this angle.

I had some curtains just like these in my living room at the duplex and I really wanted to use them in this room but I only had two. They were the Nate Berkus line from Linens N Things, which apparently doesn't exist anymore, so I had to re-create them myself. I bought these plain brown panels from Target Boutique and added the ribbon detail on the top and bottom using iron on tape. Nifty, huh?

The Expedit shelf, which I LOVE, is IKEA also and comes in three different colors. We got the white one for the playroom also because I loved it so much in here. The baskets, which were only $5 each, were from Big LOTS of all places! The armoire we got at TJMaxx when we bought Cooper's crib for his nursery. It was a set and we only bought two pieces. I'm not really a fan of "sets" and had originally planned to paint this piece, but at the moment, I don't mind it in this wood tone. The Bamboo roman shades are from Home Depot. I hung them all as close together as possible for a seemless look. You could achieve the same by ordering custom sizes to go all the way across each set of windows but that would be much harder on the pocketbook then my bargain find!

I ordered the vintage train prints on this wall and above Cooper's bed on Fulcrum Gallery for under $10 and just framed them in frames from Target. The awesome train shelf above the bed is from Pottery Barn Kids. (I had a gift certificate!) and the Railroad Crossing Sign and vintage WI license plate were found online also.

So, that's the lowdown on Cooper's room. Its been done since February and I am just now finishing this post....and just as I was finishing up, I went upstairs to discover my two little bugs in bed reading together:

I posted this photo of the peanuts on facebook and a high school acquaintance told me the room looked like it was straight out of Pottery Barn! THANKS, Paul! What a compliment. Pottery Barn taste on a garage sale budget. I guess it works?

Kids Come First {Girl's Bedroom Makeover}

So the very first thing we did after moving in was order pizza. But moments later, we began decorating the kids rooms. Not the living room or family room or dining room or master bedrooom. The KIDS ROOMS. Its fitting that we would start there, because of course, as everyone knows, once you have kids, they come first. Many, many, MANY of the things that were so important before kids (i.e. manicures, shopping for clothes for myself, long hot baths, working out!) suddenly fall by the wayside and you live and breathe for your kids. In fact, come to think of it, I don't think I have painted my own nails, let alone gotten a manicure in the three years since Cooper was born and I seriously wouldn't have been caught dead without perfectly manicured nails BC (Before Cooper).

Anyway...We started Coop and LucyLu together in Lucia's room, which suited them just fine, because they were sharing the tiniest of tiny bedrooms at the duplex just a day earlier. Ironically after the crazy months of adjusting to finally get the two babies in the tiny room together without waking eachother up at night, they eventually ended up loving being together so much that Cooper often crawled out of his crib and crawled in with Lucy and we would find them all curled up together in the morning like two little puppies. Just melted my heart. Thus, I was thinking that the transition to a new house and separate bedrooms might be a bit much for them and sharing for a couple weeks while we worked on the rooms would be just fine. SO....let me give you a before shot of Lucia's room with the two cribs in there.

Pretty bad, I know. And those stripes were a pain in the you know what to sand down. UGH! Red dust everywhere.

So after A LOT of sanding, two coats of _________ paint (gotta look back at my swatch for the name) and some DIYed curtains later, it looked like this:

Here's a look at the curtains up close. Okay, okay. I didn't sew these myself. I could. If I wanted to. And if I had a sewing machine. That's truly what's holding me back. (Mom, if you are reading this, feel free to donate your machine when you upgrade to that one that you really want.) But I did DIY by doctoring up the store bought ones from Land of Nod. You see I wanted really long curtains, that I could hang high and wide to make the window look much bigger, but no one sells cute girly, yet sophisicated ones that don't cost an arm and a leg. So I bought these pink ones from the Land of Nod and then bought one extra panel in the same pattern in green and cut it up to add an extra 10 inches to the bottom by using iron on tape and this cute pink polka dot ribbon to cover up the seam. See? What do you think? OH! I almost forgot. I used the extra green material to recover the cushion on the bench at the end of her bed. Perfect fit.

Here's Lucia's little "art gallery collage" that I created on the wall above the dresser-made-changing-table. I created four of the seven pieces of art by using paint, tissue paper, and decoupage. I saw an artist online once that made similar children's art and I coldn't afford the price tag, so I thought I would try it myself. SO I can't take credit for the method nor the designs. But I think they turned out alright. I also painted the mirror pink and the beautiful watercolor framed art on the other wall, hanging over the crib (which you can also see in the mirror) by an artist named Judie Bomberger was already framed in that cool wood frame, so I just painted it pick to coordinate with the pink from the curtains and the mirror.

So that's that. My little girly girl room for my little girly girl who also happens to be a monster. A LuciaMonster. More about that later.

This Full House

As of January 2011, this is my new house.

My last house was full. Very full. We bought this duplex in 2005 shortly after getting married and lived in the lower two bedroom one bathroom.

First it was just us; Mark and Me. Then came Marley, our Golden Retriever, who we renamed after one of our favorite musicians when we adopted him. If only we knew how fitting the name would become....I'm sure you've seen the mischievious Marley in Marley and Me? Our prayers were answered when Cooper was born in May of 2008 and shortly thereafter, on our 4th anniversary, October 29th, we found out that we were expecting Lucia. 14 months to the day after Cooper, Lucia arrived on the 14th of July, 2009. They are both our little miracles.

Thus, our little home had become a very full house. Full of "stuff," but more importantly, full of love for my husband and the children I have always longed for and full of gratitude for the life that I have been blessed with. I once heard the saying, "The thing I love the most about my home is who I share it with," and that is SO true. I like to think that Mark and I live by that slogan. We love to entertain and bring our friends (whom we see as our extended family) into our home.

Now that we are beginning a journey to make this new house our home, our house continues to be full. Not so full of "stuff" anymore--perhaps because there is actually more room for it, perhaps because I've made it a mission of mine to donate or sell all of our non-essential "stuff" on cragislist....but it continues to be full of love, family and friends....and I am so grateful that it is mine. This is the story of our journey, as we make this house our home. Its my dream house. My Full House.