Living Room Progress | Decorating on a Tight Budget at a Snail's Pace

I am SO behind on posts on this blog, its unreal. I have so many projects finished and/or in the making that I could share. Or overshare? But as I say on a daily basis, there just isn't enough time in a day. I don't sleep much. But still, I could use about 8-12 more hours per day. But I'd have to drink 3 more cups of coffee per day and that's not good.  At this point in my life its hard to believe that a few years back I went three years without caffeine. And now I might as well have an IV. Oh well. Enough about that. Time to talk living room progress.
I have taken my sloooooooow, sweet time on our living room...and that is actually a really good thing. I had a totally different vision in my mind for our living room when we first moved in...so I am pretty glad I took my time. This makeover is three years in the making and still not quite finished.

Let's take a look back. This is how this room looked when we first laid our eyes on this home. Not my thing, but it worked for them. And we bought the house so that worked for them too. Except we got a sweet deal. Yay for us.

Then here was the living room right after we moved in. EEK! No better than their version. We had no plans of it staying this way....this was just a temporary arrangement while we completed our family room makeover. Look at little Coop! I can't believe he was that little when we moved in.

Yikes. This is pretty bad too...but honestly....this was just where everything landed temporarily.

Here are a few shots of the then unappealing entryway. Eww. I have had plans to put a gallery wall here since we moved in and three years later it still hasn't happened. I may have changed my mind now.

One of the first things I did in that space was add this skinny little bench. I found it on craigslist for $20. It was dark wood and had giant feet that stuck out of the front and back but a friend I work with cut those off for me and I painted it white. Spray paint and Safecoat Acrylaq are my friends. You can also see here I got a new rug. I pulled the new wall color out of that rug...I actually don't think it will live there much longer though, because now I want something bold and bright!

In this next shot, you can see the light fixture. Brass. And crystal. Not my favorite. That will go sooner than later. I want something funky like this but smaller. You also have a view here of our old, dated front door and a tiny glimpse of another furniture steal scored through a cyber-friend who I met on craigslist. I know. Kinda weird. But in this day and age is it really that weird? Anyway...Kirsten is an uber-creative furniture painting gal. Check out her stuff on her blog. Unfortunately she doesn't live here anymore, but if you happen to be in or near Fargo, you could snag up one of her fabulous upcycled creations. 

Next is the view looking toward the entry and down the hall toward the bedrooms. Sandwiched by these two areas is one of my treasured family heirlooms: my great-grandmother's piano. 

After this dresser found a new home in my bedroom and the dresser from the master bedroom ended up in the girls' room...this old heirloom from my other grandma, affectionately named Gigi, by my kids, ended up in the entryway. A few years ago, I actually found a photo of an identical dresser in Lonny Mag, one of my favorite magazines to shop for design inspiration.  The dresser was being used as a bar in a dining room, which reassured me that repurposing this dresser as an entry console was a great design choice. On the right you can see our new and improved craftsman style front door. 

Last spring, I finally got around to changing the paint color in my living room, entry and hallway. I went with a grey, one shade darker than my dining room. Don't have the name right now but I will come back and update soon.  I can tell you its Olympic Brand from Lowe's because they have low VOC paint at a great price. It turns out to be a bluish gray, which wasn't necessarily what I was going for...but it works... and when I found this beauty staring back at me at one of my favorite consignment shops, I knew the bluish tone was meant to be. We also purchased a new rug from Joss and Main around that time which you can see here.

I found these cute metal tables at Target.  I tried out a few different lamps and shades from Target and Marshalls before deciding on the sleek, mod white lamps from Target and a plain white drum shade with teal stripes along the top and bottom edge.

I found the ikat storage bench on Joss and Main, which I loved because it pulled in the blue from the couch and offered so much storage for our sheet music and even a few blankets.

Then I found these curtains on overstock and I was thrilled, because I had originally planned to hunt down that material and make them myself.  When I came across them on overstock, I knew it had to be fate. Right? Now if you are a design blog stalker like me, you will start seeing this print everywhere, but that's okay. I love it anyway.

Next came these white chairs, that I scored on craigslist for a steal. Its all starting to come together, don't you think?

Here's the view down the hall, before I updated my hallway gallery wall. More on that later.

And here we have the view from the door, with a photo bomb by my baby and my fur baby.

The final touches in this living room makeover happened in the last two months, and although its not completely finished (am I ever really done?)  I finally feel like this is the livable living room that I've been dreaming of.  I found the marble coffee table on JCPenny online, of all places.  I also got it for a steal. Its originally $675 and on clearance for $299. I bought it when they were having a site wide sale, so I think I paid $219 and had free shipping too. Booyah.  The moroccan ottoman poofs are really popular right now and the real leather ones usually go from around $200 each on sites like One Kings Lane and Joss and Main or $275 on JonathanAdler.com.  I found them through a private seller in Morocco and got the pair for $80! They came unstuffed and smelled like an animal...I think they were seriously directly off the animals' back.  But a few weeks in the cold garage later, the smell was gone. I ordered the stuffing on Amazon prime and Voila... Just like their high-priced friends for less than a quarter the cost.

So there you have it. My living room makeover. Let's take one more look at the before and after to see how far we've come.


BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

A Mailbox Makeover | Time for some Curb Appeal

The other day as I was getting the mail it suddenly occurred to me that my mailbox was looking terribly tired and ugly. Eww. See for yourself:

When we moved in, the previous owners had their last name on the side of it with these cheap sticky letters from Home Depot....and when I removed them, the adhesive was all over the mailbox. I was too lazy preoccupied with other projects, so I just bought some of the cheapo letters to spell our last name and covered up the yucky adhesive with our name.

But as you can see, the letters haven't weathered the storm, so to speak. Wisconsin winters and a bunch of shaving cream from that time we got TPed kind of took their toll on the cheapo letters from Home Depot. The other side has our house number with some more durable, yet still ugly numbers.

Yikes. The post wasn't looking so hot either. Since this is one of the first things you see when you pull up to our house, it is obviously not giving the best first impression from the street. Clearly time for a makeover. I knew this would only take an hour or so, So I knocked it out while my littlest babe was sleeping one afternoon this week.

We don't get the paper version of the newspaper, so I took off the little sidecar. At least that's what it reminds me of. And since it is just constantly getting filled with fliers and papers that we put right into the recycling, I figure completely removing it may cut down on the clutter... hopefully the flier delivery people, whoever they may be will just skip us and over time we will even save a tree, perhaps?

The first thing I did was wrap the red flag in tinfoil and I sprayed the entire thing with primer. Rustoleum painters touch. My fave.

Next I sprayed just the mailbox in one of my favorite Rustoleum colors, Summer Squash in Satin finish.
I thought the white post would look nice with the new white trim on our house.

Hmm. But something just wasn't right... this color combination wasn't sitting well with me and the post was going to need many many coats of white to look right. So I sprayed the post with some Rustoleum black in a flat finish that I had sitting in the garage.

Okay, so I like the post much better but the yellow and black combo felt too bumblebee to me... So I busted out my trusty Rustoleum Lagoon in Satin Finish, and I was finally diggin' it.

I let it all dry for about 30 minutes and then stuck on my new house numbers from Vinyl Concepts.

Next I sprayed over the numbers with some Polyurethane Clear Coat to protect it from those nasty Wisconsin winters I mentioned earlier... I think I'm actually going to go out there and do about 3 more coats of that, just to be sure. 

The total cost for this makeover was only $3...which was the cost of the vinyl numbers. I had all the paint just laying around in the garage. I'm so happy with the result. Makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

 Its the little things, right?

Project Curb Appeal

Its about time I share a bit of what we've got goin' on outside our house, because lately we've made some major changes and some minor changes and they have made a HUGE difference in the curb appeal of our home. So, let's take a look back at what our house looked like from the street when we bought it in 2010. These photos were taken by the previous owner just before we moved in. Notice the dated front doors and drab trim color. I knew I wanted to change these from the very beginning but we had have so much work to do on the inside of the house that some of the outside changes got put on the back burner.

In this shot you can see the weird little dwarf pine tree just to the right of the front entry stairs. Personally I think it looks like a Christmas tree with the top chopped off and obviously many other people did too. You wouldn't believe how many times people asked me what happened to the top of our tree...But apparently its supposed to look like that. Anyway, I spent a good hour and a half digging that thing out the first summer that we lived here.

We actually got a jump start to "project curb appeal" when our house was robbed this fall. Yes. You read that right. I was home when it happened and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. But that's an entirely different and long story for another time or post. Nonetheless the burglary is what precipitated some major changes, such as new doors and windows. Obviously the windows and doors were as old as the house, which I believe was built in 1946, so that puts them at the ripe old age of 67. Some of the wood was rotting out, we only had one usable screen per room and the storms and screens were a major pain in the you know what to put in and take out. It was time for replacements, that is certain. 

This is what our house looked like this past December right before the windows and doors were installed.

And here is the dated front door and peeling trim.

 

For the replacement windows, we got several estimates and hunted around to find what we felt was the best quality window at a reasonable price and we ended up going with a company out of Madison that uses Enviroview windows. We had a few bumps along the way with the installation and some errors made by the salesman but all the issues were resolved to our liking and overall we are exceptionally pleased with them... and we were also jumping up and down for the fact that we have 5 years to pay them off with no interest. Sweet deal. 

Here is a view from my bedroom window from last fall.

And here was the view from my bedroom window right after our new windows were installed.

And here is the front of our house just a few weeks after the new windows were installed.  Perhaps you can see one of the errors? The double-hungs in the living room are missing their grids. Eventually that issue was resolved.

Here is the front of the house, after we got our grids in the living room windows...and just after a January blizzard dumped a foot of snow on our driveway.  Gotta love Wisconsin.

Let's take a look at the new front door. I love the Craftsman-style door with the shelf-detail below the windows.

As you can see from the following shots, the door alone wasn't enough.  Our front entry still needed some help.

Well, mainly, it just needed a fresh coat of paint, and it was definitely time to get rid of that drab beige color trim. 

The side door was replaced with the same door as the front door and it looks so much better than what we had. However,  the trim around the door and surrounding the garage door is still in need of a fresh coat of white paint. I thought I would have gotten to that by now but I guess its been quite a busy summer. I'd like to add it to my "honey-do" list, but let's be real. We all know I'll get to it before he does. :) 

Finally in about June I got around to painting the trim around the front door and here's how its looking now.

SO MUCH BETTER!

So...let's take a look at a Then and Now shot of my house from the curb.

I think Project Curb Appeal is going okay so far. 

I'd like to add some black shutters to the living room and bathroom windows.

Next up is a really easy mini-makeover of our mailbox.

Stay tuned.