January is for Decluttering...again

We got a dog.  A really big dog.

Do you know how large of a crate you have to get for a great dane?  And do you know how hard it is to find a place in your house to put that kind of crate?

I say that, because I once again feel like we have too much stuff.  So I have 3 declutter goals for January:

1. Sell unwanted Ikea cabinets (done! $80 on Craigslist...seriously people - jump on the Craigslist train!)
2. Sell a couch (can't decide which one...but we have at least 1 too many...)
3. Empty 12 things out of my office room (which is where the crate now lives) until it is "acceptable"

#3 is the hardest.  That room is where I stash all the stuff I don't want to get rid of but don't really have a use for.  So I told myself yesterday if I can't come up with an immediate purpose/place for it (ex: hang on wall, put in jar with other pens...), it has to go.  I told myself that our house is not a museum and has to have space for the things we have yet to do.

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” - William Morris

Project Recap: Dining and Living Rooms

I talk a lot about projects we are in the middle of, but I realized that I very seldom actually show a finished product. Well with the purchase of a Craigslist coffee table last night, our front 2 rooms are nearly complete enough that I thought I'd have a little show-and-tell. Here's a recap of how we got here.

When we first moved in in 2009, we had pot lights put in, and Jay painted the walls and ceiling white. They were yellow. Yes, even the ceiling. Jay is not normally one to spearhead a painting project, but he HATES yellow. We actually spilled about half a gallon of paint on the dining room carpet but weren't too concerned knowing we had to get rid of it anyway.

You'll remember our record wall from last year we built when both of our dads gave Jay their old records, as well as the old record player from Jay's parents I painted white:



In August last year, I showed my chandelier painting project for the dining room. And I talked about painting an old lamp I took from my mom. My mom just got me this fun shade from Anthropologie for it:



In December of 2010, I showed our tree wall project for the dining room, and you can also see the new wood floors we had installed. (I never put pics of this process up and I just found a bunch, so I'll have to do a follow-up.)

Here is a pillow my mom helped me make around this time using Ikea fabric:



Back in February, I wrote about picking fabrics to recover all my Craiglist finds. Well we did it.

Couch went from this...


...to this:


And chair went from this...

[I can't find the before...I'm convinced I will though]

...to this:


My inspiration was this chair from Anthropologie that I always loved:

This shows the detail of the top of the table we bought last night (notice our wedding book, which I finally did this last Christmas 3.5 years after the fact...it's currently our only coffee table book). This table taught me perseverance with Craigslist - this was the 3rd table I contacted a seller about. I checked every day, multiple times a day once a lost the first 2.


I have learned my Craigslist lesson: upholstered furniture has to be reupholstered ($$$$) - wooden furniture just has to be wiped off.

And altogether, it looks like this!





The only thing we bought brand new besides the shade my mom got and the Ikea fabric for the pillows was the rug. Last December I was having a bad day and just decided I would feel better if I spent a good amount of money, and Jay said OK. So that's what I got.

The grey-ish chairs also came from my parents. They were pink - we had them recovered. And the table by the grey-ish chairs was also from their old house (I think it was in Kath's old room as a nightstand ????)

I have a few more ideas in here, but we've made a lot of progress over the last 2 years!

[Sidenote: New goal for self is to stop using my camera phone and actually get out our good camera!]

Unfinished Project Month - Update

So an update on unfinished projects...I'm still painting kitchen cabinets. Two down, three to go. I now remember why I never finished this 2 years ago.

Today while painting, I listened to Shiny Toy Guns, who Jay and I saw open years ago for Mute Math. They had some radio songs, but I decided today I really like this less-listened-to song:



And this is Jay's favorite off this album:


And this was in a Lincoln commercial:

The Worst Feeling...

...when you find something you love on Craigslist, email the person, and they never respond back.

[Sigh]

August = Unfinished Project Month

I decided a few weeks ago that August should be "unfinished project month." I have lots of ideas for new projects I want to do, so I figured we should finish up a handful of projects that have been sitting 99% complete for too long. We pretty much already had all the supplies we needed. And now that we have a nail gun, these were even easier!

Project #1: Quarter round in my closet
Procrastinated for: 1 year
Time to complete: 20 mins to cut and nail (40 mins if you include my trip to Lowes)
Cost: $4.69



Project #2: Install glass in guest bathroom cabinets
Procrastinated for: 1.5 years
Time to complete: 30 mins
Cost: free (that's right...we already had the glass cut and everything thanks to my mother over a year ago)


Project #3: Touch-up paint baseboards
Procrastinated for: 1 year
Time to complete: 2 hours
Cost: free

I've left the worst for last...painting the rest of the insides of our kitchen cabinets. I wrote about the horribleness of it here. What I didn't mention is that we didn't exactly finish. We didn't paint what we knew we wouldn't use. And we, in fact, don't use any that haven't been painted.

And here's a pic of Jay with my sister's baby Jack at a brewery (blurry because Jack wasn't digging the brewery). Just because they're both cute boys:

Backyard: Planning Phase 1

If there is one thing NOT lacking in our backyard, it's vision. I absolutely obsess over what COULD be because right now there is not a lot happening.

Well tonight was an exciting night, because I found 1 thing I was thinking we could use back there for free. These are now sitting in our garage:



I saw them on the side of the road (trust me, they weren't actually still in the person's yard...they were more on the road, which means you can take them). So right around 9 tonight, Jay and our neighbor Kevin loaded 3 up in the car. I knew Kevin's wife Stephanie would be totally on board with this and want a few, too. [I forgot to mention that they were REALLY heavy...Stephanie said, "They must really love us," as we stood there watching them get them in the car...]



So now the plan is to get a chain saw to cut each in half. We're thinking we'll need to strip the bark off, and I haven't decided about painting. But then they'll be nice little tables.

This is my plan for what I like to call "Phase 1" for the backyard:



We already have the lights, fire pit, stumps (!!), bench (antique store for $150), and captain's chairs (free from my mother...and apparently kind of in right now I discovered while Googling for a pic). I'm thinking about painting the chairs a funky bright color just for the heck of it.

So now we just need some tall plants and a brick patio. (As a side note, I found several palettes of bricks on Craigslist for $100, but you had to go pick them up and figure out how to get them loaded up and transported wherever you wanted them. For the sake of our marriage, I figured it was worth buying them somewhere that would deliver.)

Belong

I'm a bit particular about the art in our house. This really bothered Jay at first - he hated all the blank, empty walls. But my deal with art is that it should be meaningful in some way. I'm completely not a picture person, but I think what a lot of people do with pictures in their house is what I do with our art. So I like to either do it myself or know the person who did it, and I like for it to have a story that is significant to us in some way and represents our life at that moment in time.

Well we've just acquired a painting that fits all the criteria!


At the church we go to, there is a resident artist that paints during all the services. It's pretty incredible because he paints these in just over an hour and does it 5 times per weekend for each service (the five are usually similar with slight variations). Jay has asked him a few times if we could buy one of the pieces he's done during a service, but it never works out. Well 2 Sundays ago, I really liked his painting. So I asked him if we could buy it (he usually sells them for $250 I think), and he straight up gave it to me! It's now in our living room.


In addition to the message behind the painting and Scott's awesome artistic style, another thing I love about what he does is that he painted it on a cheap piece of 4'x3' particle board that's maybe 1/4" thick. Somehow that makes it more accessible to me. We decided to mount it to a 1x3 frame to give it some more substance. Here we are building said frame in our living room (this is the project that actually led us to buying the nail gun).


And since I'm never in a hurry and tend to have a long-term vision, I see this as having 2 friends in the future to really fill up the wall. See?

Small Laundry Room Projects

Sometimes it's the small things in life...

We've just added 3 small, cheap organizational things to our small laundry room, and it makes me so happy. I just really really like for things to look nice and for everything to have a little spot to go home to.

First, a wall-mounted thingy I got at Lowe's to hold brooms, mops, etc:


Second, a screen thing to hide the water heater (these were actually already in our house from the previous owner, and it seemed like a good use for one - we've got 2 more):


And finally, a little drying rack we got at Ikea. This is my attempt at a panoramic to show where things are in relation to each other:


Jay's got some big ideas for the laundry room. We just bought a nail gun (!), and he's more open to projects when he's got new tools to try out.

Adding a little color to our world of White and Grey

You may recall my Craigslist couch that I got about a year ago:


I bought it with the intention of recovering. Well my mom, Jay, and I actually spent hours today looking at upholstery samples. These pictures are horrible because they are from my phone, but the winner is kind of yellowish while still remaining neutral.

What's even more exciting is that I also recently bought a Craigslist chair ($38!), and we also picked out samples for that. We're going bold:


So between buying rugs for Christmas and reupholstering furniture, I feel very grown up.

Goal #5: Paint Something

Goal #5 was to paint something (I previously mentioned that Goal #6 was to read more).

Do I did.

I used all the paint samples left over from choosing paint for the living room, and was then of course disappointed that it was so similar in color to the walls. But that's ok because we'll (eventually) have some brighter things on some of the other walls.

On a sidenote, I also touched up our old TV console. This was actually an old '70s dresser that someone gave my younger sister. She didn't really want it, so I decided that we (me and Jay) should rip all the hardware off, lose the drawers, and spray paint it black. Everyone thought this was such a bad idea. They were wrong.

Paint Everything: Example #2

Awhile back, my mom gave me a lamp with a glass and brass base. I liked the shape, but it just didn't look like it belonged with us. So I painted it. Because that's what I do.

Old lamp from my mother (free):


Lamp shade ($27 online - I had a hard time finding a cheap shade with a spider fitting and finally found one here):


Green spray paint ($5 - I was planning on going white but the shade ended up a little off-white so I changed my mind! And it's a little neon/bright, but there are only so many options of green spray paint):


Now I think he looks like he belongs with us!

Let's Do This Thing! aka Feeling Inspired

I have a sudden wave of inspiration to finish our front 2 rooms. It takes me a long time to figure out what I think a room should look like, and then I obsess over it. And I am OBSESSING over these rooms.

These rooms have been a series of projects over the last year. Have I mentioned how much Jay does not like my projects? First we painted the rooms white, and Jay switched out the light switches and face plates. Then there was a little DIY project when I fell in love with this wallpaper:


Once I saw it, no other wallpaper was good enough. Problem was, it cost $200 a roll! So I fell into wallpaper depression, trying to rationalize why I should spend $600-800 on wallpapering a single wall in our house, especially since we were eventually going to have to buy a table and chairs to go into the room. And then...THEN...I saw these panels on Ikea's website:
It was 9:30, and I made Jay drop everything to go to Ikea right that second before they closed so we could buy them. The entire project was about $100:


(Notice in that picture there is no table, just the amazing green chairs I found at Marshalls. We bought a table a few months later.) And then there was this project. And then this one. Then we followed rule #2 and hired pros to install wood floors. Love it. I have been obsessing over wood floors since we moved in. Current state:

So here's my game plan, people: we've got 2 small DIYs that I can do on my own...no Jay necessary. A few weeks tops, pending the shipment of my lampshade I ordered last night. And then there is a more ambitious (awesome!) project I will need him for (ie it involves power tools). And then a recovered couch and rug later, we're done!

Rule #2 For Owning An Old House

Know when to hire a professional.

[Pictures to follow]

Paint Everything: Example 1

Step 1: Take old, awkwardly located brass chandelier down from above the front door (where anyone over 6 ft tall scrapes head walking under).

Step 2: Clean and prep; spray with white spray paint; let dry; repeat.



Step 3: Rehang in dining room, replacing light fixture that would be better suited for a Bennigan's.

Rule #1 For Owning An Old House

Don't be afraid to caulk and paint everything.