Sad Headache Sunday and Continued Improvements

 Today was sort of a sad headache kind of Sunday.  After getting some things done around the house, I got a killer headache and spent the rest of the night in my hipster shades hiding from light and sound :( 

But before the devastating pounding started, we got some really great things accomplished and the living room area is nearly done!  Yay!  Not only did we replace every outlet and light switch in the living room and entry way, but we also installed the new chandelier in the entry way, unpacked our bathroom stuff (finally) and organized the master bath, and installed a new doorbell!  It was definitely a slower day around here, but as the smaller projects that we're able to do get fewer and fewer, it's nice to be able to just sit back, watch some Adventure Time, and relax with our cats for a while. 

Here's the photographic evidence of all of our hard work:

The old entryway light fixture that seamlessly combined painted gold and silver plastic, wood paneling, and spray painted black aluminum.  It was definitely one of a kind.  It also hung really low into the entry way for some strange reason.

Our new beautiful light fixture that was actually (and surprisingly) much easier to install (lets face it, Colin really did all the work on this one).  It turns out we learned from the disaster yesterday in the dining room!

Our old yellowed, mysteriously sticky, cracked doorbell.

Our new sleek white doorbell that plays a fancy little tune!

Of course he spent most of the day doing extremely manly things like drinking protein shakes, lifting double his body weight on the bowflex, and hunting giant elk.

Extreme kitten relaxation.

We're more actively researching tiling the entry way and in front of the fireplace (aka watching a million videos on youtube), and hopefully will start on ripping up floors this week.  It's sort of a daunting task, but just knowing that we're almost done with the big stuff for a while is motivation enough!

New Light Fixtures

After lots of hard work, we decided to take today a little slower (ha).  Once we finished a nice long breakfast of waffles, eggs, and bacon, we got to work moving pretty much every box and medium sized piece of furniture into the basement in preparation for pulling up all of the carpet.  We then moved on to a gigantic home depot trip for things like light fixtures, smoke alarms, and other items we needed to get the house back up to code (mostly outlet wiring). 

Since we were committed to lots of train track building with Rogan for most of the night, we only installed one of our new chandeliers.  Let me tell you, it was not as easy as we thought it was going to be!  Those suckers are heavy and our ceilings are ridiculously vaulted, but this light just happened to be in an area too low for our ladder.  The only way we could conquer it was to put the whole light together, have Colin stand on a stool and mount the hardware/wire the new light, while I held the giant thing on my shoulders until he was done.  Here's the final product:

Old

New

It definitely makes a dramatic difference in the room!  Not to mention it's nice to have a light in the living area that wont randomly go out every now and then!  Tomorrow, we're tackling the one in the entry way.  I'm sure with the heavier light and the higher ceiling it should be a piece of cake!

Fireplace Transformation

We finally finished a project that I can share with you!  Over the last few days, in between painting every wall in the house, we've been bringing our fireplace back to life.  Here's what it looked like when we started:

The first thing we did was remove the gold insert and clean out years worth of ash and dirt.

After the clean out

All of the ash that I shoveled out.  I'm pretty sure it had never been cleaned before.

After lots and lots of scrubbing, we finally realized that it was just too stained to survive no matter what cleaning products we used.  I was initially a little sad because I really liked the dark brick color, but nonetheless it had to be painted. 

The first step in painting a fireplace is priming the brick.  You can get masonry primer for this, but the nice people at home depot said that regular primer would work fine if we already had it (which of course we did), we just may have to do a couple coats to hide the stains.  This was after the first coat, but it only ended up taking two.

Next, we painted the wall a nice warm brown tone, only slightly darker than the walls in the hallway, living room, and entry way, and tested out a cream color for the final coat on the fireplace.

After all of the hard work and back and forth feelings about painting the brick, I am thrilled with the end result!  It makes the whole living room look more modern and the fireplace is a beautiful centerpiece for the room. Now all that's left is to replace that gross tile! (coming soon!)

What do you think of the transformation?  Are you of the mindset that brick should never be painted, or is it ok if there's no other way to save the integrity of the fireplace?

Before

After

The end of an era :(

Last night, the magic died.  The last Harry Potter film is finally upon us, and we celebrated accordingly!  At the last minute, Colin and I decided to make an impromptu visit to Portland to watch with friends since he got Friday off from work (yay!)!  This is the last film, and the last time we can wear our shirts without looking like crazies, so we figured it was more than worth it :) 

After a three hour drive we (of course) headed to buffalo wild wings before the big movie with some of our besties! (I also reunited with my baby!)

If my old girl would make it up to WA we wouldn't even need to find a truck!  She could haul everything for us!

My first attempt at getting a picture of the boys.  Apparently saying "this is for the blog!" doesn't elicit the exact response I was looking for :)

Much better :)

The Winging Beauty!

After we had our wing fill, we headed to the movie!  For the first time ever, we didn't have to wait in a huge line outside, they let all Harry Potter moviegoers into their auditoriums to wait!  It was a much better system.  Much warmer.  After finding seats together, we conjured up some free popcorn from Yahoo!  with our wands.

After two hours and five minutes of pure emotional roller coaster, we gave our final review:

I'd say that was one successful conclusion to a Harry Potter lifetime of fun.  Now, please excuse me while I go read all seven books again and cry about how it's ended too soon. 

PS
Um, did I mention there was an ever so short teaser trailer for The Dark Knight Rises?  Yeah it was pretty much the most epic moment ever and I can't wait until Summer 2012!!!!

Major update and a torn apart home!

Wow that was one major hiatus!  But don't worry, my new goal is to try and put aside some time each night to work on the blog from now on! The main reason I've been so MIA lately is this house we recently bought.  My goodness is there a lot to be done!  Here's a rundown of how things have gone so far.

Since the house didn't have a deadbolt, the first thing I did was have Colin install one.  This was also a good excuse to bring the door out of the 80s.  Everything was going fine until Colin's drill ran out of batteries.  The rest of the installation sort of went how that picture up there looks.  However, the finished product was SO worth it, and it feels much safer having it installed (although it's good to know they didn't feel like they needed one!).

We're still trying to find a "brushed bronze" strike plate.

The next order of business was a new mailbox.  Our old mailbox was falling over, rusted, mossy and gross.  Luckily, our dear friends across the street noticed this and presented us with a brand spankin new one!  It's tough to tell in the picture, but it's actually huge!  Plenty of room for lots of freebies in there!

Continuing in our effort to spruce up the curb appeal a little bit, we installed this nice new doorbell!  The old one was gold and pretty gross.  I definitely would hesitate before ringing it.  This new one is pretty and even has a back light that turns on automatically once it gets dark!




Since we had a nice new door knob, and a nice new door bell, we figured it was time to get a nice new porch light!  Luckily home depot (our second home) had some fairly nice ones on super clearance, so we installed those too!  I don't love the glass section, but Colin really likes them so I gave in on this one :)

Finally, and quite possibly one of the biggest outdoor tasks yet, we raked out pine needles and did some serious weeding.  If you refer back to the "sold" picture, and then look at the progress in the picture below, you can see that all of our de-jungle tactics really paid off! (Colin even got me some cute green gardening gloves so that I would be more excited about helping!  He knows me so well :D)

Moving inside, one of the smaller but more noticeable projects we took on was replacing the old 80s light fixtures in the hallway.  There are three of them, and just switching them out for these new ones (also from HD and also on sale!), makes a huge difference when walking down the hall.

Old and gross.

New and pretty!

Quite possibly the biggest project yet, and something that takes up about 90% of our day, has been painting the bedrooms.  First, we had to rip out all of the wallpaper, and then pretty much reconstruct all of the walls with a ridiculous amount of spackle.  This was then followed by lots of sanding and lots of primer.  Here are the transformations so far room by room.  Just keep in mind that I took these at night, and we haven't installed any lighting yet so the colors aren't exactly like they look in the pictures.  Also excuse the giant piles of stuff in the center of each room.  We haven't exactly unpacked yet (and are still sleeping on the couch).

The dreaded pink room!!

Originally

After two coats of primer

The final product!  A nice light green color!

The master bedroom.  It was plain white before.  No wallpaper, but we did prime it because of all of the spackling we had to do.

Clearly Julius approves of this nice new gray color!

The front bedroom.  This room had two walls that were wallpaper with years of paint over it.  After stripping them we found out that the glue they used in who knows when had stained the walls and was pretty much impossible to get off.  After lots of spackle, sanding, and priming, we painted it this nice yellow color.  Now remember, it's night time and the light is from the flash.  I promise it's a much more muted yellow than it looks.

No, the ceiling is not yellow, it just looks that way.

The last thing we did was choose outlet covers for our newly painted rooms.  This was actually pretty difficult because I never thought about whether you're supposed to match your switch covers to the fixtures or the moulding.  Of course they never show things like that in the pictures in home improvement magazines, so after much deliberation I decided that the light switches would get the fancy covers, and the wall outlets would get nice new white outlets and covers.  This seemed like the way to go since we'll be putting in white moulding.  Here are some pictures so you can decide for yourself.  All I know is it's nice to get rid of the gross cracked and yellowed ones that were there before!

New white outlets and covers

Fancy bronze switch and cover

What you don't see in these pictures is all of the moulding my dear husband had to tear out in preparation for all of this.  Not only did he pull out all of the upstairs floor and door mouldings, but he also removed all of the nails to make sure that they were safe to get rid of.  It took pretty much forever.  We also removed all of the closet doors (most were either on backwards or had huge punched holes in them for some reason) and then painted the closets white.

Tomorrow we'll start painting the hallway, entry way, and living room and then we should be done with paint for a while!

We also ordered our laminate floors and moulding today from builddirect.com.  If you're in the market for new floors and are ordering a large amount, I highly suggest you check them out.  They had the lowest prices we could find anywhere for the best product, and were able to give us even more of a discount when I called to talk to a sales rep.  I was initially drawn to them because they were willing to ship me out five free samples (no credit card needed) overnight, but once I saw the product I was thoroughly impressed.  We were able to purchase 12mm sound/cushioner pad attached laminate in the perfect dark color we were looking for for $1.74/sq. ft.  It was a fantastic deal!

I'll be sure to post an update as we continue to paint and get things fixed up around here.  It's a lot of work, but each night we're able to go to bed exhausted and excited about how the house is changing and coming back to life!

Our morning with Rogan

So, I know I've been majorly neglecting the blog since we got here, but to say that we've been busy would be a massive understatement. Between receiving our household goods shipment and starting house projects (that require multiple trips to Home Depot a day), we've hardly had time to breathe.

Since I'm not really prepared for a full update post, I figured I'd share our morning with Rogan instead. I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but our friends Heather, Jorge, and their son Rogan moved in the house directly across the street right as we moved into our house! Of course, on the day their moving truck was coming Rogan's daycare fell through, so he got to come visit us instead! Here's some pictures of how the morning went:

The first thing I did (after building a box fort in the driveway of corse), was put the boys right to work bringing in the trash cans.





Next, we decided to get to work on the front lawn, so Rogan and Colin got the rakes and shovels.












After lots of raking, it was time to load up the wheel barrel with all of the pine needles. Rogan liked his technique better than Colin's.












After lots of hard work, it was time to head inside. Turns out, Lao loves Rogan, and followed him around everywhere. Can you spot him?






Little did we know, the cat tower doubles as a jungle gym. Rogan and Lao had lots of fun playing on it together!
























After I told him the tower was rocking too much and Lao was getting too tired to play, he gave me the saddest face ever:





And finally, while trying to take a picture with our "sold" sign, Rogan just had to get in there too! Turns out this new house comes complete with an adorable two year old! :)

Location:Poulsbo, WA