Reno Round-Up, Part 1: The Outdoors

Another gap in blog posts and you know what that means: I've been busy, which sucks.  I have an ambitious list of projects for this summer and I WILL make time for them to happen!

I thought it might be good to take a cue from other popular blogs and do a little "renovation round-up" to see what we have already accomplished and what is still on the to-do list.  Maybe it will make me feel better? So here we go, starting with our outside projects:

General Yard

DONE:

• Cleaned up edges of pathways
• Cleared out old brush
• Bought lawn mower
• Have kept up with lawn maintenance...I know that's not a big deal, but we've been doing it so I feel like we (and by we I mean Sean) deserve a pat on the back

TO DO THIS SUMMER:

• Finish cleaning out dead plants and leaves from fall
• Reseed some small patches of grass

LONG TERM TO DO:

• Remove rocks and plant new stuff in front and side yards
• Landscape back yard
• Plant lots of lilacs

Front Entryway

DONE:

• Remove nasty old bird poopy wreath

TO DO THIS SUMMER:

• Power wash house
• Repaint the gable (is that the right word for it?  Awning?)
• Replace lighting fixture
• Replace house numbers
• Replace mailbox
• Paint front door
• Replace door hardware
• Add potted plants

LONG TERM TO DO:

• Replace front door at some point

Courtyard

DONE:

• Swept & cleaned
• Put out little table & chairs

TO DO THIS SUMMER:

• Stain table & chairs
• Plant vines to cover lattice by garage
• Buy grill 
• Buy additional patio furniture
• Add more potted plants

LONG TERM TO DO:

• Replace concrete--the drainage is awful
• Hot tub (I'm not joking...how awesome would a hot tub be out there?)

Next up: the downstairs...stay tuned!

Spring is here...

As I write this, I'm listening to the rolling thunder sweeping across the prairie. We are currently under a tornado watch and a flash flood warning.  So far in May we've had 9" of snow dropped on us by a blizzard, 100 degree temperatures, and now thunderstorms/tornados/flooding.  It takes some adjusting, this "weather" that Minnesota has.  Mostly because in California, we don't have any.

Brody doesn't handle the thunder well..he gets a somewhat manic happy/panty face and follows us around wherever we go.  At night, he insists on sleeping on the bed.  Brody is incapable of jumping onto our bed by himself, unless there's thunder, in which case he's imbued with some super-puppy strength and can propel himself up and onto our bed with no problems.

Anyway, here are some pretty pictures from earlier in the day, pre-storm:

We bought a lawnmower!  Sean's mowed twice already.

Finally looking like spring...two weeks ago, this was covered in snow.

Sean planting trees.

Look very closely...

Mama duck nesting in our neighbor's yard!  She's got 12 eggs under there.

While Sean rushed to get yard work done before the storm hit, I kept chipping away at our guest room.  There's still a lot to be done, but it's starting to look more like a real room.  Today I hung curtains!

They still need to be hemmed, but I'll do that later when I get a sewing machine.  I love how much adding curtains transforms a room.  These were $20 a set at IKEA, and the curtain rods were $25 a piece at Target, so for the whole room it was under $100.

I also got this lamp at IKEA, which I am totally in love with.  It's a little impractical since the arm sticking out makes it take up a lot of width, but I'm thinking it'll be really handy once I put a chair in that corner.  Our guest room will double as my knitting/craft room, so I can adjust the lamp to focus it on my needles.

More IKEA, obvs.  This still needs some styling, but eventually all of the cubes will be filled with either books or knitting stuff/yarn.  I used to use those drawers for office supplies, but I'm finding that I really don't need a home office any more (since my real one is just a few minutes away).  I'm thinking the drawers are going to become knitting needle storage.

Still on the to do list for this room:

• Finishing arranging/styling bookcase
• Hang wall art...I have some ideas but haven't purchased anything yet.
• Hem curtains
• New bedding
• Add comfy chair and rug
• Paint doors & replace handles
• Organize closet
• Build radiator cabinet
• Add crown molding...eventually.

For now, I'm just hoping that our basement doesn't flood and our house doesn't wash away!

The Blue Room

Well, dear readers, hello and welcome to May.  Last weekend was absolutely gorgeous...my thermometer hit 81 at one point.  I spent some time with Brody at the park, had a picnic with the cast of my show, and spent a lovely afternoon exploring Northfield, Minnesota.

And then this morning, May 2, we woke up to this:

(Well, to be completely accurate, that is the view out my front door right now at about 2:30 pm.  The snow plows have already come by.  It is still coming down fast and furious.  There's about 9" on the ground.)

School is cancelled, my show tonight is cancelled, and what better way to spend a snow day in May than blogging and doing house projects?

Let's backtrack a bit: the big project over the last few weeks has been tackling our guest room.  It's been sitting there, full of boxes, feeling rather unloved ever since we moved in.  We'd finally gotten to the point where we really needed the extra storage in there, and so we decided to dive in and make it happen.

Here's a reminder of what it looked like when we bought the house:

Idea #1 was just to scrape down the dragonfly decals (they're like wallpaper, but dragonfly-shaped) and paint.  But, the more we've lived here and thought about it, the more we realized that we cannot. Paint. Over. Any. More. Wallpaper.  Even if it's already been painted over.  So we decided to take the plunge and scrape it all down.

I feel like I've already talked through this process enough times on this blog...you guys know the drill, right?

Ooh, what is that lovely wallpaper underneath?

Wood paneling wallpaper!  Of course!

And some sort of desert landscape.  Beautiful.

Never fear, Sean will destroy it.

Here's what was different this time around though: as I scraped, I found something lurking underneath the layers (around 3 wallpaper, 1 paint):

A crack.  A rather large (floor-to-ceiling), nasty looking crack.  That someone had patched. OVER THE WALLPAPER.

So, the patch came down with the wallpaper and I was left figuring out what to do with the crack.  One trip to Ace Hardware later (I love our local hardware store), and I was ready.  Fiberglass tape and ready-mix plaster!  I didn't get many pictures because it was messy and very dusty, but here's a few so you can sort of see what it looked like afterwards:

First I taped over the crack, then I spread the plaster over the tape.  Here you can see the tape with the plaster applied.

Here's a view of the whole thing so you can see how big it is. 

I sanded it down once everything had dried, but BOY did that make a huge mess.  I probably didn't sand it quite as well as I should have because the dust was so fine and was getting everywhere.  We did get everything cleaned up, but I'll only use this method again in the future for really major plaster repairs like this one.

The good news is that now that we've primed and put two coats of paint over it, it's barely visible.  You can still see the tape a tiny bit if you know exactly where to look, but if you're not looking for it it just disappears into the wall.

The other major repair project in this room was the floorboards.  Here's what they looked like when we moved in:

Basically, they did a terrible job installing them.  There's a gap between the board and the wall, and a gap between the board and the trim at the bottom, plus they never filled the nail holes.  So, I went around the entire room and filled the nail holes, plus caulked in both gaps where it was needed.  It was hard to get a good shot, but here it is with the wood filler and caulk:

I did two coats of paint on all of the trim, and it looks so much better now!

Here's some photos of the room from primer to finished:

Gorgeous, gorgeous freshly painted trim!

Ebbtide by Sherwin-Williams

I'm still not 100% happy with how the color turned out.  It looks gorgeous in these pictures but is a little more intense in person.  However, it's not a bad blue and I think as the room fills up with furniture it won't seem quite as overwhelming.  We've been working on setting up the guest bed and such (another great project for a snow day!), so we should be ready for visitors very soon.  Stay tuned for photos of the furnished room!

I'm a big fan.

Well, dear readers, I've been as busy as possible over the last few weeks and have fallen a little behind on the ol' blog.  However, things are a-happening...

I'm working on a big project right now which will have to be revealed at a later date.

But, in the meantime, we did check a big item off the list!

We inherited a collection of some hideous ceiling fans with this house:

I think the last one wins the prize for being the most hideous...it's in Sean's office.  You can't really tell from the picture above, but the shade is speckled with...well, I don't know, just take a closer look:

It is uuuuuuuhhhh-gly.

Well, WAS ugly, I should say!

I did take a moment's pause to consider what we should replace these fans with.  After all, there was a little (itty bitty) part of me that thought about how cool it would look to replace them with really interesting, statement lighting fixtures that don't involve spinning blades.  But, I also believe in function over form, and the truth of the matter is that we DO use these fans.  A lot.  Not just in spring, summer and fall, but also in winter to help circulate the warm air.

I did a few minutes of "research," too, and Google tells me that home buyers prefer ceiling fans.  That's an unofficial poll that I found on...some website somewhere, but it's good enough for me.

The only really attractive ceiling fans I've ever seen are extremely modern, which wouldn't really fit into our house, so Sean and I went to Home Depot and picked out the least offensive fans we could find.  They aren't incredible objects of beauty, but they are a vast improvement over the old ones.

This was just slightly more complicated than replacing a basic lighting fixture since there were a lot more parts...

However, it was easy to figure out by following the instructions.

We did come across a fun discovery: when they sprayed the popcorn (yuck) onto the ceilings, they didn't take down the lighting bracket...they just sprayed over it:

Add that to our list of head-scratchers.

Anyway, the new fans are up and they are so much better!  All three upstairs match; the one downstairs is slightly different but fits in.  Somehow I missed getting a picture of it.

More updates soon...and here's a hint...it involves those dragonflies!

The T Word

Trim.

I've been painting it.

Here's the thing about painting trim: it's really, really sucky to do but it's really, really awesome when it's all done.

Painting it is a pain.  It means moving a lot of things in the house.  Lots of wood fill and sanding.  (Yes, some previous owner added trim on to our base boards but DIDN'T FILL THE NAIL HOLES.  Any of them.) And then lots of very fussy painting, being very careful not to get paint on the already-painted walls.

By the way, next room I'm painting the trim FIRST and THEN painting the walls.

But!  When it's done!  I swear it makes everything better.  All of the trim in this house was already painted white when we moved in (which I love--I just think it feels much fresher and contemporary than wood trim), but it was sad and tired (say it like Ted Neeley in JCS..."now I'm...sad...and tired...").  Beat up.  Dirty.  Scuffed.

Painting all of it in our beautiful, fresh Sherwin Williams Alabaster white (I'm so in love) makes the whole house seem new.

It's just a pain to do it.

So that's what I've been up to.

Oh, and we've also started two major house projects, one of which should be wrapped up in a day or two and the other (of which?) I hope to report on in about a week's time.  Both of which are making my arms and shoulders very sore.

Photos to come...

For the record...

...let it be known that today I finished hanging the doors on our kitchen cabinets.

Yes, it only took seven months for me to finish that project.

Huzzah!

Mirror, mirror...

Next in the continuing adventures of Sean and Lindsey's back entryway...

With paint done, it was time to think about decor.  It's such a small space that I knew we'd have to be very careful how we organized it.  As much as I would love a beautiful entryway bench with hooks and shelves and the whole nine yards, we just don't have room for it.  What I knew we did need was a lot of hooks.

I did some searching online and found this beautiful piece at Pottery Barn:

There were just a couple of problems.  First, it's $259.  Also, I measured and it's waaaaaay too big for our space.  So strikeout on both fronts.

Then a brilliant idea dawned on me.  When we first moved into the house, we went around and basically tore everything off the walls that we could, because it was all hideous.  It got thrown into a big pile in the basement and we haven't gotten around to sorting through it all yet.  (I'm guessing half will go in the trash and the other half will go to Goodwill.)

So, one short archaeological expedition later, I had our solution:

There had already been a mirror with hooks in that hallway when we moved in.  I just took it down because it had that awful teal from the kitchen on it and it was ugly.

But, I was inspired and wanted to see what we could do with what we already had, and so began my little project.

Step one: remove pegs.

I was really hoping they were screwed into the frame, but they weren't--they were glued in.  A little wiggling and I was able to pry them out, though.

Step two: wood fill.

I ended up doing two passes; one to fill in as much as I could, then sand, then another to fill in any left over cracks, then sand again.  I also sanded down the rest of the frame around the mirror to get it ready for painting.

Step three: prime and paint.

SO much better already, right?  I used some old primer we had from past projects, and then gave it two solid coats in the same white that we used on our kitchen cabinets and trim.

The problem came when I took the tape off the mirror:

It was a total mess.  I did a terrible job of not painting the tape (obviously) so there was a lot still stuck on there.

However, I now know that an x-acto knife can fix just about anything.  Fifteen minutes of scraping carefully, and it looked good as new.  I also gave it a really good wiping down with some Windex to get all of the tape goo off.

Finally, it was time for the hardware!  I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted on there yet, so I picked up a couple of different sets of hooks at Target.

I'd used these hooks before in a closet, and they're great--inexpensive and sturdy.  I opened both packages so I could play around with the layout, figuring that whatever I didn't use for the mirror would still find a use somewhere else down the line (we can ALWAYS use more hooks in our closets!).

This was too many...it looked crowded and it might be hard to take things on and off the hooks.

This was my second favorite...not bad, but it only gave us four hooks to use.

This ended up being the winner!  It looked balanced, there was plenty of room, and we had six hanging places.

I couldn't wait to hang it up.  It was a little nerve wracking drilling into our plaster (I decided to drill, then use an anchor and screw to hang it) but it feels very secure and our hallway is finally functional!

Grand total for the project: about $6 for the hooks. We already had everything else.  Beats $259, huh?  I wish we had the little drawers that the Pottery Barn mirror had, but the entryway is so small, I'm afraid they would stick out too far and take up valuable space.  This works well enough for us, and Sean has already taken over it with all of his stuff.

Action shot!

While I was at it, I also hung a small set of hooks on the opposite wall near the door, to give us a place to hang coats and jackets. (Also from Target!)

And there was one other major change that needed to be done (if you haven't already caught it yet)...did I ever post a picture of the ugly mushroom light fixture?  No?  Just in case, here it is...er, WAS...

And here it is now:

Yay for BETTER!

(The story of replacing the light fixtures is a whole 'nother story for a whole 'nother post.  Basically, it took much longer than we had anticipated, thanks to our old wiring, but once we got it figured out it wasn't too bad.  We replaced this light and also both of the lights in the upstairs hallway.  They were about $25 for 4 at Home Depot, so it was a cheap fix and we still have one extra left over...in case one breaks?)

And so ends phase one of our back hallway improvement.  We're still not totally done, but what's left can wait or become part of other, bigger projects:

• Get one more rug for the landing by the kitchen
• Replace flooring (it's the same bad vinyl as in the kitchen, so that will all happen at once)
• Build cover for radiator
• Clean up back doorway...I did a deep clean on the inside, but the outside is filthy so that will wait until it's a little warmer outside
• Find cool artwork to hang on remaining wall...I'm open to ideas!