2 years - exterior

Thanks so much for taking this little journey down memory lane with me during the last two weeks!

Last but not least in my two year recap is our exterior. We've only managed to work on the front and the roof so far. The backyard is still concrete and ugly, it looks pretty much as it did when I posted photos last year in May but we plan to change that eventually. After we got a new roof I wanted to spruce up the front door and already had assembled the materials over the course of a couple of months. Unfortunately the existing door had completely rusted away under the kick plate and we decided to get a new one. Two months later I finished the project. I really like how a little pop of color makes such a big difference. Before the house looked kind of blah, after it looks so much friendlier and welcoming...

2 years - fireplace

As promised here is a post about how our fireplace developed into what it is today. We had hoped that we could just open it like the one in the dining room, which is non-functioning because the previous owners cut off the chimney and it stops in the attic. Not a good idea to start a fire in that one. Our hope was to be able to create a functioning fireplace in the living room as the chimney is still intact. After tearing down the row of bricks we discovered lots of dirt and our boiler exhaust. Big bummer! I guess that's why they put up the row of bricks in the first place. At least we got rid of the ugly and not symmetrical stone on the floor. What was up with that? We'll never know...

We had a friend who is a contractor close the opening, build us a mantel and lay down marble mosaic on top of the original marble hearth because unfortunately it was too small for the new mantel. I searched the internet for an old cast iron fireplace cover/door to recreate the look of a working fireplace and quickly discovered that they are quite expensive if they are in a good condition. So I started looking for something I could restore myself and found a nice looking one on ebay with a starting bid of $30 and it was located in NJ, so we could pick it up ourselves. Nobody else bid on it because on one of the corners a piece had broken off, it didn't bother me because I thought I could come up with an idea on how to fix it. First I stripped the paint off of the fireplace cover, which took me months to complete. The big pieces were easy but the intricate parts were pretty time consuming. I also had to take a break from stripping the thing because I spent way too much time in the basement working on it. When I finally finished stripping and sanding the piece I started to built up the missing corner (more details here) and finished it off with a couple of coats of black spray paint.

2 years - living room

Next part of my little recap on what we've been up to during the two years owning our house is our living room. The living room had great bones, just like the dining room, but needed a little bit more work than just a coat of paint. We didn't like the closed fireplace and wanted to open it up to look like the one in the dining room and thought we just get rid of the row of bricks covering the opening and call it a day. Unfortunately it wasn't that easy and it took a while to figure out the best looking solution. Because it took us quite a few steps and a long time to make the fireplace look nice I will be giving the fireplace makeover it's own post next week. 

See the door on the left side of the fireplace? It didn't make any sense to us because it leads to a small hallway that had 4 doors (one from the living room, one from the main hallway, one to the guest bathroom and one to the guest bedroom) and not much room for anything else. So we closed the door opening and put a coat rack for our guest on the other side and will be hanging pictures on the living room side. Also we won't see our guest running to the bathroom when we are sitting on the couch. Guests have their own little private space now. Big improvement! We already owned all the furniture you can see except the bookcase which is actually the IKEA Bestå System. When we moved to the US we brought some of our furniture with us (it was paid for by P's company) and because we didn't bring a coffee table we used my metal storage boxes as make shift tables and nine years later we still don't own a "proper" coffee table. We'll see it might change, it might not.

And yes I took a stone sculpting class and made both sculptures in the living room. I really enjoyed it, to me it was really relaxing to chip away at the stone and turn it into something new. After finishing those two pieces my teacher teacher moved away and now I don't really have time to do it anymore. Maybe I should pick it up again...

Have a great weekend!

2 years - dining room

Today is my second blog anniversary. Can't believe it has already been that long. Thanks for taking this journey with me, without you it wouldn't be the same!

Second in my two year recap is the dining room. It was a pretty easy transformation, especially compared to the kitchen, we just painted the walls, ceiling, window and door frames, crown and base moulding and called it a day. OK, now that I wrote down what we painted it sounds like a lot of work and it also took a while to finish it all. Of course we also swapped the chandelier for a more modern light fixture and the stained roman shades needed to go as well. The chandelier was the same model than the one in the kitchen, there was also a smaller one like that in the hallway. I managed to sell all three of them at a local flea market for $30. Yay! Tried to give it away for free on craigslist before but nobody came to pick them up...We already owned all the furniture except the chair and the side tables in the window nook so we didn't have to spend much on this room. The little side board under the orange poster I brought from Germany, I found it sitting next to the dumpster of my student dorm. Even back then I picked up furniture from the street. We managed to finish the dining room just in time for Thanksgiving 2010 and hosted our first Thanksgiving dinner for a group of friends...

 

2 years - kitchen

Usually I have a post about my previous week on Mondays but this week is a very special week, two years ago we closed on our house and two days later I started this blog. Last year I shared a photo of our house circa 1938 (?). This year I want to show the progress we have made so far. Let's start with the kitchen...

I can still remember when we drove to the house after the closing, vacuum and other cleaning supplies in hand to clean a couple of rooms and prep them for painting. Well we didn't have any power because the previous owners didn't pay their bills in a while. It was a Friday evening and of course we couldn't get power until Monday but we still managed to paint two rooms over the weekend. We wanted to get done as much as possible before moving in a month later. In early May my parents came over from Germany to help with the house and the move. One thing we wanted to change as soon as possible and before running out of steam was the kitchen. P and I both didn't like anything about the kitchen, it was not our style and we didn't like the colors either but a kitchen renovation was not in the budget and the cabinets were still pretty new and in good shape. So I planned to paint everything. First the kitchen needed a good scrub, everything was super greasy. We cleaned the top of the cabinets three times and they were still sticky. The area above the range had stalactites out of grease dangling from the ceiling. Yuck! My parents were nice enough to sand all the kitchen cabinets and doors so I could paint them which took a couple of weeks (or months) to finish. I even painted the tile backsplash and contrary to all the negative things I had read about painting tile it still looks like the day I finished painting. You can find some pictures of the whole process here.

All in all we painted the cabinets (doors and visible parts), tile backsplash, walls, window and door frames, ceiling, base and crown molding, changed all the handles, replaced missing hinges, switched out the light fixture, as well as the range, microwave and the dishwasher. Because there was too much unused space in the middle of the room we later added an island that we snatched up on sale at IKEA. Quite a change from the before...