three years in number 40

Yesterday three years ago P and I closed on our house. It was somewhat scary to sign all the papers and spent so much money, that didn't even belong to us but in the end we never regretted the decision. We fell in love with the house right when we walked in, at least I did. Even though there were lots of things we wanted to change about the house, the bones were just right. Last year on our second anniversary of homeownership I wrote a handful of recap posts with projects we had finished in the first two years. This year there will only be one summary of the main changes we made in and around the house. These days this little blog turns three years old as well. Since I have not been blogging very regularly in the beginning I just recently crossed the 300 post line, this will be post 306. If you want to walk down memory lane with me check out the post that started it all. The house and the blog have come a long way in the past three years and I am looking forward to what the next years will have in store for us...

Happy hump day my lovelies!

p's office l vestibule l powder room l guest bathroom l barn door l fence l campaign dresser

barn doors

I wanted a barn door right after I saw it here. P and I agreed that it would make sense to have a barn door in lieu of a regular door in our upstairs bathroom, as the door was swinging into the already small room. The existing bathroom door was cheap looking, dinged up and unfinished and not worth saving, pretty much like almost all our upstairs doors. Of course I started to search craigslist and Ebay right away for the perfect door for my project and found it around Christmas of 2010 (yes, 2010!) in Connecticut. The door was located near friends and we planned to visit our friends after picking up the door. Our friends cancelled last minute because the whole family came down with a stomach bug but we still headed to CT to pick up the door. When we hit the road it was snowing lightly, there was some talk about a blizzard the day before which we both shrugged off as being totally exaggerated. The roads were pretty clear until we left the freeway, this was when we realized it had snowed more than we thought. We loaded up the door, grabbed a quick bite to eat and started our journey back to New Jersey. The drive back took forever because it was snowing pretty hard and driving got worse by the minute and I was a nervous wreck when we finally made it home in one piece. The next morning I opened the door and we had three feet of snow. After all we had to go through to get the door home we stored it in various rooms around the house until we started to renovate our guest bath and powder room and had our contractor put it up. I was afraid if I would give it a try it might fall off the wall as I am very good at missing studs by a millimeter.

It all started with a peach colored hallway and cheap and beaten up doors. First thing we did was to throw out the door to the room on the right, my office, because it was falling off its hinges. A week later we remembered that my parents had to stay in that room because they helped us paint the house and move in. Classy people like we are I just nailed an old bed sheet to the door frame and called it a day, at least it gave them some privacy. The left door leads into P's office, it needs to be replaced as well. Although it doesn't look so bad in the photo the wood veneer is coming off in several places, where it has been nailed back into place. My office is still without a door as is the hallway closet and our "walk-through closet" that leads to our bedroom.

We love our new barn door and I cannot believe it took me so long to finish this project. At first we thought about painting the door but we think its imperfections make it look just the way we like it.

It's funny to talk about all the snow we had back when we picked up the door because I snuck away to sunny Florida yesterday and when this post goes online I am either on my way to or already at the Disney Hollywood Theme Park. Miss Piggy & Kermit here I come!

Here  is a list of items used in this project:

-door, found on Craigslist for $40 but be sure to check out your local Re-store or other places that sell reclaimed building materials

- hardware from McMaster-Carr

-two recessed pulls 

 Have a great weekend everybody!

stair inspiration

As previously mentioned in my goals for 2013 post I want to beautify our stairs. Right now they look fine at first glance but if you look closer you can see that they are pretty worn out. There are also countless gaps between the treads and the quarter round moulding, the stringer and the balusters. To get an idea on what I could do to spruce up the stairs I started to collect images on Pinterest, yes I have a whole board devoted to stairs. My first thought was to paint the risers, stringer and the balusters white and the treads and handrail black. But there are so many beautiful options, like colorful treads, wallpapered risers or painted runners and now I have a hard time making a decision. I absolutely love the colorful striped rug on the last image. Can you believe they are multiple small IKEA rugs? Unfortunately the rugs are not available anymore. I guess the best way for me to figure out what to do would be to start and fill all the gaps with caulk and then prime everything. Caulk is my magical weapon against any uneven or crooked trim etc., if you want to paint something that has unsightly gaps use caulk to fill in those gaps before painting. Once painted it looks like the gaps were never there. I have used many tubes of caulk around the house, on door frames, baseboards, you name it. After a coat of primer the stairs, the spindles and the handrail would be a blank white canvas, maybe that will give me a better idea of what to do next...

Are you for bold colors, monochromatic white or classic black on staircases?

1. living etc 2. remodelista 3. apartment therapy 

4. apartment therapy 5. patrick miller via kreativ inredning 6. apartment therapy 

7. faded plains 8. dagbladet 9. apartment therapy

guest bathroom - after

Happy Friday everyone! The first full work week after the holidays is coming to an end and I am finally starting to ease back into the groove of daily life, here on the blog, at work and at home.

Today I will photos of our guest bathroom as promised on Wednesday, the contrast between the before and after are not as stark as with the powder room because the guest bath looked decent, if you can't see the loose tiles in the tub surround. But as I mentioned before it looked only good on the outside, below the toilet the floor was rotting away because the toilet was not installed properly and must have been leaking since it was installed. Since all the drywall was in good condition we only replaced the area around the tub with cement board and of course the subfloor was replaced as well. We had known from the beginning that we wanted white subway tile and mosaic floor tile, either hexagon or penny rounds. And I don't regret our decision one bit. Really glad we decided on black grout too. The wall color is a warm gray called Amherst Gray from Benjamin Moore's Historical Color collection. We picked the Lillången sink & cabinet from IKEA because of its depth, we didn't have enough space for anything deeper and wanted a solution with storage underneath. For a tub we loved the Cube Collection from Wetstyle but not the price, so I searched the internet for an affordable solution and found one from American Standard at a fraction of the price. We found it at a Lowes in the area and had it delivered but now they don't seem to carry it any longer. Most of the little pieces, like the mirror, towel holder and tub caddy we already owned and when I saw the matching wooden bath mats on a recent IKEA run I had to have them. I like the light birch color with the white of the tile and the gray of the walls. Hope our first guests will like the bathroom as much as we do.

I am looking forward to be able to take a nice long bath in our new tub this weekend, with candle light and a glass of wine...What are your plans this weekend? Hope you will have a great one!

 l wall color benjamin moore amherst gray #HC-167 l in regal select in pearl finish l 

l light fixture lillholmen ikea (already owned) l mirror molger ikea (already owned) similar l 
l urchin target l pharmacy bottles restoration hardware (already owned) l

l sink lillången ikea l faucet dalskär ikea l soap dispenser sävern ikea (already owned) l 

l towel holder molger ikea (already owned) l towels skagern ikea l toilet american standard l

l toilet brush holder sävern ikea (already owned) l trash can sävern ikea (already owned) l

l bathtub american standard (discontinued) l shower head l spout l and controls american standard l wooden bath mats molger ikea l tub caddy molger ikea (already owned) l
l roman shades jc penney (already owned) l

powder room - after

I know this post has been a long time in the making but now it is finally time to reveal the renovated bathrooms, the powder room makes its way onto the blog first. Can you believe we started with this sad looking space? Me neither! Even though the room is small, some serious work went into the completion of this room. As previously mentioned the exterior walls and the pipes under the floor were not insulated, which made the space feel like a chilly outhouse in the wintertime. When we started thinking about redoing the powder room we immediately knew that we wanted to use up some leftover subway tile from our upstairs bathroom. One wall tiled from floor to ceiling gives this room some interest and after painting the walls I already loved the contrast between the white tile and the dark gray. We used Benjamin Moore's Racoon Fur again, like we did in the entry vestibule. What a cute name for such a cool color. First we thought about getting a simple frameless mirror above the sink but couldn't find one in the right size, my next thought was that maybe I could find cool vintage mirror at a thrift store or an estate sale but then P suggested that we could reuse the mirrored door from the old medicine cabinet. It was a great idea because the dimensions were perfect, I just needed to spray paint the frame. Because the room was only black/gray/white we decided to use the yellow I had left over from spray painting a necklace last year. We love our new powder room and are not using it for storage and cleaning paint supplies anymore.

Are you ready for the guest bathroom reveal on Friday?

l wall color benjamin moore racoon fur # 2126-20 l in ben low voc paint in eggshell finish) l
l light fixture (already owned) l mirror (already owned) l sink lillången ikea l

l faucet ensen ikea l soap dispenser sävern ikea (already owned) l toilet lowes l 

l tissue holder (not pictured) l towel holder enudden ikea l hand towel hären ikea l 

l toilet brush holder enudden ikea (not pictured) l rice paper window film (already owned) l

bathrooms - during renovation

As promised I have a bunch of photos from the bathroom progress for you today. Unfortunately I don't have any from the days we only had bare studs on some of the walls, it was always too dark to take decent photos when I came home after work. In the guest bathroom we only redid the walls surrounding the tub to add new cement board. When the new tile was installed I was a little scared to stick to our decision to use dark grout but once it was up I loved it. In the powder room we opted for white grout because we thought it might be overpowering the small room, the floor also got white grout because the tiles were so thin and we were afraid that the white tile adhesive might show through the dark grout. I have applied sealer to the grout twice and hope that will keep it looking fresh for years to come. After removing the banged up partitions in the powder room it was clear why it was always super cold in that room during winter, there was no insulation in the exterior walls. We already suspected as much but why didn't the previous owners go the extra mile and install insulation? In order to add insulation our contractor needed to make the walls thicker and the tiny room shrank even further but now it gets pretty cozy and warm in that room. Now you don't feel like using an outhouse anymore. The pipes underneath the floor were not insulated either and because they are in an area that can get pretty cold we were lucky that they never froze and burst in the winter.

Next was painting the walls but I didn't take much photographs of the process and will jump to the finished bathrooms in my next bathroom post. Hopefully I'll get that ready for next week!

 

 

bathrooms - before

I know I have promised that December will be bathroom month on my blog but I haven't been able to post any photos yet. Today's post is all about the before conditions. 

First up is the guest bathroom. After moving into the house we painted the walls to match the green tiles in the shower surround and gotten rid of the pedestal piece under the sink to be able to add a storage shelf. I also replaced the old medicine cabinet and the light fixture. Throw in a new shade for the window and a shower curtain as well as small accessories and we called it a day as we had a functional and not too shabby looking bathroom. Unfortunately the tiles started to come loose around the tub and we thought about redoing them and this led us to wanting a new and deeper tub and eventually to redo the whole shebang. Luckily we made the decision to renovate the whole bathroom as the toilet had been leaking under the tiles for years, which you couldn't see in the bathroom or in the basement below.

 

 

Close to our back door we also have a small powder room in which we didn't do a thing besides cleaning it when we moved in. I used it to clean my brushes and rollers after painting and as a catch for all things floating around that I didn't want to see.The toilet had a hairline crack and we were afraid it might not make it for long and will start to leak soon. When we decided to redo the guest bathroom we wanted to make this tiny room look nice too. It is in a convenient location when you are sitting out in the back yard and need to use a bathroom. Once we have a real back yard and hanging out in it more often it will certainly come in handy...

 

vestibule - new diy floor

Sunday the 12th of August I finally painted the interior door frame of the vestibule and decided to lay the carpet tile, that I brought home from work about a year ago. They were all samples for one client and since we did not need them anymore I figured I could turn them into a nice looking carpet tile mosaic in our vestibule. I had already drawn up a sketch in Auto Cad how I wanted to position the tiles, now we just needed to make a decision on what tile would go where. We laid out the different tiles on the floor and worked up our pattern from there. That was actually the most fun part of the whole project.

Next step was drawing a line that was somewhat parallel to the front door. From there I laid my first row of tiles and then the next two. To make the tiles stick to the floor I bought a roll of  carpet tape, which is basically heavy duty double sided tape. Those three rows were pretty straight forward and didn't need much cutting but the rows on either door opening needed to be exactly measured and cut to size. I did not take any good photos of the process besides this grainy photo with my cell phone because I knew if I'd stop working I would call it a night...

All in all I spent about 4 hours on my knees and my legs were sore for three days straight but I think it was worth the pain. The new floor really makes the space look finished. Not looking too shabby for only spending $8 on the whole project. Next on my list is getting the vestibule door fixed up and re-hung and also installing new glass panels in the transom above.

Have any of you fun projects lined up?

dreaming about a backyard

I think I have mentioned it before that our backyard is more like a concrete jungle than a place you want to spent your time. The name says it all, 99.9% of the backyard is covered in concrete. And if that is not already bad enough it is not one consistent slab but instead various slabs, with different heights, that have been poured over the course of decades. Big tripping hazard! The oldest parts have cracks through which the only green in our yard started to sprout. Even nature agrees with us that this yard needs to be greener! 

There is also a small deck, right when you step out of the kitchen. The location would make it a great spot for al fresco dining but the size is way too small for that, even with just the two of us. Overall we never hang out in our concrete jungle and we would love to transform it into a lush green back yard with a nice sized deck so we can chill out after work or have friends over for bbq’s etc.

The plan is to get rid of all the concrete in the driveway and yard and replace it with simple pavers that lead from the driveway to a new larger wood deck, that is much closer to the ground or a paved patio and have the yard fenced in with a new wooden fence to give us more privacy. Around the perimeter of the yard we would like to plant flowers and maybe even a small vegetable garden.

I have been pinning away inspirational photos on Pinterest, here is my garden inspiration board, for a while now. There are almost 150 pictures on that board so I made a collage with some of my favorites. 

What would be your perfect backyard oasis?  

 

 

1. foras studio via remodelista 2. flutterbymama 3. dwell 4. rosenlof/lucas 

    5. via pinterest* 6. house & home 7. jenna lyons backyard via styleite  

8. rees roberts & partners 9. via pinterest*

*If anybody knows the source of the photo please let me know. Tried to find it to no avail. I like to give credit where credit is due.

to-do for the weekend

The weekend is here again and I finally want to finish the vestibule. I started working on it in the spring of last year and it has been in this half finished state for way too long. Two weekends ago I already painted the interior side of the door white, it still had the primed finish that the door came with. My parents are coming for a visit in mid September and this gives me a push to finish up projects like this before they arrive. We have used upcoming visits from friends and family before as deadlines for getting projects done on previous occasions. Last year it was painting P's office so my sister and her boyfriends had a nice room to sleep in. 

Here is a list of things I want to accomplish this weekend:

- paint door frame around exterior door

- prep other door frame for painting (maybe paint as well)

- install new flooring in the vestibule

- call or email contractors for estimates how much having the old wood door stripped would cost

  us (I wanted to do it myself but do not feel like it right now)

What are your plans this weekend? Will it be all fun or a working weekend like mine? 

and it was all yellow...

Today I have no vacation post for you but one or two more might be coming in the future.

Back in March I posted about knitted home accessories and that inspired my mom to start knitting pillow covers. First she knitted two pillow covers for my sister but used a different pattern and yarn. Because I like yellow she decided to make mine in that color. Apparently it wasn't that easy to find yarn in the bright color she had in mind. Love how they came out and the color is a nice contrast to our couch. And they are so soft too. Danke Mama!

So what nice things did your family, friends or even a stranger do for you? Or have you done anything nice for anybody lately? 

Have a great weekend everybody!

p's office

In February I shared how I painted a desk that had a beat up plastic laminate finish. The desk I scored for free on craigslist and a couple coats of paint turned it from drab to looking fresh again. Because P's old chair was broken and wobbly we checked out the Design Within Reach Outlet that is close to where we live and found this Series 7 chair. It was marked down quite a bit and they also had a 20% off sale that weekend. P had a gift certificate as well he ended up spending only about $50 on the chair. And the chartreuse color looks great in combination with the grey of the desk. Now you can also see where the framed pucks hang. It's so great that each of us has a room for ourselves, it's a solution that works for now. Who knows what we might need the space for in the future. 

You know both of our work areas now, I already showed my desk a while back. What does your desk/work area look like? Would you mind sharing them with me? If anybody would be up for it you could send me a picture and a description about what you like/don't like about it and I would turn it into a post. It would be fun to see where you sit while blogging...

Happy three day weekend everybody!

 

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...

cherry tree

It's Friday! Yay! Do you have anything fun planned for the weekend? I want to weed our front yard and hopefully finish sanding this dresser, which has been sitting around in our since last July. I'm almost done sanding and just want to finish it before the dresser has been in our basement for a year. We are planning to use the dresser in our living room and put the TV on it. Actually we would need a new TV as well, we have an old humungous model and would upgrade to a flat screen TV because the old one would not fit on top of the dresser. I dream of a white TV, that would blend into the background more because TV's are not that pretty to look at...

Last weekend I took hundreds of photos of the tree just to try out my new camera, it's so much fun discovering what it can do and the tree looks so pretty right now, but the weeds underneath it take away from its beauty. Also the neighbors might think we're the one house ruining everybody's curb appeal. Last year we got standing ovations from the neighbor across the street after our weeding session. So weeding time is here! 

Happy Friday!

my hang-it-all

Remember back in November I wrote about the vitra special edition of the Eames hang-it-all coat rack. My parents read my blog and thought the red one would be a great addition to our entry vestibule so they gave it to me for Christmas. Thanks again Mom and Dad!

I hung it on Sunday and even managed to hit studs with all four screws so it hangs very secure. Which was a first for me, I usually miss the studs by a couple of millimeters. Keep staring at it in awe because the red color looks so nice on the dark grey walls.

happy halloween!

Happy Halloween!

This is our house yesterday morning after our first snowstorm. The snow is mostly gone now. Still can't believe it really snowed...