Thursday, March 21, 2013

moroccan painted stencil wall

i am so in love with our bedroom wall. our bedroom walls were originally a light pink/taupe. we painted them gray. i purchased a wall stencil from cutting edge stencils and painted the fill-in of the stencil a lighter shade of gray. makes such a big difference! now i want to paint more walls in the house. the edges were the hardest part to do and since it wasn't straight up and down it took me about 6 hours to complete. plus i'm a perfectionist so i cleaned up any rough edges with a wet q-tip. i know the walls are a bit bare but that's because there is another diy project in the works. i don't even mind the bare walls because this wall easily steals the show.


here it is up close.



wall of framed photos

i'm sure many of you have seen all the blogs and diy's on walls of framed photos. if not switcheroom blog has a great article on all the different kinds of varieties you can make. it took me a while to decide if i wanted mismatched frames or same color frames in different sizes, there were just sooo many options. i'm more of a clean line, traditional, symmetry person. i narrowed it down to wanting the frames to be in a perfect rectangle. so it came down to, same color, different size frames, to fit a perfect rectangle or same size frames all around. different sizes was a challenge but doable although more expensive. i went to michaels of course and saw the floating frames. i hadn't seen too many examples of floating frames on the internet. i loved the idea immediately. now purchasing the frames, that's another story. i needed 16 frames. the first michaels i went to had about 6 frames. i ended up going to 3 michaels. but that's not all, it was multiple trips over about a month. the frames were 11 x 14 at $14.99. I used coupons from the michaels website. then for the last half all their frames went on sale 40% off. good enough for me! so here it is:


Wednesday, March 20, 2013

bathroom makeover

i know i have been mia but that doesn't mean i haven't been doing anything. prepare for multiple blog posts... i'll start with the bathroom. we weren't planning to makeover our bathroom for a while but the previous owner's wonderful tiling job left us no choice. in case it didn't read right, i'm being sarcastic. talk about quick fix. the previous owner staged the house nicely. but looking closer, there were definitely corners that were cut. the grout from the floor tiles started to crack and making a mess. so we thought ok, let's re-grout. but christian thought because we don't even really like the tile, why not just re-tile the bathroom? oh boy did he regret that. when we went to pull the tiles we could clearly see why the grout was cracking. the floor was uneven because there was linoleum flooring underneath! this was done in two bathrooms! the other one was so bad that it had raised the tile flooring causing the bathroom door to not be able to open and close properly. the second bathroom was also remodeled but more on that later. back to this bathroom. we also found another surprise when pulling up the tiles. because the flooring wasn't done properly the base area around the toilet was leaking water. it must have been leaking for a while because there was mold on the boards around the toilet bowl. when we looked downstairs in the closet there was a big wet spot on the ceiling. i guess it was a good thing the grout was coming up because who knows how long it would have leaked until we would have noticed it. poor christian had to cut the wood around the toilet and replace it. re-tiling the floor led to doing the shower walls, adding a new bathtub, new vanity, and some sort of storage.

one of my favorite relaxing things to do is to soak in water that's too hot with a good read. there was no way i was going to do that with the plastic bathtub/wall insert. i don't even know what it's called i had never seen it before i started look at homes. but it had to go for so many reason. one of them being it just never looked clean. i don't care if you use straight up bleach, it was a pain to clean and it never looked white. so this grouting turned into an entire bathroom makeover, over time. this did not happen in a month or two, or three. actually christian just finish putting the trim a week ago. this is also because there are always multiple projects going on at once. oh how fun it is being a home owner :)


one day we will replace the lights above the mirror. we patched up the hole that had the medicine cabinet. we haven't put it up yet but a mirror with an extended arm will go there. the bathroom is small so i didn't want to put a closed storage cabinet. instead i liked the idea of having glass shelves and storing stuff in wicker baskets. baskets were a steal at michaels. they were having a deal and i got all three for $7! vanity from home depot. mirror from home goods.



i wish i had a before photo of the tub area. there are no words to describe how awful it was. i guess plastic tub insert is enough said. we got pretty tiles and accents from home depot. and i can't take credit for a lot of this work, not even half. but i don't mind because i couldn't have done it better. thanks christian!! i did the fun stuff. You know, like paint, pick out colors, and the decor of course. there are a couple of minor things we have to finish up but overall we are happy with the makeover.