Bathroom Sheetrock

The bathroom is coming along, with most of the sheet rock up and framing completed around the new medicine cabinet and niche in the shower.  The bathtub is in, and the new ceiling fan has been installed now for a while.

We decided to put the niche off-center, we thought it looked more interesting and was easier to reach.

New storage cabinet, and there will be a light right above it

Bathroom Progress

K's been working on the bathroom in stops and starts, working it in between jobs whenever she can.  She's anxious to have it done so the main floor will just feel done and she won't need to think about it.

We've been making plans for how we want the room to be configured, and we decided to leave all the plumbing where it is.  She'll just need to add an additional line, because we'd like to have two sinks.

The photos aren't super exciting, but just show where we're starting from.

Mudroom Storage

K felt like taking on a "smaller" project in the house.  Now that it's winter, we're using our mudroom a lot more for all our big coats and boots, for K's warm work clothes.  And we've thought a lot more about what we'd like to have in there for storage-- coat hooks, hanging rod, shoe storage, and cupboard space.

There has always been a lot of storage in this mudroom.  There are a few big, very deep cabinets, two skinny cabinets that hold only smaller things, and two nice-sized drawers.  There's a hanging rod with some open shelves above.  K made a matching Formica countertop for this area, too.

It has worked pretty well for us, but we would like to have more storage for shoes, some bins for each of us, and ideally a place to sit when we're putting on shoes/set our bags/set the kiddo down while we get coats on, etc.

After discussing all that, K worked out a plan to use this whole wall for storage, and still be able to use some parts of the other walls for storage, too.  There should be enough space to do it all.

For now, she pulled out the cabinets and she'll soon begin installing the new storage.  We have cabinet materials that match the kitchen, and we do have enough chrome pulls left to put in this room, too.

Hello again, green linoleum!

Homeversary & Bringing Baby Home

It's been a busy month, with a flurry of activity trying to get our house ready for baby, along with the end of my pregnancy.  It came down to the wire, but we were as prepared as we could be.

On June 8th, we brought home our baby.  We had a little boy!  I realized later, too, that the day we brought our son home was the 3rd anniversary of us owning our house!  What an amazing day.

The house looks just the same, if not slightly less kept-up on the outside, but there are big changes inside!  It's been an amazing transformation in there, and it's a nice place to bring our baby.  <3

Kitchen Tile

With the busy Formica countertops we chose, we thought we'd want to stick with white tile for the backsplashes in our kitchen.  We considered traditional subway tile, or other shapes, like a Moroccan-style.  And we decided on a long rectangle tile -- a 2" x 10" installed stacked, with light gray grout.

Light gray grout is visible on the right side

The "breakfast nook"

Getting So Close in the Kitchen

The kitchen is coming along!  The doors are on all the cabinets, along with all the hardware.  I love how the chrome pulls look with everything. Now we need to make decisions on paint and tile, and we think we know what we want to do.

For the paint, I had always been thinking of green.  Especially once I saw the old paint color-- I really wanted to replicate that color.

But now that we have the appliances and counters installed, K had me look at a blue paint that she had leftover from a project.  And this blue paint looks really nice with all of it.  I've also compared this blue paint and green paint chips to the dishes we'll be using, and I think the blue will be the better way to go.

I've been collecting Fire King Jadeite dishes for years.  I have a lot of bowls and platters that I love, which were packed away during the years that we were renting.  I have a few pieces of their Azurite, too. Once the kitchen is done, I will get those all out of storage and use them again. 

And a few years ago, I bought a huge lot of the dishware I've always wanted-- the Blue Heaven pattern from Royal China.  The blue paint will look so good with this pattern. 

Jadeite, Azurite, and Blue Heaven

There's a bit of the color we're considering on the right side of the sink in this photo

Organizing & Purging

Came home from work today and found that K and her bro had done SO much in our house to clean and organize it.  It feels amazing in here.

First off, the baby's room is cleared out and ready to set up for the little one.  Just about as soon as K had the trim up and the room finished, we started putting tools and supplies in that room-- just to keep them nearby.  Stuff that had been in the living room, until we got that couch and got going on finishing the living room.

Now, the baby's room is clean and ready to go.  Our spare bed is set up in there-- that's where family who visits will sleep while we have the babe in our room for the first couple months.  And my old Ikea bookshelves are in there, too-- I'll get some bins and see if they will be useful in there.  If not, we'll move them out to the alley and post a curb alert.

We had a ginormous sisal rug that took up almost our whole living room-- which was helpful when we used that rug to cover up the ram board on the floor.  We want a rug for the living room, but haven't decided on what to get, and it's low-priority right now.  So she cut that big sisal rug to a more useful size and put that in our living room, under the couch.  It looks pretty good.

Lastly, our beloved air hockey table is gone.  It's bittersweet, really.  We acquired the table from some friends when we rented from them, and we have moved it 2 times.  And it is a BIG MF-ing table!!

It took up a lot of room in our basement-- pretty much made us configure the furniture down there in a certain way.  Yeah, it was a blast to play at parties-- it was definitely a popular item in our house!  But K and I almost never played it, otherwise.  Eventually, it became more appealing to take back the space and let go of the table...

So when I pulled into the alley today, some guys were loading the table top into a van.  I totally hollered at them, "Yeah!  That's awesome that you're taking that!"  Turned out K had not posted any sort of ad online-- the guys had just been driving by and saw it.  She had it out there with all the pieces nicely piled, with the pucks and the handle thingies all ready to go.  Glad it's found another good home.

The awesome table at the rental where we got it...  Before we moved it 2 times...