Almost-Complete Bedroom

Our bedroom is one of my favorite places in the house.  It's so calm because there is very little in it.  Four pieces of furniture -- bed, bench, and two nightstands.  And I love all those pieces, so it looks so simple and lovely to me.  Our bed frame is from Ikea.  The nightstands are from Target and I love them because they look so much like the ones I really wanted from West Elm.  But these nightstands saved us $300! The bench is also from Target, and was a wedding gift my my sister and brother-in-law.

The bedside lamps are from JC Penney, the Jonathon Adler collection.  The navy blue curtains are from... Bed, Bath & Beyond, I think?  We've had them for quite a few years now.  The gray and green bedding is from West Elm.  The new decorative pillow was my gift to K for our 2-year wedding anniversary, and it's from Etsy.

I think of this room as complete, but there is nothing on the walls!  We should probably get some art and photos in the room, and we've talked about it quite a few times, but it's just so simple and relaxing in there right now without anything...  I'm not sure I want to change it.

Clean & Calm Bedroom

We have our bedroom back!  The floor is refinished, the walls are repaired and painted, the ceiling is painted, the outlets have been replaced to code, windows painted, stained trim and base added, curtains re-hung.

New nightstands and a new bed-frame to follow, along with new door hardware and a new bedroom door.  The original door was too damaged to paint and save, so it was just easier to pull the whole thing out and get it out of the way for the floor guys.

The room is calm and clean, and after about a month of sleeping in our basement and at our neighbors' house-- the bed feels huge!  I think we both slept funny last night-- it was almost like we were sleeping in unfamiliar surroundings. 

Here is what the room looked liked when we bought the house:

We had primed over the red walls pretty soon after moving in, but that's how it stayed for at least 2 years afterwards.

I just LOVE how the floors turned out.  The color is so rich and all the detail in the wood grain shows so vibrantly.

Oh, and did I mention that our trim was FREE?  K found a bunch of it at the side of the road somewhere, pulled out of a 1950s home.  K said it was a pain in the butt to sand and re-stain, but once they were installed, we are both really happy with the results. 

Room Craziness

It's been a rough week.  Whew.  Poor K is wiped out...  I can't keep up, either!  We've been working on the walls and ceilings in our rooms with hardwood floors, in order to get those walls before the floor guys come in to do the refinishing on Monday.

So, patching, mudding, sanding, painting our plaster & lathe walls.  Trying to repair years of damage and neglect.  It's totally working-- the walls look 100 times better!  It's just a LOT of work.

K used a sprayer to paint all our doors and windows, which were previously all a very industrial-looking tan (which we're SO sick of!)  We figured this would be a big improvement until we replace the windows, and visually, it is definitely much better!

Newspaper & painter's tape = cheap stained glass

Living room window, mid-taping

Post-spraying

She also sprayed all our vent covers, just so we didn't have to go out and buy all new ones right now, on top of all our other expenses.  Some of them were painted weird, just like our trim, and some were just old-looking.  Now, they may not all look perfect when you look closely, but they sure look better. 

Repairing progress in Baby's room

Above, the baby's room now has a smooth painted ceiling, painted windows and doors, and wall repair is mostly complete.  This room will have painted white trim around the windows and doors.  The other rooms will have stained wood trim.

Our room has a newly painted ceiling, painted walls, painted windows and closet doors.  The door to our room was too damaged, so we'll need to get a new one.  We decided not to mess with the texture on our ceiling.  I guess the look of it grew on us over these last couple years. But it was so much dingier than we had realized-- once K got painting it with the bright white paint, it was like, "WOW!"  It looks so clean and crisp, and the chandelier looks even nicer now.  Yay!

And ohhhhh, the living room.  I'm in love.  Seriously... we've never had a usable living room, in all the time we've owned the house.  For a few days, here and there, we've set up a sitting area when we needed to, but it was always on top of a big sisal rug, on top of the ram board from when we were working on the ceiling.  And there was always wrapped-up bookshelves in the corner, and storage stuff against the wall.  So, just never an actual "living room."
But it's already so pretty.
I'm so excited!

Living room, in progress

The ceiling and coves are smooth, painted, and gorgeous.  The windows are sprayed, which is a huge improvement.  K had to do some major repairs on the entryways to the room because the plaster had gotten nicked away over the years.  She built them back up, so now the corners are sharp and crisp once again.  And the walls, though still in progress, already look sooo much better.  :-)

Rough week, true, but it's so fantastic to see this progress and know we'll have actual finished rooms SOON!

Floor Prep and Room Progress

More progress on the rooms!  The ceiling in the nursery is now all scraped.  K was surprised at how nice it all came off-- much better than in the living room.  She thinks it will be really easy to mud and get cleaned up.

The hallway ceiling is also scraped.  This is the hallway that connects all the rooms on the first floor.  Just a small little space, but the ceiling looks a lot better already.

The trim around the living room windows has been pulled.  We'll just paint the inner wood parts, until we replace the windows.

Our floors are also accessible now, with the trim pulled in all the rooms.  We have some floor guys coming to refinish them in just a little over a week.  Can't wait!  K could do them herself, but she thinks it's just easier to have them do it, since it's such a messy process.  I'm excited to pick out the stain color.

These beautiful floors need some LOVE!

There are lots of little burns on the floors in all the rooms...   :-(

In our bedroom, the trim was painted with a black glossy enamel paint.  But not painted well-- just slapped on with one pass, with the brushstrokes showing on each piece.  And they got the black paint on the floor quite a bit when they did it.  Dummies.

Black paint from the trim

But it's all going to be good.  I'm so excited to see them all sanded, stained, and glowing.

Starting On the Bedrooms & Main Bath

I had no idea when we'd start working on the rooms of the house, but it's suddenly happening!!  K and her bro did a bunch of work on the house today-- pulling off the painted, wrecked-up trim and starting to scrape off the popcorn ceiling in the nursery.
... Did I just say nursery?  That's right, I did!!  K and I are expecting a baby, due at the end of June.  We're over the moon about it.  And so, the spare bedroom is now being prepared to be the baby's room, just as we hoped it would be someday.

Popcorn ceiling on its way out

K had also spent a large part of her day in her office, so by the time the evening rolled around, she was itching to do some wrecking!  Getting rid of those things in the house that she's so sick of.
So... she took a jackhammer to the bathroom on the first floor.  She pulled off some of the tiles, and pulled down the storage above the bathtub. 

We have wanted to improve this bathroom since we bought the house.  I think that it may be original to the house...?  Or maybe it's a 70s remodel?  Not sure, but it's never been very functional for us.  The worst is how filthy it was.  After years of renters, we never could get it clean.  The bathtub, though iron, is a typical size, so a tall gal like me can't take a bath in it without my whole torso or all my legs sticking out of the water.  And with the storage above the shower, I'm too tall to take a shower in here!  The storage up there also wasn't necessary because there's a spacious cedar-lined closet in the bathroom already.

Our goals for remodeling this bathroom are to put in a deeper bathtub, make the shower usable for a tall lady like me, replace the worn-out vanity and maybe even put in two sinks.

I did make sure to keep those chrome pulls on the cabinets!

Again, I'm not sure if this bathroom is original or a remodel?  Once K started taking down some of the storage and tile, we could see that the walls under the storage used to be painted yellow.

Chandeliers and Switch Plates

While having a lazy, laying-in-bed morning today, K and I discussed some of the decorating we plan to do in our bedroom, and I asked her if she could please put up the chandelier today.  It's been sitting in the storage room for a few months, finished.  And she said yes, she would put it up for us!  :-)

Here's the before:

That base is kind of cool-- I wonder what the glass looked like....

We got the chandelier up, with one quick $6 trip to the Home Depot to get the needed hardware that was slightly different than what was there from the old fixture.

Once all the bulbs were lit up, it was like, "Holy crap, we have to get a dimmer on this thing!"  With all those bulbs in a normal-sized bedroom, it was a LOT of light.  So K ran to her supply of goodies and grabbed a dimmer switch, and installed it.  I makes a huge difference!

Finished and lit up!  Except for the one bulb on the left that likes to go on and off...

The previous light fixture had a bigger base, as you can see around the medallion of the chandelier.  This will get fixed later!

And then that led into K working on our messed-up light switch situation.  The house has switches that don't do anything, lots of missing switch plates and a couple weirdly-placed outlets.  She fixed 2 broken switches, and figured out that our hall light is wired to a box that, until now, had an outlet in it.  In the middle of the wall!  So, now we've got a switch there and we are able to turn the hall light on and off without pulling a string attached to the fixture/ base holding a bare bulb.

K also put in a new switch at the bottom of the stairs leading to my office.  Until now, there has only been a foam insulator as a switch plate, with a normal up/down switch.  It seems really out of place there, on an inside wall.  Like, I could see putting one of those on an outside wall, if you really wanted to be picky about insulating every inch.  But this piece had obviously been painted over at least once, and it was just weird.

Foam insulator "switch plate"

Last week at the thrift store, K had found the coolest, strange, old switch for 25 cents!  It's the push button kind, and it's really just a clear lucite plate and you can put whatever kind of paper or fabric that you want underneath.

Whoever had owned it put a cool patterned, blue paper under the plate.  It looked kind of old, maybe even 50s, I'm not sure.  But the paper was double-sided and on the back was...  a crazy clown!!  The paper was perfectly centered so that if the clown was facing the front of the switch, the push-button would actually be his nose!  I flipped out and I had to have it!

Pretty, patterned paper

Clown face on the other side of the paper!
The brass button makes the perfect nose for him.

And while installing this switch, we found more pink paint had been on the walls of the stairway at some point.  A coral rose color pink, more vivid than the pink in the basement.

Here is how the thrift store switch turned out!  I love it!  Obviously, our walls still need some love, but we'll get to that at some point.

For now, I'm just excited that this button makes it easier to turn the lights on and off.  I'm usually going up the stairs carrying my breakfast or armloads of other stuff, and it's much easier to hit this switch with my hands full.

Boy kitty climbed the ladder to sniff the chandelier, then had to figure out how to get down!

Chandelier Rehab

K brought this chandelier home for me from a job.  The homeowner was getting all new lighting, and this was going to be trashed or donated.  K knew I would LOVE it, and she was right!  (I had one similar to this in my favorite apartment.)

Dusty, brassy goodness!

Beautiful details

But now I have a choice.  I can clean it up, make sure things are working properly...  but leave it the antiqued brass color.  OR, I could paint it.  I'm normally very against painting things, especially wood, to a color that they weren't originally.  But I've seen many pictures of painted chandeliers, and I'm just so drawn to the white ones!  This chandelier would be beautiful in white...  

I removed all the crystals, and soaked them in hot water and vinegar. Drained and dried them.  Now, they *sparkle*!!  Removed the plastic candle tubes, and taped over the candle and bulb areas.  Brought it outside, and painted it with a few coats of satin white spray paint, over the course of a few days.

Because a leafy, windy day is really the best time to spray paint something. 

Amazing what a change it made!

Took a drive to Mohn Electric, in Uptown.  They helped me match the candle tubes, and grabbed me some new cardboard insulators.  Once home, I had to trim all the tubes down to 3 1/2 inches, because Mohn only had 4-inch tubes.  (I had seen some 3 1/2-inch ones online, but by the time I'd pay shipping, the price was ridiculous!)

Now all that remains is to put in the bulbs and install the light.  For now, this sparkly chandelier will just sit in the corner of the bedroom and wait.  But at least I got to check one small thing off my To Do List!