Spring Is In The Air!

Like most people around the country, we enjoyed a very mild winter this year.  There was not much snow to speak of, unless you count that terrible October storm.  And although spring officially arrives tomorrow, I feel like we have been enjoying spring since the beginning of March.  Instead of "Coming in like a lion..." March brought us lots of mild temperatures and beautiful sunshine.  {The end of this week may even bring a record-breaking 80 degree day!} 

All of this uhhhhhhhhh-mazing weather is giving us a sneak peak at what may bloom in our yard this year.  We are anxious to see what will appear on our almost-half-an-acre since this is what the yard looked like when we bought our house.  {Yikes!}

Even though our yard {especially the back yard} is still a complete hot mess, at least we have a whole lot of daffodils popping up everywhere!!  Who needs grass when you have flowers randomly appearing in your dirt patches, right?!?!?!  {Yup, those are tiny hot pink arrows pointing everything out.}

In keeping with all things spring and the great outdoors, I'll fill you guys in on an appointment that the hubby and I had with a tree company this weekend.  We have a bagillion oak trees on our property, and most of them are planted close to each other, or close to our house.  We are hoping to selectively remove some of these trees over the years for the safety of our house, as well as the health of the trees and our lawn.

From the tree people {I'm so technical}, we learned that our town has restrictions regarding cutting down trees.  You can only cut down one healthy tree a year, unless you want to replant another tree in it's place.  So long story short, we are going to have twenty {yea, that's right...2-0} trees safety pruned, one large oak removed {it's next to our house and lifting the sidewalk...who knows what the roots are doing to the foundation of our house}, the dead cherry tree removed {it's the one with the birdhouse, front and center in the first picture above}, the hemlock you see below removed and a bunch of stumps ground down that we couldn't manually remove while we de-jungle-ified our house.

Unfortunately, the cherry died because it became infested with insects.  The tree person said that it's common because of it's sweet sap, and clearly, no one was tending to the property to save it.  The hemlock needs to come down because it's growing into the oak tree right behind it, and it's also stealing sunlight from my precious magnolia to it's left.  As if those two things weren't reason enough, we were informed it's $210 a year to treat that tree and keep it healthy.  Ummm, no thank you.  We aren't paying all that money to keep a tree that will kill two others.  {Luckily, the hemlock isn't big enough to count towards our healthy tree count, so we are okay to take it down for those of you keeping track.}

Welp...that is our tree saga.  Even though this is going to be a CRAZY expensive endeavor, it's totally worth it.  Our poor property has not been taken care of in years, and we really can't afford to have any huge branches come down on our brand new roof or break one of our brand new windows.

Anyone else have a super expensive home cost pop up lately?!?!

PS-I linked up to Thrifty Decor Chick's "Show Us Your Kitchens" linky party so I could show off our retro renovation in all it's glory. :)

Using What You've Got

In my sunburst mirror post, you caught a glimpse of the new console that now lives behind our sofa.  Its actually a dresser from a mid-century modern bedroom set that I purchased on Craigslist for $200.  Yup, that's right.  I was able to find a beautiful, dovetailed set {dresser, armoire and two nightstands} for that price.  Yayyyy!

Anywho...since the hubby and I have these awesome closets that fit most of our belongings, we knew we wouldn't need both the dresser and armoire in our bedroom.  The armoire worked much better for our layout, so the dresser needed to find a new place to hang out.  Lucky for me, I knew just the spot for it! 

I wanted to put a console table behind our sofa, and since we didn't have the budget for one, this dresser was the perfect substitute to serve as a perfect placeholder.  Its a bit deeper than I wanted it to be, but hey, beggers can't be choosers!

Unfortunately, I deleted the before picture of this piece, but I do have a before picture of the armoire from the same set.  Hopefully this will give you an idea of what the dresser looked like before...

I love the lines of the piece, but the color and hardware just weren't the look I was going for.  So after the usual sanding, priming and painting methods we used on all of our other Craigslisted furniture {here, here and here}, our new console table looks like this...

No, it's not painted white.  It's {wait for it}....a very pale aqua!  Anyone surprised?  Nope...I didn't think so haha.  And noooo, it is not the same color as the buffet.  The buffet is actually a much brighter aqua.  This is more pale and subdued.  They coordinate, but are not the same.

I wish I could take better pictures and show you the real color of the piece...but just trust me.  It's very pretty!

Here is a picture at night...so the lighting is even worse.  It's hard to get a straight-on shot of this piece because it's so long and I can't back away from it very much.

Of course Perny needed to try and get in a picture...

 Let's try that again, without the cat in the way!  {You can see it's a bit more blue in this picture...}

Here is a close-up of the hardware I chose for doors.  I love that it looks like it was original to the piece.

And the other hardware I chose for the drawers...

 And here is a view from a previous post, showing how the console looks in the whole room...

I have been on the hunt for lamps to set on the console, and the chevron fabric laying on there will most likely become a runner for the top of it.

Piece by piece, our home is coming together! :)

More Than Meets The Eye.

One of my weekend to-do's to prep for the hubby's family visit on Sunday was getting our barn door painted.  I meant to do this the week it was installed, but clearly that did not happen.  This weekend was a different story though...I was a woman determined.  The minute I got home from work on Friday, I threw my paint clothes on and got down to business. 

After a little paint and primer-in-one {the same we used on our trim and cabinets}, our door went from this....

...to this!

 

I know...I know... you are probably thinking that I wasted my time painting it because it looks EXACTLY the same, but I promise you...in real life, the barn door looks much more bright and clean...and well, finished!

Plus, it feels so good to cross another thing off my to-do list. :)

A Place to Call Home...

This weekend was crazy busy for me!  We made plans to have the hubby's family over on Sunday...so that meant I needed to cross quite a few things off my to-do list before then!  {More on that later this week.}

One of the smallest projects we completed was finding a home for and hanging the sunburst mirror I discussed here.

I thought that we should hang it over the TV to give that side of our great room a little "ooomph".  As you can see below, it was mega boring before...

Now, it's much better!

And yes, that is a newly painted console behind the sofa.  I'll be showing that in more detail this week.

P.S. - I was lucky enough for Roeshel over at DIY Show Off to feature me on her amazing blog today!  Head on over there to check it out! :)

Far From Over...

For those of you who remember this post, you know our basement is quite dark and dreary...and well, retro.  I never choose to spend more time down there than I need to.  Basically, I quickly do my laundry, and I enter and exit our house through there...that's about it.

Since we first shared the space with you, we've had a new steel post installed to accommodate the removal of so many walls upstairs, the hubs and I ripped down the ceiling, we had new windows installed, we rearranged the laundry area {with new a new washer and dryer}, we moved in and now, thanks to a whole heck of a lot of hard work by my Dad, we lightened up the walls with a couple fresh coats of paint.

{Here's my typical apology...sorry for the awful pictures.  I took them on my iPhone as I left for work in the morning.  And seriously, we only have 3 lights in the whole basement.  Its awful.}

We know this is NOT where our basement story ends.  I mean, come on...it still screams HEEELP!!!  But it is a lot better than where we started. :)

One day {when we hit the lotto} we will have this area re-done...so it'll be the perfect place for kids to hang out and play.

Anyone else dreaming of re-doing a specific area of their home?!?!?  I'd be shocked if I heard a "no" to that! ;)

Smitten.

Holy moly, I am so smitten with our new-to-us buffet!  A couple months ago, I purchased a Thomasville beauty off of Craigslist, and sadly, it has sat idle in our basement, just collecting dust since then.  But thanks to a recent visit from the World's Greatest Parents, I got the kick in the pants I needed to spiff this pretty lady up and get it set in our dining room.  {Don't get me wrong...the cabinet was beautiful already...just not my style in it's original form.}

So here she is after I removed all of the original hardware and sanded the surface to roughen things up for the primer.

Then it was time to select the color I wanted to paint it.  {And not only did we need to select a color for the buffet, but also for two nightstands, an armoire and a dresser-turned-console that I had bought off Craigslist during the Summer.}  We used a very scientific random method of choosing our colors...aka we laid a million paint chips out all over our bar...honed in on the general color we were going for... and then took the "finalist" chips around the room to examine them against other objects, and to see how they looked in different types of light. 

After all of that fun, I had my Dad assist me in carrying this light-as-a-feather piece {HA...sarcasm} from the garage to our living room, where my Mom was waiting to take over the priming and painting.  Lucky me, I was exiled to our master bedroom, trying to take care of the disaster that is supposed to be our oasis to escape to.

After some perfect painting and several days of curing, I was finally able to re-attach the doors and the original hardware.  The second I put the first piece back on, I was S-M-I-T-T-E-N.  I absolutely loveeee this piece and I'm so happy with how it came out!!

{These photos make the color seem A LOT lighter than it really is.  The very last picture, although not a good one since it was taken with my iPhone and has a glare across it, best depicts how the color appears in real life.  Forgive me...I don't know how to change my camera settings to fix this!}

So there you have it...that's our new-to-us buffet that I can't get enough of.  Anyone else take on some major furniture painting lately?!?!

P.S. - I have a couple more furniture makeovers to share with you guys.  I'm just waiting on some hardware, and then I can hopefully reveal them to you guys later this week! :)

F-I-N-A-L-L-Y...A Reveal Post!

For a while now, you guys have heard me talk about all this "progress" that was happening at our house, but I never posted any reveal pictures to back up all my jibber-jabber.  Well I'm finally able to start showing off what my parents and I {mostly my parents :) haha} worked very hard on.

First...we started with the curtains.  We rolled all 18 yards of our fabric out and made our cuts. 

Then my Mom got down to pinning...of course, Perny wanted to help out.

And before I knew it, my Mom was able to crank out 4 panels.  Yup, that's right, I'm still scared of my sewing machine...and my Mom is a total pro, so I left these up to her.  I did not want to make any mistakes on my expensive-splurge fabric.  So I stuck around and consulted on hem lengths and the look I was going for.

A couple days later it was time for me and the hubby to hang our off-the-shelf Home Depot blinds and put up our curtain rods.  Instead of using the support brackets that came with our curtain rods, we chose to use Kwik-Hang brackets.  My Mom found these online and had me look into them.  They're great, and don't require any drilling into your walls.  That is a huge plus because we didn't want to do any unnecessary drilling into our plaster...although, there was one downside to these brackets for me.  I originally thought I'd hang our curtains from the very top of the wall, not the top of the windows.  This would help to add height to our room..but after thinking it over, I decided to forgo the extra foot of curtain and use this nifty little invention.  It comes out of it's mailing box looking like this....

And the brackets look like this....

You simply hammer the little teeth into the top of the window frame, and you're done!

So our windows have gone from dark black holes....

....to this!



And I'm sure you spotted two of my furniture projects in the room during those pictures.  Last night I finally got the doors and hardware back onto the buffet in the living room, which means I'll be sharing it soon!

So, what do you think?  Do you give the made-over windows a thumbs up or down?!?

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend!  Happy Friday! :)