Happy New Year!

Over the winter break house renovations continued. It was a total bummer though because the plan was to play "Renovation Realities" (I love that show) and install the carrara marble subway tile around the cooktop. Unfortunately someone (me) didn't order enough tile. And we couldn't even start, since when the new tile comes, if it's wildly different it will need to be shuffled into the deck.
So we did other things.

AND THE MOST AMAZING THING HAPPENED. We removed the old crappy wall oven from the 70s and found hardwood floors! Which means that there are hardwood floors underneath our HIDEOUS brown tile floors. At least in the dining room and part of the kitchen. So exciting and will hopefully save us so much money, as refinishing floors will be a lot cheaper than buying and installing tile. We'll just have to decide what to do to join the rooms (dining and kitchen are pretty open concept). We could install wood in the kitchen, but that's probably not the most practical solution, since I'm messy and we have dogs.

I also continued painting kitchen cabinets.

And here is an after shot (minus the new herringbone marble backsplash of course).

Soon to be revealed is our new stainless microwave oven and trim kit, for that built-in look!

Vintage Light Fixture Installation

When we moved in there was a non-functional ceiling fan over the spot where a dining table would go:

Boy these pictures from our viewing of the house are terrible and depressing.

We scored a BUNCH of cool vintage enamel fixtures from Dave's dad and with a little bit (ok a lot bit) of elbow grease we have a super cool new light!

That's a lovely shot of the hole in the ceiling left by the fan. And Mr. Pickles and the next project "Operation hide the washer/dryer."

And after much crawling around in the ceiling:

Hmm, these pictures aren't that great either. Oh well. The light is a green color and matches the cool one we got at a flea market in Hamburg (slated to be hung over the sink).

I was also very excited to receive the rest of our Flor tiles that were backordered. Hurrahhhh!

And a big shot of the entire rug!

Posting Break Down

Woah, my apologies for the lake of posts. I started a new job and it's kept me pretty busy (maybe I've already mentioned that).
A new Flor store opened in Houston. They had been open only 1 week and I had already been 4 times. But the upshot is that we ordered a carpet for our living room. And most of it has arrived (a few tiles on backorder) and it's partially installed. I'm totally jazzed about the parquet-style installation. This is a "during" shot.

And very excitingly, I've also hung the curtains. It's really hard to get a good shot of the windows because with the approaching winter the sun is always shining in. 

Night:

 Early Morning:

How to paint shutters

While I would describe our house as brick, there is some woodwork and all the trim and shutters. And all of it was painted 1960s blue. Which is sort of a dusty blue, but not in any attractive sort of Swedish or French way. Just a dirty looking, sad blue.

Well this weekend, I finally got around to painting the trim around the door and started on the shutters. Shutters are such a bitch to paint. We couldn't easily remove them to spray them with ease, so I went with the ole paint brush. Here you see a "during shot," two shutters painted, two still blue. It was so going on the paint gloss black enamel latex paint was so odd. It was like painting with tar. One upshot to painting with tar is that you really only need one coat. And I felt very HGTV saavy because I asked the paint guy to tint the kilz primer so it would be gray instead of white.

On a sidenote, it's so sad to compare how the grass looks in these two pictures. The drought and heat of summer have not been kind to the lawn. Apparently, we may be on the cusp of a 10-year drought in Texas. As a result, I have no plans to resod the front. I think we are going to investigate xeriscaping over the winter.

Here is a close up on the entry way, featuring cream trim and a fancy new brass doorbell to match the door hardware!

Here is a tighter shot of the shutters. I used painted tape to mask off around the shutters to avoid painting the brick. They were a real paint to paint because the old paint was totally crumbly in parts and it's really hard to paint the louvers and not get drips. Hopefully no one will ever get up close and just stare at the shutters. They look 2390482903483290 times better from afar!

Doors, doors, doors

This cool salvage place called Historic Houston unfortunately went out of business. It's quite sad for us, because it was an important resource. Most notably we got our reclaimed wood floors there:
Installation:

Post sanding:

We also bought some metal casement windows. And we went on their final weekend and got a bunch of old wood panel doors for half off (about $40 each). Which is so soooo much cheaper than anything you'd get at Home Depot or Lowes, with a whole bunch more style.

This weekend I painted (with minor patching) the door for my sewing room and we installed it last night. No photos yet though. I also got a nice antique glass knob set from another architectural antiques place in Houston.

And my husband worked on installing new closet doors. Using plain 6 panel doors as bypass doors. For this we did go with the Lowes cheapie because they are really lightweight and well suited for slide.
A photo below (side note this room is not peach, a color I despise, but rather it's orange).

This morning I found this picture and want to do something like this to replace the crapped out louvred door that covers our water heater in the kitchen. The adjacent washer/dryer don't even have a door at this point. I think it would work well!

No I Haven't Died and DIY Stainless Countertops

Hello Everyone!
Sorry for the long delay in posts. I'm sure everyone has just been breathless in anticipation with what has been going on in my house. Not that much, actually. We went on an awesome vacation to the Pacific Northwest. It was really fun and the temperature was never over 80 degrees. We left during and came back to a continuing heatwave in Houston. Nothing like 110 degree temps to make you feel like working on your house!
I have misplaced the connection to plug my camera into my computer. So pictures continue to be Iphone only. Exhibit A: Temperature 112 degrees. AGH

Exhibit B: Cool rug purchased by husband in El Paso, featuring Emmit and his vigil waiting for said husband to come home.

Exhibit C, D, E and F: Stainless countertops

I removed all of the blue laminate from these niches in the kitchen and painted the surrounding cabinets. We had priced out having stainless steel cut by a metal shop and also looked at new laminates (couldn't decide if laminate carrara was cool or god awful). But then my father in law mentioned that he had some old duct work that was stainless and the pieces were probably large enough that he could cut the segments we needed for the kitchen! And HOORAH it worked. This was also the smoothest DIY project we've done in awhile. Or course the sheets didn't fit perfectly into their new home, but my husband easily (or it seemed to me) filed them down (or whatever) to make them fit. And he sanded out all the imperfections, so they have a cool brushed surface. Then I rolled on contact adhesive and we stuck them in place! HOOOORAH.

Weekend Update

Well, despite one snafu of dining room paint turning out really minty, thus creating multiple trips to Lowe's to remedy the situation, it was a successful weekend of home renovations!

As expected, the kitchen looked like a bomb went off as I had to empty a bunch of large drawers in order to paint them.

Bomb has gone off.

Mint green dining room. ACK!

Before/During

Now I just have to wait a few days for the paint to cure on the drawers before attaching the handles.

The fridge surround is also looking quite nice.

 So re: the dining room. After I decided the mint paint was terrible. I went back to Lowe's and bought 4 different samples. And settled on "Parakeet Pete" which is very similar to the paint in our bedroom. But hey, it's not the same shade and I figure since the rooms have different exposures (dining room-north, bedroom-west) the paint will look quite different.

New paint!

I got some edging done last night.