Friday, August 21, 2015

Three Season Room Part 1

Let's start at the beginning. The three season room!

Day One in the 3 Season Room

This room really sold us. We saw so much potential here. The rest of our house has 4 windows. FOUR. One small window in the kitchen, One tall window in the living room, one in the guest room and one in our 'master' bedroom. The other bedroom that currently is an office had a window at one time but they replaced it with a door instead. It has come in handy with a dog since there is that access at the back of the house but I still need windows. We do have one small window in the laundry room in the basement but it doesn't count! In other words, this room of windows is seriously the BEST. BONUS there is a small cat door leading to this room and that's Todd & Pipers jam.

Cat door- Todd says, let me in!


We started by replacing the subfloor and adding luan and trying to level the floor before installing flooring. Chris and his dad got down to work! This room is on top of a deck and it isn't the least bit level. The posts under the deck in the middle are higher than the rest of deck. It isn't noticeable on a day to day basis, but it did not make tackling this project easy for my perfectionist husband.

Chris after the luan was installed and self-leveling stuff (Forgive me, it was 3 years ago!)

On top of the subfloor Chris put down some BIN primer to cover up the TERRIBLE cat smell. 

Note- not from these cuties Piper and Toddles. They wanted to come in and check it out.


After this Chris started installing our floor tiles. We were and still are pretty cheap. We had no real idea what we were doing or how to do it so we went with something that would hold up, be durable since it's an indoor/outdoor space and easy to install. We picked parquet style plastic tiles. They were self-adhesive but Chris still used glue on the floor to help hold them in place. He likes to shake it up so he installed them on a diagonal pattern just to dress it up a bit. He's got a good eye!


Installing into the night! 


He took a break to see if he could still balance on his elbows, and of course he can that cutie of mine. 


WOW. Night and Day makes quite a difference. 

After the floor was installed which took a few hours and some cuts but since they are flexible plastic that part was pretty simple which was great because we didn't have any power tools at this point so he used a utility knife. Later that summer we painted! Or I painted, The hubs isn't so much for paint or mess. I decided on a deep yellow, gold color wanting to aim for a India theme with deep golds, purples, reds.
Looks great with that green door.

Chris was concerned that the sun we get in that room would loosen the glue on the tiles so I did my research via pinterest and this blog and found a tutorial on using Conduit in place of curtain rods. Those can be so damn expensive and yeah, again we are cheap. Or frugal? Maybe that's a more flattering word. I went to Lowes, and had them cut it to size. The clips to hold the conduit was almost as expensive as the curtains themselves. I found myself at World Market and found a bunch of clearance curtains that worked for me! To fill in the gaps I bought a lot of their sheers since buying 8 curtain panels was going to cost way more than I wanted to spend. In the end? Happy accident! They looked purposeful and beautiful!


I still have these curtains today, they look amazing!
I did not spray paint the conduit mostly because I was lazy. Do people really look at the rod? I hope not, judge away friends and family.

Since this post is becoming a lot longer than I intended, I think it's best to add a part two. Which is exciting just thinking of all that we have accomplished! This room has been fun to play with and style and it is for sure my favorite room in the house, and these felines of mine cannot get enough.

Catch ya on the flip side homes,
T Bomb

Thursday, August 20, 2015

House Updates!

Before I break it down room by room I wanted to give you some reference! What's a blog without pictures? A book? All of my rooms are a work in progress for sure. We bought our house in January of 2012 which means we are quickly coming up on 4 years of homeownership! Forget the depressing fact that January is coming up quickly, disgusting. Winter. In Ohio. NO. Just no.

We closed on our humble abode and lived in it for a few months, again WINTER... before getting to work. I specifically remember having a mini breakdown regarding owning a house finally and living with white walls and cracked countertop and freaking wallpaper border with pink ribbon and blue flowers. Shivers. For reals. It's a small house, only 936 square feet. That is not including the 300 square foot in the three season room or the 500 square feet in the basement. One of the first things we had to do was install some flooring in both the three season room and basement. We had an escrow that enabled us to be reimbursed from the bank. From there the remodel dragon was released!

Here are some before pictures just to give you an idea of where we have come from. I hope to put up some detailed room by room posts soon!

Chris day one in our house, changing the locks

Chris reading some directions on how to change said locks. Sad to say, these floors remain today. Note it was freezing and our heat wasn't turned on at this point.

Front Door- green. Oak trim, yellow outlets. Totally a 1990 house.

Our first furniture. haha

Ipod photo of our guest room. 

Chris after replacing two pieces for the subfloor and adding the luan with some self-leveling gray stuff?


Rolling on some BIN primer or Killz. This room smelled like the previous owners had some kitties that did not use their litter box. It was pretty terrible

Before the luan, This is just the subfloor.

More subfloor

Subfloor!



Originally this was apparently a door from the 'master' bedroom into the sunroom. They removed the door and patched and this is how it looked when we moved in.

Living Room

Living room shortly after we moved in

Our unfinished basement. I wanted a teal color to provide a nice deep color to go with all that natural wood. Notice, no carpet! Just glue. 

More shots of the wood. That was an unfinished bathroom that I have NO photos of! On the other side of that room there was an old toilet, small vanity and shower. No drywall, no floor, just cement. 

Don't mind the orbs... Todd looks scary up there! Apparently the purpose of this stone platform was to hold a wood burning stove? 

Chris sanding the wall to prepare for primer.

Piper, orbs and the wood steps leading to the sunroom door.

Basement after primer, chalkboard wall and loading up the teal paint. This was our first paint project!

Painting away

A look at the stone wall.

We have carpet!

Our kitchen from day 1. See that fancy wallpaper border

Our original sink/faucet.

A little bit after moving in. That end cabinet was added by the original owner.They blended pretty well! This was after we replaced the hardware. There was white marshmellow knobs previously.

Some new hardware. See below for the original white knobs that drove me nuts! 

Original knobs, cabinets. 

Bedroom. This is the other side of that wall where they removed a door leading to the sunroom.

Main floor bathroom day 1

Main floor bathroom after we put up our new curtain
Alright! That's your first look at our home as of 2012. Can't wait for you to see what we've done! We have come a long way.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Time For a Little DIY

Who knows what this blog is, it's a real mixaroo of random moments in my life. Although the lack of posts makes that a lie or at least look that I have had no life. But it's just hard to have a blog topic. Do I have to have a topic? All this to say that for the next few posts I will have a topic! I love DIY and have done a lot of it around this house of ours. I've always known I loved houses because my TV has stayed pretty permanently on two stations, HGTV and DIY network with the occasional Food network and MTV for some Teen Mom thrown in. As a young lady some of my favorite memories were driving around our little town with my mom talking about houses and picking out our favorites. I still see you dark red brick beauty in the park! You'll always be my number one muse. Never change home-y. So without further ado or terrible puns, the next few posts I have planned will be DIY related. For no other reason than we spent a shit ton of time tackling these projects, they deserve their own little spot on the interwebs! Some big, some small and probably not at all helpful because I am not a true blue blogger professional but- there will be pictures! Everybody loves pictures!

Laterz- T