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Tuesday, May 7, 2013

DIY - Home Renovations Continue


One of the funnest things about owning your own home is decorating and DIY home renovations, in my opinion.  They can be tiresome to do, but so incredibly rewarding. Especially when you stand back and look at what you may also have designed, and definitely created!

Elijah was born a week after we moved into our first house, so he had little time or money for much else but baby mode.  Initially, while Elijah was only a couple weeks old, my husband and immediate family helped get some intro painting done around the house. A year later, we started finally doing more, and two years later, we finally are closer to actually decorating our home while making more changes.  Our home is pretty new (built in 2005) but needs some updating. We were lucky to have bought the home with nice hardwood floors. But the kitchen cabinet color is too light for my taste- oak or maple, I think. Staining them is our next big DIY project that we will be working on in a couple weeks. Stay tuned for that post!

In the meantime, we painted most of our house.  We started with our family room and kitchen and finally painted the the formal side of our house and hallways. We keep a pool table in our formal living room and don't have a formal dining table of our own in our formal dining room yet.  When we initially painted our kitchen, it was a lighter shade of green, but I ended up not liking it after I painted the formal side of our home a deep red and light brown/tan color.  The kitchen is now painted a complimenting shade of brown/tan as other parts of the house.

I can't wait to finish the rest of the house - guest bedroom, office, master bedroom and bathrooms.  But those projects will be in a few months. I'm mostly interested in finishing the formal side of our house so I can start to decorate, finally! I can't believe we've lived in our house for 2 years and still haven't hung up pictures! A testament to how anal I am and how I want things planned out rather than moved around here and there. 

I have a bazillion ideas and projects twirling around in my head. Many of them I've pinned on pinterest.  Follow me here!  I lose sleep thinking about it. While they sleep, I surf the Internet looking for more ideas, online shopping, and planning! Decorating for me is like a child going to disneyland.  In my secret life I would've gone to fashion/interior design school and had my own home show on HGTV or the DIY Network.  In my other life I suppose.

Here is some of our progress: 


This is the view of the inside of our house from the front door.  Here you are looking down the hallway from the front door.  To the left, through the openings, is the formal living room and dining rooms.  Straight ahead, you can see the light green in our kitchen that I ended up changing to the same shade of brown above the red that you can see here on the left.  The kitchen turned out much nicer and not so "Christmasy" once I added the deep red and got rid of the green!  The lighting in this picture isn't the best to show the shade of brown that is actually in this hallway.  It looks like it has a yellow-tone in this picture, but it doesn't - that's just the lighting.  You can see in this picture that our house is barely furnished two years later.  Mostly because the things I want are expensive and one of the great joys of homeownership, unless you've got unlimited funds, is to decorate here and there on a budget.  "Great joys" in that last sentence was used with sarcasm. Of course I wish I could do everything all at once! But I'm grateful for what I have and I do what I can when I can. 


This picture is the same hallway but from the other end of the previous picture, standing in the opening before the once green painted kitchen and look at the front door.  You can clearly see the deep red panels I painted in the inlets of our hallway, which is the same deep red I used in the adjacent formal living and dining rooms on the bottom half of those walls.  You can see that a little bit in the previous picture and clearly in the next picture.  I love this deep red - I think it was called Ruby Red.  We got it from Home Depot. It looks much prettier in person than in this lighting.  Honestly.  We get compliments all the time about our bold pop of color! 

The red inlets are reserved for projects I have in mind.  In the large red inlet nearest you when viewing this picture, I am going to add a wall collage.  I'm so excited about it too! I've started slowly collecting different frames, and pieces of art for it! I've also been keeping an eye out for a bench to add in front of my wall collage and large vases as accents on each (or one) side of the bench I plan on purchasing.  

My pinspiration has been the following:





Lastly, here is a picture of the formal living and dining rooms (As I mentioned previously, we keep a pool table in our formal living room) - we figure we're young, fun and like to entertain. We'd get more use out of a fun place to play pool and hang with friends than a formal sitting area at this point in our lives :) 

Sorry the picture quality is kind of shitty.  But as you can see, we painted a pretty brown shade on the top half of these joining rooms and seperated it with a chair rail.  Chair rails, like crown molding, require precision mitter cuts.  Do your research, and get help if you try to do something similar! In general, it's a total DIY project that can be easily done and adds a TON of character to your space! We LOVE the result! 

Don't mind the ladder, and hand-me-down dining table.  That table is not staying. I actually have my eye on a  dining table more suited to our taste for this space.  Also, the shade of brown here is the same one we replaced the green with in the kitchen.  

I can't wait until everything is done in these rooms, and the adjoining hallway! I'm ordering faux silk curtains in a matching shade of deep red for these rooms; our friend is working on a beautiful painting for us to go on the large wall parallel to the pool table; I'm buying an upright piano to go against one of the walls, and hanging pictures, art and instruments.  It's going to be lovely once it's complete and a total reflection of who we are! 

Stay tuned for updates and additonal home reno projects - including our DIY Kitchen Cabinets Makeover (we're staining them)!!! 

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