Have A Seat

Since we moved the dinning room in to the living room area, the old dinning room has been in flux. I'm still struggling with a few aspects but here is the in-between state.

The chairs are from Fred Meyer a while back and the table is from Cost Plus. The rug is way too small. I bought one from Urban Outfitters but it was too big so I'm back to square one.

The sunshine has been making picture taking difficult but here is the view looking in from the front of the house back towards the kitchen.

We still need to move the chandelier. We have been ducking around it but now that we are sure we are happy with the new set up I can move it back over the dining room table.

My ikea desk has replaced the buffet that was here. It is a bit too small but it is a good place holder until something better comes along.

A few little changes but I am starting to see what I want this room to look like. I just wish I had a warehouse full of every type and size of furniture known to man so that I could try a bunch of options. Like a staging company but for regular people.

Cheers!

The Time Has Come

I took these pictures of the laundry room on November 19th of last year.

Yikes. It got better at first, but like every room that doesn't have a clear organizational process it quickly devolved. Not any more though. Welcome to our newly cleaned out laundry room.

Come on in.

Straight ahead, the back door.

Look to your Right. Notice the lack of shelving and clutter.

Look to your left. Water heater. Ohh fancy.

Turn the corner to view the newly cleaned off ledge. Junk free is how life should be.

Here's a better view of our server, furnace, and the door to the second bath. Weird right?

For those of you who like visuals, here's an aerial sketch. 

What are we going to do now? How nice of you to ask! Since day one I have wanted to do something about the fact that you have to navigate the Laundry room just to use the bathroom. Add to that the fact that our Laundry room is officially considered "unfinished" space and thus is not counted in to the square-footage value of the house. So, as the title implies, the time has come! 

Here's the general breakdown of the project.

1. Move the furnace
2. Move the wall
3. Demo tile in bathroom
4. Fix shower? Possibly relocate
5. Storage

This might make things clearer.

Not that this is to scale but you can see we'll be swapping a smaller Laundry room for a larger bathroom (which I would prefer). We haven't exactly nailed down the plans for the bathroom since most of them depend on what we find in the demo. After remodeling the kitchen I've learned not to plan around any one aspect until you know exactly what is underneath. 

Much more to come. The furnace guys come on Thursday and then our carpenter will be here next week so we should have a better idea about what we have to work with soon. Until then, I'll keep dreaming about bathrooms. 

Cheers! 

Have I Shown You...

My reading nook?

It cozies up to the fireplace nicely.

It is in no way finished though. I'd still like to reupholster the chair in a plush velvet and DIY a new footstool (that one is too tall for the chair) but it sure is nice to have a place to sit close to the fire. As you can see I'm pretty fixated on the living room. As things get darker it is nice to feel like our home is cozy. What is that you are saying about finishing the kitchen? Oh, that. I'll get to that one of these days. For now, I'm going to cozy up in my nook.

Cheers!

PS I've been working on slowly updating the house tour page. Some of it is still out of date but it is much closer to how things are really looking around here.

Bedroom Progress

We started this weekend with all sorts of plans to finish up a few projects we have been working on around here but in grand Keller fashion we decided to go to Ikea instead and start a new project that wasn't even on our radar. I know, crazy. Of course, since we decided this Saturday night I'm still putting the finishing touches on things so I thought I'd show you something we did ages ago.

Remember when we were rushing to get things done for our house inspection way back? Well part of that was giving it a paint job. That's right, I've been sitting on a Before and After for months. Bear with me folks.

Here's the bedroom right after we cleaned everything out back in July.

You can see our finished corner that we bumped out in the kitchen processes giving us a nice square room instead of a silly L-shaped one.

 My mustard dresser really clashed with those lavender walls.

Obviously we needed to paint to make it look less half done so we tried something new. Since time was of the essence we decided we would just go to the store, pick paint, and then come home and paint. No swatches, no thinking, just go with our gut instinct.

Here's how it turned out.

We ended up going with Behr's Slate Green. Which is surprisingly not very green.

I also finally splurged and got a full length mirror. Can you believe I've gone a year and half without one? I've been so happy to be able to see my see my shoes and shirt at the same time (silly I know, but it is the little things)

I'm not sure if the light is staying. It actually doesn't clash as much as I thought it would but I am still on the fence (Daniel loves it so it may take an act of God to change it).

Daniel's side of the bed.

My side of the bed. As you can see I get the dog. I've got ideas for how to hide the dog bed though. I'll keep you updated if I ever get around to it.

 You can see we have the trim up but I need to put one more coat of paint on it. I also need to paint those doors.

There you have it, a long over due reveal. Has anyone else just picked random colors and gone with it? So far it is working out for us.

A Little Seen Corner of Our Home

I don't believe I have shown you what is now the office since we moved in over a year ago. Since then things have changed and it has gone from this

It was a good library but it makes a better office. So we switched things around and have come up with this probably temporary solution.

I'll admit this is about as clean as this place gets as it serves double duty as craft room and office. I'm hoping to tackle some of that soon but you know how that goes. You can thank an impending appraisal for the relative cleanliness.

What I'd really love to do (besides paint) is add a day bed and move the desk. Clearly carpet needs some love too. The thing about home offices (or ours at least) is not much real work happens here. Daniel is usually parked in some other room in the house so I've pretty much taken over the space.

Our sudden progress is not slowing down but spackling takes time people. I hope to show you some major changes next week (because lets face it, we aren't going to get a very good appraisal without it).

Hope you all have productive and fun weekends!
Cheers!

In One Year We

Closed on our house

Repainted the guest bedroom

Turned the back yard from this

to this

Went on our second honeymoon

Celebrated our first anniversary



Stenciled the front porch



and the back



Created a gallery wall downstairs



and up

made many many little things as seen on the Project Page

Added a kitten to the household



Celebrated our first Christmas

Demoed the kitchen

Went to Mexico

Started putting our kitchen back together

and many other little things too many to enumerate. It was a great first year and we are looking forward to a great second! Thanks for being along for the ride!

Cheers!

I've Finally Done It!

I've updated the House Tour page! Now you can get a better over all feeling for how things have changed in the last two months.