New Floors In My Office!

After a brief side project in the kitchen (aka our new door), it's back to the new upstairs floor.  My office is next on the list.  Here are some before shots.

I definitely needed a new floor in there, am I right?  Well, Uncle Don was over yesterday to work his magic!  Here's my new floor!

Pretty amazing, right?  I can't believe what a difference a new floor can make!  I can't wait to start moving furniture around and hanging some art.  I've got big plans to make better use of my workspace and some decorative ideas as well.  But that will have to wait until the floor in Chris's office is finished, because all the stuff we've been shifting from room to room will have to be moved back in here for a time.  It's a bit of a hassle, but it will be so worth it in the end.

Kitchen Door Installed!

 Here's what was happening when I came home from work this evening:

New kitchen door being installed.

 And here's what was waiting for me when I returned home from dinner:

The door is installed!

 Here's a close-up of the knob and the dead bolt.  They still look like they are not the same color in this picture, but they really are - I promise!

Schlage antique brass door fixtures.

 And here's the scary results of cutting a bigger door hole in the wall:

Lathe and plaster.

Old and new supports.

It's pretty scary to see the inside of your house.  You'd think I'd be used to it after the bathroom, but no.  It never gets less creepy to know that a bunch of rickety boards and crumbling plaster are the the only things keeping your house standing.  But it's okay, Uncle Don is coming back over the weekend to frame up the door and cover the gaping holes.  More pictures soon.

Kitchen Door Hardware

Tonight Chris and I picked out a knob and dead bolt for the new back door that is set to be installed tomorrow.  We decided on the Flair Antique Brass Residential Keyed Entry Door Lever and Antique Brass Residential Single-Cylinder Deadbolt, both by Schlage.

I know they don't look like they are the same color in this picture, but they are in person.

Door frame photos

Here, have a few photos of the removal of the top of the door frame from over the weekend:

Top of the door is gone.

Top of the frame and the corner moulding.

You might recognize this terrible red paint from the murder wall.

So many layers of paint over the last 100 years...

New Door Incoming!

As you may or may not know, our refrigerator is old and gross.  It's kind of moldy, the freezer light is out, there are exposed wires inside where someone ripped out the ice maker before we moved in, and things on the top shelf of the fridge have a tendency to be frozen while things in the freezer are sometimes not quite as cold as you'd like them.  In short, we need a new fridge.  So we went looking at fridges while we were off from work after the wedding, and we fell in love with this beautiful Samsung refrigerator. Unfortunately, both are too large to fit through our tiny Victorian doorways.  But instead of doing the reasonable thing and buying a smaller fridge, we've decided to go ahead and just widen the doorway.  Ridiculous, I know.

Our new back door.

The door has been purchased and is sitting in the backyard.  All that's left is to remove the old door, widen the doorway, and install it.  Amazing, right?  Uncle Don came over on Saturday to take down some of the door frame, just to get an idea of what is waiting for him behind our walls.  Not a whole lot, from the looks of it.  I was hoping maybe there'd be wads of cash back there, but no such luck.  Heck, we don't even have insulation back there.  No wonder it's so cold in here all the time!

We're keeping the trim to use on the doorway we'll probably make during the Big Kitchen Redo (which probably won't be happening for several years) since it won't fit around the new door.  Check out all of the awful layers of paint on these things!  I really don't know what the past owners of this house were thinking when they painted their kitchen in all those horrible colors.  I think our donations to the paint layers will be a lot more pleasant.

So that's all I've got for you so far.  Chris and I have to pick out hardware for the new door, which I'm sure will be a lot of fun.  I think the plan is to install the door on Friday, so I guess we'd better get shopping!

New year, new projects

Okay, so, the plan for yesterday had originally been to paint the kitchen.  I was doubtful about this plan, since there is still some paneling that needs to be taken down and some giant holes in the walls that need to be patched.  But who am I to question the helpful locusts?  During the week, my aunt and uncle came over to start painting the new bedroom so that we could move out bedroom furniture in and continue the floor installation in the rest of the rooms.  They got the entire room painted with the base color and one wall faux finished.  All that remained was to faux finish the rest of the walls and we'd be good to go.

Since the bedroom painting was already well underway, we decided to just go ahead and finish that instead.  So my mum, my dad, my aunt, and I finished the remainder of the faux finishing while my uncle painted the murder wall with Killz (more on that later).  When he was finished with that, he came upstairs and helped us move all the bedroom furniture in to our brand new bedroom!

Plastic bag faux finish

It is so amazing!  It's almost like we moved into a new house.  Obviously there's still a lot more to do in there: new curtains, new bedspread, new decor pieces - you know, all the fun stuff.  But even now it just looks so awesome, it felt like we were sleeping at a hotel.

Let me take a minute here to talk about the faux finish.  If you have looked through my bedroom inspiration board, you have probably seen this picture:

http://www.elledecor.com/image/tid/5990?page=7

I decided these blue and green Moroccan walls were the walls I wanted.  We used this plastic bag technique:

which I think worked out really well.  Obviously, we used blues and greens instead of browns, but the process was the same.  I think our knockoff walls look really close to the inspiration picture.

Now, on to the kitchen.  Some of you may already be aquainted with our murder wall, but for those of you who aren't - let me introduce you:

Standing in front of the murder wall!

Scary, right?  We had originally hoped to strip the wood of the wainscoting and stain it, but it quickly became apparent that it would not be possible.  This happened months, maybe even years, ago and we've just been living with it ever since.  But no more!  The murder wall has now been covered up (to some extent):

No more murder wall!

It's far from finished, but even this little change has made our kitchen a less terrifying place.  Now it can be easily painted over when we do get around to starting the kitchen. 

But that's not all - there was another small addition to our kitchen:

Our newly extended kitchen table!

Since I hosted New Year's Day dinner, we needed more space to seat everyone - so my parents brought over the leaves for our kitchen table!  Hooray for more makeshift counter space!  Again, it's not a huge change, but it makes a very big visual difference in the room.  Chris and I are both really excited to be able to have a centerpiece and still have room to eat.  Unfortunately, the leaves make it even more obvious how much our table desperately needs to be refinished:

Regular table vs shiny, unused leaves.

When my parents had this table, the leaves usually sat in the basement unless there were a lot of people coming over.  So they saw a lot less use and as such retained a lot more of their youthful glow.  Ah well, someday.  But refinishing the table is not high on my priority list, so for now we will just have to deal with it.

So yeah, I feel like we got a lot accomplished yesterday.  It was a great way to ring in the new year.  Stay tuned for floor updates, bedroom updates, and an explanation of my plans for the kitchen.

Ringing in the new year...

...with some home improvements!  I am too tired to update fully right now, but here's a sneak preview of what we (me, Mum, Dad, Aunt Candy, and Uncle Don) got accomplished today:

Check back tomorrow for the full update!