The Porch

Our house came with a screened in porch right off of the living room and kitchen. The porch needed a bit of aesthetic work, so for the last 6 months, DH has been working on the porch off and on. When we moved in, the ceiling needed a fresh coat of paint and new light fixtures. The ceiling fan in the middle was a sad little thing, and the lights on either side had long lost their globes. I wish I had thought to take a picture of the ceiling before, but I was too concerned with getting the old fixtures down.

We found the ceiling fan and the lights at Lowe's. Originally, the lights had a white base, so DH spray painted them with some Antique Bronze paint to match the ceiling fan.

For a while, our porch had a nice new ceiling with the same old walls and floor. For some reason, DH and I didn't want to paint when it was 100 degrees outside ;) So our poor porch sat like this until Fall.

DH painted the walls and trim of the porch, and then set about painting the floor. Our original plans for the floor included painting the floor gray and then stenciling red bricks onto the floor. After DH had completed about 1/4 of the floor, we took a long look at it and decided that it wasn't going to work. So DH painted the floor again, this time a shade of brown.

After we found a rug that we liked at Overstock.com, the porch was finally complete!

Now we just have to wait for it to warm up enough to sit outside :)

2010 State of the House

Today marks the one-year anniversary of our house. To commemorate, I thought I'd post a tour of our house as it is today. To keep this from being the longest post ever, I've linked to previous posts about the rooms where possible.
Our major expense to the house to date has been installing new windows. Next year, we plan to replace the roof.

Exterior

For the exterior, we have removed many of the bushes that surround the house, restored the pond, and laid the patio (partially visible here). Next spring, we'd like to do some landscaping.
In the future sometime, we'd like to replace the siding and trim. When we do that, we will sand down and repaint the exterior doors.

Master Bedroom

So far, to this room we have replaced the ceiling fan, painted the walls, moved our furniture in, and hung pictures. Until a month ago, we had shutters over the windows in our bedroom, but when we placed the windows, the shutters had to go :(

We hope to paint the ceiling (we didn't realize until we moved in that someone had painted the ceiling yellow), and install crown molding sometime in the near future.

Master Bathroom

This room was the first room to get a major overhaul. Looking at this room makes me excited about my plans for the rest of the house.

The only thing left for this room is replacing the shower and redoing the door. I like the bifold door, but I realize that it does have it's drawbacks. When we take up the carpet, the bifold door will likely be too short for the lower floor. I'd love to install a pocket door, but that would involve moving an outlet.


Hallway

We have painted the hallway and hung pictures. We would like to replace the hall light and move the light so that it is mounted in the ceiling.

Guest Bedroom

We have painted the guest bedroom and filled it with the stuff that doesn't have a home anywhere else :)

Other than replacing the ceiling fan, there are no current renovations planned for this room.

Schoolroom (aka the Front Room)

Aside from painting and moving things in, we haven't done anything to the room.

BB's Bathroom

We have painted the walls and decorated. We plan on doing a major overhaul to this room like we did to the master bath, hopefully at the beginning of the new year.

BB's room
Again, all we've done here is paint and move stuff in. We are going to replace the fan in his room, and aside from the flooring and door changes, we have no further plans.

Living Room
We have painted this room and moved things in. I dislike the off-set fireplace, but as of yet, I don't have a plan for the fireplace.

Kitchen
We haven't done anything to the kitchen aside from moving our stuff in. After we replace the roof, the next project we're saving for is a new kitchen.

New cabinets, new flooring, new counter tops, new lights, new oven, new stove, new hood...

I can't wait.

We initially planned on painting the existing cabinets and countertops, and repairing the cabinets where needed. But after some research, we've come to the conclusion that a better use of our resources would be to replace. We don't plan on selling this house anytime soon, but whatever changes we make we want to make with the resell factor in mind. The time and money it would cost to fix the cabinets doesn't make it worth our while. Replacing the cabinets will also enable us to improve the layout of the kitchen.

Front Hallway

In the hallway, we replaced the globes on the existing light fixture and spray painted it to take it from shiny brass to antique brass.

We also removed and/or painted over the wallpaper. Parts of the wall are still bumpy, so we'll have to go back and fix that. Other than that, we have no further plans.

Laundry Room

In the laundry room, we patched and painted the walls. We plan on either removing the cabinet doors or painting them. When the kitchen gets new flooring, we will replace the flooring in here as well.

Overall Interior

Throughout the house, we plan on replacing the carpet with hardwood flooring. When we do this we will also replace the base molding. At some point, we would like to replace the hollow doors with 6-panel solid doors. Chances are, this will take place after the kitchen remodel (which is after the roof).

Yet Another Project Completed

Thanks to DH!
A previous owner of our house had installed a pond in the backyard. When we walked through the house before we bought it, the pond looked like this:

The pond was mostly empty, except for debris that had fallen in and rainwater that collected there. We didn't do anything to the pond until this Spring, when we cleaned out the pond (ICK!), and pulled up the overgrown plants that surrounded it. For a while, our pond looked like this:

We fiddled and fiddled with the water until we bought a UV filter. I didn't want to spend $80 on such a thing, but it has been worth every penny. Our water went from green and murky to clear enough to see the bottom. I add algaecide every week, and the filter does the rest. DH pulled up the old week barrier and redid the existing rocks, then added more rocks. Now our pond looks like this:

I still want to find a hollow fake rock to cover the outlet, but other than that, it's done. And I love it.

Trash to Treasure

I was at Goodwill today and spotted this:

I can't help but wonder where, oh where, this sign fit in. 80's coffee shop? Some type of island-themed cafe? You can't tell from the picture, but the frame was mega gross. I have honestly never seen such a flimsy plastic used for a frame - of a mirror, no less!
The cardboard back had started to curl away from the mirrored glass, enabling me to see that the tacky pastels were printed on paper:

After taking the picture apart, I flipped over the paper, spray painted it, and stuck it all in a new frame:


The original picture was $5 (hooray for Goodwill's color of the week!), and the frame (also at Goodwill) was $8. The mirror hangs almost directly across from the window in my kitchen so that it will help bounce the light around.
There's a little bit of damage to the mirrored portion of the glass, but I think it adds character. Sorry for such a crummy picture, but it's really hard to take a picture of a mirror and not be in the picture yourself!

A Making Do Re-do

Since our master bath renovation, I've been inspired to hurry up and do more to the rest of the house. Unfortunately, our budget says otherwise. So we've been doing renovations using what we have on hand.
Thanks to the very small size of our master bath (and the paneling that covers 2/3 of the walls), we had a lot of leftover paint from the master bath (Valspar's Desert Fortress). Since I knew I wanted a tan-colored neutral in my laundry room, it was pretty easy to decide what to do with the paint. Of course, it wouldn't be a "before and after" without a couple of befores:

And now for some afters:
Although you don't see it in the pictures, there is a shoe organizer directly under the coat rack. Both are from Target and I've had them since we lived at our old house.
I bought the sign above the coat rack for this project. It originally had a saying on it, but I painted over it with some craft paint. Upon reflection, I think the sign could use a bit more distressing.
The previous owners left the top cafe rod for the door. I bought the second rod and the cafe clips. I already owned the curtains on the door, which really aren't curtains but rather 2 frilly cloth napkins and a table runner.
At some point, we have plans to take the door off, sand it down, and restain.

All of these wall decorations I already owned. I initially looked for some laundry room wall art, but I wanted to make do with what I had. I used some album frames to frame pieces of an old apron pattern I found at a yard sale a few years back. and filled some containers I already had with various sewing notions. I'd like to find something taller to go in the larger box at some point. I did, however, buy the holder for the ironing board and a new cover for the ironing board.

The shelf above the washer and dryer is the shelf that used to be above the kitchen doorway in our old house. I did have to buy one additional bracket for the shelf to support the middle. I will redo the laundry room cabinets whenever we redo the kitchen cabinets.
All in all, we spent an estimated $50 for the project (I lost a Lowe's receipt). Not exactly free, but I think it's a lot of bang for the buck. At some point in the near future, we're going to replace the floor boards in both the laundry room and front hallway (upcoming post!) with a slightly shorter version of what we did in the master bathroom.