This next project was the biggest one, both in terms of time/effort and in its effect. We took up the carpet in our family room area and laid hard wood floors. We intend to lay the same hardwood floor in the front dining and living rooms as well.... but that's someday in the future. (To me that means 6 months from now. To Luke that means in like 2 weeks. He's definitely more motivated than I am when it comes to all these projects. I am burned out, but my man is like the Energizer bunny and wants to work,work, work. I complain about it now, but I am grateful for his ambition and drive to keep us motivated and making our house a home.)

Luke's dad was once again a huge help in this project. He helped us tear up the carpet and begin laying some of the floor.

We got into a pretty good rhythm where I would decide which boards I wanted placed where, get them all laid out for Luke who would then spread the glue and lay the boards. Then while he was placing the boards I would prepare the next row. We got the routine down rather quickly. All in all, the floor-laying process really wasn't as intimidating as it sounds. The hardest part was cutting around the round part of our stair case. Laying the floor took about 1 1/2 days total.

 

 Didn't it turn out so pretty?

Another difficult part was making sure all traces of glue got wiped up. Between laying and preparing and gluing and cutting, it was easy to get gluey fingerprints on the boards. It was important to wipe up any trace of glue otherwise we were left with this foggy appearance. Luckily we were able to get rid of the smears by using Mineral Spirits and just through foot traffic.

This really wasn't as bad/hard as I thought it was going to be and it was fun to discover another project that we were capable of doing ourselves!

Next came the crown molding. This was tough to get the hang of, but Luke being the genius engineer that he is, picked it up pretty quickly and after learning what angle the cuts should be at we were able to get it done pretty fast. It's incredible the effect it has on the rooms we've completed so far.

Moving the Wall

Next we had to tackle a wall. Yep... we have a half wall dividing the kitchen from the eating area, and we didn't like its placement. It was too far into the eating area, leaving room for only a small table and like 2 chairs. It was a big project because it included moving electrical wires and pipes, removing the countertops, and a lot of demo-ing and muscles. 

Obviously this was a man's job, so luckily Luke's dad was willing to help! He and Luke put their muscles to work and chiseled away at the white tile countertop, removed the cabinets, and somehow moved the wall and the plumbing. They're awesome. It was kind of like magic to me. I was upstairs painting my life away while the boys were doing their thing, and would come down periodically to check up on their status and to snap a few pics.

Here's the kitchen before the remodel. This peninsula with the sink is what got moved. We moved it 18 inches further into the kitchen. Because it has a 6 inch overhang on the back side, after we moved the wall and got a new counter top we gained about 2 feet to the eating area. We were worried that moving this wall would make the kitchen really small, but actually I think it's now a perfect size and that the size of it before would actually have been a little too big.

Here's the men chiseling away at the counter top.

 Cabinets got removed. 

We had to turn the water and electricity off so they could move all the wires. They were up in the dark working away. I think they were working on this til 2am. 

This is the new placement of the wall, and you can see how much room we gained from moving it. 

So we only have a little baby table right now, but eventually we can fit a bigger table in there some day!

This is the size of our kitchen now after having moved the wall. I think it makes much more sense having everything a little closer. Before it was a little too big. We love it and are SO happy that we decided to move that wall. Thanks to Luke's Dad for all his hard work and for helping us. We obviously wouldn't have been able to do it without him!

A Fresh Coat of Paint

So clearly, painting was the first job on our to-do list. Luke, being the kind-hearted, color- blind boy that he is let me pick the paint color all by myself. I opted for a creamy neutral and decided to carry it throughout the main areas of the house. 

Do you know how hard picking a cream color is? You'd think it would be the easiest thing to find because 

1) everyone likes cream paint 

2) there are a gazillion options to choose from, so you'd think you could just pick one and it would look great. 

Wrong-o! It was so difficult. It took me multiple sample cans and many trips to Lowe's to select the perfect color.  The main problem was we have a mixture of regular and fluorescent lights in our kitchen, and many of the paints looked fine when the fluorescents were off but as soon as I turned them on the paint looked pink. Eventually I found the perfect color that looks good under all types of light. I love it!

 Remember that purple/ pink/ green room? This is its beautiful, fresh makeover.

The sea shell room was the problem child.  I was able to peel up the stupid straw wall paper pretty easily but there was a paper layer underneath it that would not come off the wall.  Although I was basically spent after scraping the walls for an entire day, I did think it was cute to find this message on the wall.

I haven't taken a picture of the sea shell room post- paint makeover but it looks much better. I finally gave up on scraping the paper layer off the walls. We will cover up that section with white bead board around the room.

This is the Family Room after being painted, and that is our new baseboard! This was before we actually stapled the baseboard to the wall. I just laid it there to see how it would look compared to the old baseboard on the other wall. We put the baseboard up after taking up the carpet and laying the hard wood floors, which I will post pics of later. 

We also put up crown molding! Luke impresses me each and every day with the skills that he has. He had never done crown molding before, but because he is a genius he figured it out in no time. His boss let us borrow his air compressor and nail gun for this project.  Thanks, Tom!

Here's the family room with a fresh coat of paint and the crown molding. Excuse the mess.... 

And here's the kitchen with the crown molding and paint.

Crazy Colors!

The first step to our home transformation was painting. Once you see the paint color they chose you will understand why this house scared us away the first time we walked through. I do wonder what the previous home-owners were thinking. Clearly they had a different style than Luke and I do. So let me take you on a tour of our house so you can experience the awesome paint colors we had to live with before I painted my life away and turned the walls from headache into refreshing. 

When looking at this picture, the front door is on the right. This room and an identical room across from it are the first two rooms upon entering the house.

After passing those first two front rooms is the kitchen and then the family room. These rooms were a bright yellow and this weird brown. The kitchen had paintings of grapes all over. It was gross.  

 

  

 

This is the upstairs guest bathroom. Crazy colors, huh?! I'll get to painting it someday. But this bathroom is a really decent size. I love how roomy it is. And it has a very good-sized linen closet as well as good counter/ cabinet space.

 

 Bedroom #1, which I call the sea shell room because it had sea shell stickers plastered all over the walls, as well as this raffia/ straw wall paper glued onto the bottom half of the wall. This room was a nightmare to paint over.  I scrubbed and scraped for a whole day trying to get the stickers and wall paper off. 

 Bedroom #2: This over the top purple/ green/pink room. 

 

Here's the purple room in the middle of the painting process. Each room took 2 coats of paint to cover up all the craziness!

 This is the Master bedroom, one of the somewhat more mild of the rooms. We have not painted the master yet..... and we may not get to it for a while. It's one of our last priorities among all the other projects we have going on. But we'll get to it some day. I'm thinking gray, white, and yellow....

And that wraps up the tour of the rooms pre-paint. The family room, kitchen, stairwell, upstairs hallway and the 2 guest bedrooms have been painted. I'm planning to wallpaper or stencil the downstairs bathroom. The upstairs bathroom I haven't decided what to do with yet but I think I've stepped foot it in 4 times total so I'm not feeling too rushed to start it anytime soon. I don't think I'm going to touch the laundry room, because for whatever reason that's the only room the previous owners painted a sane color. And the front living and dining room I have big exciting plans for. Luke is going to build me a built-in bookcase and window seat which I'm so excited for, and I plan on placing wainscoting along the bottom half. I've had my eye on some very pretty furniture and someday those two rooms are going to be looking mighty fine. But for now, we're trying to pace ourselves. I'm excited to post our progress thus far. Already within 2 months of living here, this house has undertaken some incredible changes!

Our New Home

A few months ago I abandoned my blog due to the fact that I had nothing blog-worthy to write about. Everyone else seems to have such interesting lives, always having something to share.... but I always felt silly with whatever I posted. 

Well in the recent months Luke and I have gone through quite an adventure as San Marcos, CA's newest home owners. After a quick 28 day escrow process, we packed up and left our apartment home of 2 years and set out to experience home ownership for ourselves. In the rush of packing, and the delay in upacking I have yet to find my journal so I haven't recorded any of the experiences we've had in the last 2 months.... hence my return to blog world.

The home we bought was one of the first houses we ever walked through in our search for a house. We were not impressed and  pretty much wrote it off due to the amount of work that would have to go into it. We put in multiple offers on other homes and always got out bid. We found a few homes that we fell in love with, but didn't like the area. The home search was very emotional and stressful. Somehow we were guided back to the house we're in now. Upon walking through the house the second time, our eyes were opened to the possibilities of what we could do with it. We even wondered why we passed up on it the first time around. It suddenly seemed like it would fulfill all our needs-- it was a decent distant from both our jobs, we were still in the same general area that we were in before when we lived in our apartment, it was a decent size... not too big but something we could grow into. We were so excited and ready to place an offer. We were confident we would get this home, since it had been on the market for a while, but just to be safe we put in an offer a bit higher than the asking price. We had been burned many times by putting in an offer at asking price and then getting out bid, and we didn't want that to happen with this house.  To make a long story short, after what seemed like millions of signatures on millions of documents, on April 6 (28 days later) we had the keys in our hands and were ready to move in. 

Thanks to great friends and Luke's parents, moving out of our apartment and into our home was really not too bad. It was sad leaving our apartment for the last time. Camden Old Creek was our home for 2 years and we had enjoyed so many good times in that little one bedroom home. We knew it was time to move on, but it was difficult leaving the incredible ward we had grown to love, and the memories we had made in that apartment. Thanks, Camden for an awesome time!

Because of the amount of work we had planned to put into the house we kept most of our belongings in the garage for quite a while (in fact many of our boxes are still out there). For the first month we spent many nights watching TV in our family room with pillows propped behind our backs up against the wall. We ate breakfast and dinner on the stairs. Eventually we got real smart and brought in our blow up mattress and set up camp in front of our TV to watch shows and movies when we were ready to relax. It was real ghetto.

Little by little we have brought in our furniture as we have completed projects. So far we have painted most of the interior, placed crown molding and some base boards, installed new appliances, moved a half wall between the kitchen and dining area allowing for more eating space, installed surround sound system in family room, laid hard wood floor in family room, replaced old kitchen counters with new granite, installed kitchen backsplash, placed kitchen hardware,  installed new kitchen sink, and scraped up old vinyl kitchen flooring in preparation to lay new tile flooring. All except installing the kitchen counters we have done ourselves. I am so proud of us for completing all we have done. Luke and I have grown so much closer as we contemplate, make decisions, and carry through all of this together. It's been fun remodeling our home, but I am ready for it to be over so I can start with the actual fun part: decorating. I've done some here and there, but can't wait til everything is ready for me to decorate completely. 

Anyways, I plan on recording our progress and pictures little by little as our house becomes a home.  Enjoy!