The Craziness that is Home! :)

Greetings dear friends {old & new}! How are you all today? As promised, I thought I'd fill you in on some of our ongoing projects. After the initial stress of figuring out paint colors, brands, sheens, etc., we figured we definitely needed to tie up some miscellaneous loose ends around the house and start tackling some major projects!

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I decided that due to the chaos, I'm just going to post all of my "before's" and "transitional states" in "black & white" so that when it's time for the entire reveal {whenever that may be}, it will be unveiled in all it's multicolored glory! :) Until then, black and white it is!

Here we have my hubby peeling, repairing & painting the return air grill slot. When you buy an older home, there's alot of this going on. Plaster = lots of cracks = filling, smoothing, sanding, and so on! Not to mention when layers of old paint makes closing of certain doors and windows rather difficult, uneven, and sometimes downright impossible! At first it didn't seem like a lot of work, but the whole process becomes easily tedious.

If this is the first time you're dropping in on my page, I have to tell you that 50% of our house came with tile. I wasn't too thrilled with the rustic colored tiles when we first moved in, but I suppose they have grown on me. :) I would have preferred new wooden floors {not in the budget right now}, so this is where Rachel Ashwell's book, Shabby Chic Home has really helped me: embracing your home and working with what you have. In other words, if it's not broken, why fix it {at least for the most part}??? The only draw back about these tiles is that they are uneven in some parts, so when my hubby and I put in new baseboards, there were obvious gaps between the board and tile...so that's where shoe molding comes in {extra strip you see between the tile and baseboard above}. This really helps close in the major gaps.

Now moving on to the "closet dilemma" that I have been stressed out about. When we moved into our home, ALL the bedrooms had textured ceilings {you know that popcorn like appearance}. After testing it for asbestos {negative}, we smoothed out the ceilings {had to have professionals come in to do this - and it was NOT cheap!}. When they did this we had to remove all the closet doors {we were going to replace them anyway} because the closet ceilings were also textured! Upon doing this, we found out that the wall that separates our bedroom and my son's bedroom is not really even a wall...more like a flimsy board?!?!

So we have decided to take down the thin wall and build a new one - albeit a more sturdier, thicker and insulated wall! In the picture above you see that the walls went "bye, bye!" So how do you build a new wall? Well that would be trips to Home Depot, measuring, cutting, and making darn sure you know where the ceiling studs are!!! :)

Ok remember a few weeks ago when I said that we finally had our "dining room" in place...well, I take that back. It has now become a storage depo of sorts! This is pretty much where we work on our projects because our garage is unfinished {no lights in there!!!}, so we don't even eat in our dining room anymore - we have to use the breakfast bar in the kitchen because it {the dining room} has become our new "dumping ground" once again.

This is what {half} our dining room looks like in its current state. Did I also mention that we were given some hefty hand me down furniture for free...but that's for another post because in all honesty, I'm not too sure of what to do with those pieces... now back to the closet issue:

Ok now since the ENTIRE house is undergoing DIY "closet reno," we still have the majority of our clothes, linens, shoes, etc. in BOXES scattered around our bedrooms. This is why we don't have beds. That's right, with the exception of our preschooler who sleeps in his toddler sized bed still, the rest of us sleep on the floor or rotate to the couch. Why don't we have beds? Well we got rid of them when we moved because they were old, flimsy and too small. But because of the scattered boxes, that does NOT leave us any room for new beds just yet, so until we get this closet issue fixed, 3/4 of us are on the floor/couch! Do you really want to see the craziness right now? Look below, but don't say I didn't warn you!!! :)

This is part of what our bedroom is like {above}...

And my little one has his room in chaos as well...and this is only the half of it!

And I won't even get into what my teenage son's room looks like... "Teenage son's room." Those words should be 'nuff said. And couple that with renovation...well, you can only imagine... But I have to keep telling myself, "one day at a time" and it's a "work in progress!"

So here you see the hubby making sure we know where the ceiling studs are so we can attach the initial plywood above to begin the framing of the new wall. We managed to get the first piece up, but had to call it a day when our last minute out of town guest arrived last Saturday evening. So we had to hide all that junk that was in the dining room into the garage temporarily...

And here my little one insists that he helps daddy on this project, while he wears a bandanna as his makeshift "superhero cape!" :) Well, that's all for now. We will be resuming our projects this weekend. Hopefully a wall will be up sooner rather than later!!! :)

XO's,
Jessie

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