Category Archives: Before/After

October 25, 2011 · 11:46 am

Ceiling Fan Mini-Transformation

The title sort of says it all. We have an ugly ceiling fan that is now a little less ugly.

The fan in Hubby’s office wasn’t the yuckiest fan I’ve ever seen, but I still sort of hated it. I was stuck with it because I didn’t want to spend any molla on a new one just yet so I did my best to pretty it up with some good old fashion spray paint.

All of this happens while hubby goes out of town by the way, something about his tiny wife being on a ladders home alone scares him?

Here’s the before: I had already loosened the lampshades before I realized I hadn’t taken a before picture and also noted I probably should have taken it with the light off. At any rate you can see all the scratchy brassy-ness shining through, not really our style.

After I took the lampshades and light bulbs out, I detached the fan blades from their holder by unscrewing the three screws holding each blade in with this little device (and my fingers):Convenient little Phillips screwdriver, almost like it was invented for just this project.

Quite difficult to get a proper picture but you can see how the blade is in with the screws, unscrew the three screws from each blade and you’re ready to tape!

While I was taping the paper I caught myself reading the ceiling as I went. My favorite was a cartoon, it says ”Baby’s first tooth” and the baby has a Bluetooth headset in his ear. So true.

After I finished reading paper/taping I was ready to prime!I ended up doing two coats of primer before applying two coats of the RustOleum Satin Nickle spray paint {which I had left over from my doorknobs}.

Here’s the finished product, it’s still a ceiling fan but slightly less ugly ceilig fan.
Just for comparison:

I would like to change out the toggles but given I did this on a total whim I didn’t have time to plan for that. I also need to get rid of those old energy burning light bulbs!

Not bad for a 3hr total project!

Ps: Don’t forget to open all the windows and wear a mask if spray painting indoors!

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October 22, 2011 · 11:16 pm

La Cuisine

I realized I hadn’t talked about the kitchen since I first revealed it post reno almost a year ago and that post was more of a ”ohmygodi’msoexcitedtohaveakitchenimusttakepictures” kind of post. Let’s go into some details shall we.

As I have explained, the reno took so much longer than we were expecting. Thank God it was still warmish and we could live with our BBQ and paper plates.

Being the frugalista I am, we decided to demo ourselves. Something I may not have been so comfortable with had we not had Mike’s grandfather as a huge help and resource.

Just as a reminder, this is what she looked like before we moved in:Given the awkward placement of the fridge (beside the balcony door) we think the kitchen has been renovated at least once. There is also a strangely placed wall outlet which leaves me to believe there were cabinets on another wall at one point. At any rate we didn’t love our kitchen so out it went. Do you see the damage the tile did to the wall? It was terrible to remove. We needed to have the entire wall with the window re-drywalled due to the amount of damage. Thankfully Mike’s uncle is a professional painter who fixed this to the point you’d never know anything was ever wrong. It sure wasn’t going to be my first DIY project!

The floors were an easy choice. We decided to extend the same hardwood that was installed on the rest of the top floor. This has pros and cons.

Pros:

-Easy to clean.

-Looks amazing.

-Warm on the feet (compared to ceramic).

-Much cheaper than ceramic.

-Hardwood floors add structural integrity to your house.

Cons:

-Given that our wood was a pre-finished Birch, it dents very easily. Birch is much ‘softer’ than other hardwood choices and having the very thick pre-finish layers causes dents quite easily.

-In our situation, even though we had it professionally installed and fixed the subfloor prior to, unlike the rest of the house, the kitchen floor squeaks in places. I’m guessing this is due to so many weights on the floor (cabinets, appliances)  causing some slight bowing.

-Not affecting us, but if someone else wanted to update their kitchen with hardwood, they would need to remove their lower cabinets as hardwood must be placed underyour base cabinets.

Character Right? Damage done to the pretty floor from moving the appliances back :(

Given certain time constraints we didn’t have a whole lot of time to decide on certain details of our renovation. We went with Home Depot for our cabinets and countertop selection. A lot of this had to do with their ability to make stuff happen fast.

We enjoyed the design process with Home Depot. They were great at making suggestions and voicing opinions for us, who had never owned a home or renovated before. They were a huge help. If it wasn’t for them I probably wouldn’t have had a bank of drawers in my kitchen because I forgot them in my original design. Oops.

We didn’t love their installation crew as much unfortunatly. He was a sub-contractor for them and just sort of rubbed us the wrong way {Sorry Dude, I don’t really care if you don’t like my kitchen tap, $350.00 for the one you think we should have isn’t in our budget}.

Choosing the cabinets was hard. It was probably the first time Mike and I had to actually agree on something design related. Mike is very traditional where I consider myself a little more eclectic. I really liked both white and black cabinets where he truly hated both. We both liked the dark wood though and it matched the floors perfectly. For this house it was, as I see it, our only option.

The countertop was also a little tricky and we ended up changing our minds at least three times. We didn’t go with granite for two reasons. One, money. Two, given the size of our total renovation we didn’t want to start overpricing our house for the area that we live in.

Anyway, enough with the babbling. Here’s what she looks like today, a little more dressed up and 95% done:Do you like my furry centerpiece? She loves when I take her picture, can you tell?

I say the kitchen is 95% done because although I recently, finally, caulked the baseboards, patched the hole in the wall and painted the trim (it was only primed before) as all seen here:

Hole under outlet be gone!

Caulking makes a huge difference

I would still like to put a shelf or two in here and eventually change out the appliances. Not a priority right now though.

There you have it. All you needed and ever wanted to know about our kitchen!

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October 12, 2011 · 11:00 am

Cube Shelf Makeover

After completing the main bathroom renovation last week, like most women, I started squealing inside like kid on Christmas morning because I knew we had approached the decoration stage.

We don’t have a huge bathroom so I don’t want to busy the walls too much.

I had these cube shelves from our apartment that I thought could work, except the fact that they were red-ish. I decided to spray paint them. I’m no stranger to re-doing shelving units so I knew it could be done!

I decided to darken them and use Krylon’s glossy black paint. {I may have gotten a little excited and forgotten to prime first…they seem to be doing okay though}It was probably a combination of heavy wood stain on the original product and lack of primer, but even with sanding first these suckers used and entire can of paint!

Here they are in the bathroom:Still haven’t quite decided on items in/on shelves but for now it’s a little texture and eye candy for the room!

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October 10, 2011 · 10:00 am

Rust-Oleum Doorknobs

Given that Hubby and I had an extra day off this weekend, and had a beautiful sunny day, we capitalized and got loads of work done outside. Mike and my brother Andrew started our big under-deck storage area and it looks great so far. I’m super excited to see it all done and show you!

While the boys tackled the big project, Mike’s sister and I got to work puttering around a few smaller ones, like de-brassing these doorknobs:These are the knobs to the basement (interior) doors. All the upstairs knobs were totally replaced with pretty, fancy knobs before we moved in. Our intention was to replace the three doors downstairs with matching knobs. This dream came to a crashing halt when we priced them out to find they were $25.00 each! No way Jose were we spending $75.00+tax on doorknobs. Na-uh, not happening.

Welcome spray paint.

Source

I decided for the sake of $8.00 I would try a can of RustOleum’s Satin Nickle spray paint. I couldn’t possibly make them any worse so it was worth a shot.

After the super sister-in-law removed the doorknobs, I stuck them into a piece of styrofoam that would allow them to stand up, gaining better access to all angles while painting.

I also remembered to label which knobs came from what room in case they were finicky or something when replacing.

After a few coats we had this:Better right!?

I am super happy with how they’ve turned out.

Here they are, back in their rightful place, after drying outside for 6hrs:Not sure yet how they will hold up but for $8.00 I don’t have insane expectations.

One final before/after:I would defiantly recommend this product to anyone looking to do a little sprucing up. Super fast, easy and looks great!

One more tiny thing off my list!

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October 2, 2011 · 10:54 pm

Main Bathroom Update

Like almost every other project in our house, the main bathroom reno took longer than expected to finish. This weekend we finally got the last step completed, finishing the walls.  One. Year. Later. {I first wrote about the renovation here)

If I’m being honest, when renovations end up taking longer than expected, and life gets in the way, one become complacent with living with holes in their walls.

The previous owners had actually started renovating the bathroom before they moved, so we decided to work with some of what they had to save some money. Who doesn’t like saving money?!

Here’s a shot of the bathroom right after we moved in:The bottom picture was when the previous owners still lived here but shows the vanity better. We moved this old vanity to the basement bathroom which I showed here.

We lucked in with their floor choice, we really liked the travertine tiles. We also decided to keep the light fixture and faucet. All of these were huge money savers!

We swapped out the vanity, countertop/sink, mirror and shower head. We also decided that for now we’d keep the wall color seeing as how we had a whole new can of the paint downstairs.

The old vanity had an off centre sink so we did have to relocate the light fixture, leaving this behind:

A nice big hole that needed to be patched, and for some reason it took us over a year to deal with it. Shame.

For a whopping $5.00 we bought a 6×6 hole patch:

Once the patched was stuck to the wall (it was that easy, no cutting or anything, it’s like a giant sticker), we put some drywall DAP over it:…and waited for it to dry. You can see by the smaller patches it turns from pink to white when dry. No guess work! Easy Peasy.

We started this patch work oh, six weeks ago, yup, six weeks of cheetah spot speckle walls.

Until today!Clean, un-patchy walls!

We bought a new vanity base and replaced the counter with a full granite sink top combo. 

I didn’t get a close up of the patch but it looks great! I’m super happy with it.

I did a quick once over with the paint roller on all the walls and it looks all new a shiny.

This is an ever changing house so we may end up eventually changing the light and faucet. I don’ t love them but we didn’t have to pay for them and they work just fine (except when the faucet decides to drip for a few days. Annoying.)

For now though, it’s now decorating time! I know I want a shelf or two but didn’t have time (or money) this weekend to go shopping so we’ll buy or make something within the next week or two. Canadian Thanksgiving is this coming weekend, so I imagine we’ll be quite busy with the family.

Until then, I’m just happy to not stare at white patchy walls every day!

Note: the mason jar on the end of the vanity was one of my Pinterest inspirations. Mason jar+small votive holder=double holder (cotton balls and qtips for me).

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August 3, 2011 · 11:13 pm

10 Things I’ve Learned In My First Year Of Homeownership

You think you know what you’re getting into when you buy a house. Buy. Unpack. Live. Sounds simple. I’ve discovered there’s so much more to owning a house than I originally thought.

I’ve learned so much about myself, my husband, and life in general through owning our little home.

1) The saying that ”if your marriage can survive a renovation you can survive anything” is so friggin’ close to the truth it’s not even funny. When Mike and I told people that we weren’t just ripping out and replacing our kitchen but would simultaneously be: redoing floors, painting, having driveway repaved, replacing all windows and siding all while living here, it’s no wonder we got more than one strange look.  Living through the kitchen reno alone almost broke me.

Renos started in August and I didn’t have this until October:

It was still a little unfinished here.

I was one happy lady when I came home to a finished kitchen. I wanted to stay home and cook/clean for weeks! I still love my kitchen.

2) Blogs and blogging has pretty much changed my life. It is a huge part of my homeownership experience. I am the type of person who, once inspired is pretty much unstoppable until I obtain a goal. Reading blogs has inspired me to do so much more with my home than I probably would have had the creativity to do on my own. Blogging is a great outlet for me. To every reader and every blog I’ve come across, thank you. I’d like to thank Pinterest for also consuming every free moment I have to start/finish these amazing projects.

3) Painting doesn’t suck as much when you have someone with you. When we moved in I was pretty much ready to DIY/try anything myself except paint. I re-painted a few closets and that was enough, until my sister-in-law offered to help me with the basement and suddenly it was kinda fun, she took the suckiness out of painting.

4) Patience is required. I have a million ideas/home projects/upgrades I want to do at once, but for more than one reason, I cannot, it’s just not possible! We’ve only been here a year, there will be time!

5) If I am blessed with a little girl, she will never, no matter how much she begs, have a pink room.

This is our ”pink room” taken the day we moved in. It’s the spare room and the camera isn’t doing the pink justice. This room is so pink there is a permanent aura of pink around the door. It is one of the most obnoxious colors I have ever seen in my life. Once this room gets painted (that’s right, it’s STILL pink) the color pink shall not enter my house again. It has ruined me.

6) Lily has changed our lives and made our house a home. I’ve always had animals growing up, hubby has not, so for him initially, having a cat was more for me. Lily changed that. He loves her.(Her favorite toy is a paint roller). She is our little fur baby. Having Lily has changed both of us and in some ways our relationship. We love our Lily kitten.

7) Organizing household finances takes time and is a learning experience. It is not easy, dude! Even though we lived together before the house (only renting), having the house is so much more of a challenge. We’re still learning and getting into a groove.

8.) It’s scary. When you really, really think about it, it’s a huge job. A house is a big object, no matter how big or small, we all have the same basic structure to maintain. From this fear I have a million little things filed away in the irrational file in my brain {what if we get a leaky roof, flood, are hit by a hurricane, what if birds/racoons/critters take up residence somewhere before I know?} the list goes on and on….

9) Having good quality windows is a must. One of the first things we did was replace all ten of our 20+yr old windows and H-O-L-Y it makes a difference. Less humidity & cooler in the summer and it keeps warmth in (and cool out) during the winter.

10) At least 1.5 bathrooms in a house will save your marriage a million times over. We don’t have an ensuite and don’t think we care if we ever do, but we both like our bathroom time. Having that second half bath is a must. Speaking of which, we just re-did ours:It looks so much better, I still have a few little things to do in here but she’s almost done.

I love owning a home. It isn’t always easy, or fun, but it is so worth it. Owning something and making it your own is a great feeling. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

What has owning a home taught you??

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August 1, 2011 · 9:58 pm

You See Shower Curtains, I See Bedroom Curtains?

This weekend marked our 1st anniversary in our house (to which I realized I have yet to update my ‘home tour’ section on the blog-on the To-Do list!).

In this entire first year of living here we haven’t had any window coverings in our bedroom. It’s not been fun. Running to our bathroom to get changed, the sun rising directly into our windows…it’s forced creativity to say the least.

You see, for me, buying curtains requires a huge ‘room commitment’.

Curtains give so much to a room.

Curtains are like the ‘I love you’ stage in a relationship.

Sure I could have run out and wasted money on a temporary fix but why bother when I know, when we decide on a ”direction” for the room I’d re-spend money.

So we waited. and waited. and waited, until this weekend.

The reason we were waiting is because of paint.

Paint is like the ”1st base”.

When we bought the house we were ready to have the whole house painted and even had an idea what we thought we wanted in the bedroom but as other projects took shape, the bedroom paint sort of took a back burner. We never hated the paint in our bedroom either, actually we kind of liked it, which I think is why we were having such a hard time making a decision.

Over the past 365 days we’ve grown to like the paint more and more. It’s a nice shade green, neutral enough that we can ‘have fun with it’. If we do re-paint it will remain in the similar green family.

Shortly after we moved in I bought this pillow:

I loved the colors in the pillow but didn’t know how I wanted to proceed.

It already matched our walls too, again solidifying the need not to paint.

But we were ‘stuck’ in the curtain department.

Couldn’t get past 1st base.

Well I guess if you include the pillow as a room additive we were stuck on 2nd base.

Back to curtains.

I went out with my pillow in mind and nothing else. I looked everywhere and didn’t see anything I really ‘liked’.

Then this caught my eye:

Yup, it’s a shower curtain, hanging in my window.

It was the perfect width. It was the prefect price (more than perfect price at 60% off which I didn’t know until the cash!). They were the perfect colors. It stopped the light. For me, it was a no-brainer. It couldn’t hurt to try.

Let’s just confirm that there is in fact a ‘Stitch’ on our bed. He matched the room…

It is quite common of houses our age to have an electric heat outlet under every. single. window. So as much as I like long, to the floor curtains, I don’t want to catch on fire in my sleep during the winter. Those heaters get HOT. Having the shower curtain length allows them to be far enough from the heater hubby doesn’t have to worry about fires when I blast the heat before bed.

I’m quite liking my shower curtain-curtains. We still have to get more on the walls but the room is starting to come together.

I’m almost ready to say ‘I love you’ to my room.

{I should add these were only $10.00 each!}

{Linking up with http://www.bluecricketdesign.net/}

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June 22, 2011 · 7:00 am

$10.00 shelf update

I think I finally got my ledge shelves looking just the way I want thanks to playing around with pretty much every loose item I own. Here they are in all their $10.00 glory.

I’m a big fan of monogrammed stuff so as soon as I saw this post over at YHL a few years ago I rushed to my local copy and print centre to make one and now it finally has a home. The other things on our shelf is a giant red (fake) peony (needed some color!); two prints hubby and I bought in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from our honeymoon (that we paid 4 euro for); a picture of hubby and I on top of Rockefeller Centre during our most recent vacation to NYC; my favorite dollar store wicker ball(s) and a clearance photo from Homesense I’ve been holding onto, never hanging, for two years.  I’m still in love with these shelves, I’m sure they’ll change  when we find/make new stuff but for now they’re done!

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June 21, 2011 · 7:00 am

The Great Outdoors.

Mother Nature cooperated enough to allow me to finally get some gardening/outdoor work done this weekend. It was still damp but not pouring and that’s good enough for me! I got some wicked deals at the Superstore Garden center this weekend (25% off plus tax free!) which allowed me to finish my projects.

Outside of a little gardening with my mom growing up (and that was mainly deck/planter box gardening) I’m a total newbie at this. I haven’t killed anything yet though! I would say I have a ‘yellow thumb’, it’s not green yet, we’ll see in September how well I’ve done.

Using my prior knowledge and the helpful tool of Google, I was able to plant my first raised garden bed. I knew what I thought I should do, I just confirmed with the Google experts. Here’s the result:

I planed three boxwood shrubs, two dahlias and two kong coleus (mosaic leaf) plants.

How pretty are the Kong Coleus leaves?

Kong Coleus-MosaicI love them, one of my favorite annuals. Coleus plants come in a few different variations, this one is my favorite though.

On top of getting the raised garden in, which I’m uber proud of by the way, I put mulch in the front garden boxes around my two GINORM-O hostas (which I already trimmed!) and dwarf ceders:

Please ignore how dirty our brand-spankin’ new driveway/walkway is. Gardening is a messy job and getting the dirt out of a black driveway=IMPOSSIBLE. We’re borrowing my father-in-law’s pressure washer soon to clean ‘er up (along with the deck).

Continuing the tour around our property, the snowball bush I planted earlier this spring (NOT DEAD!):

It was an itty-bitty baby with no flowers when I bought it, it still has the potential to get this big though!

Pretty little white snowflakes:

When we bought the house we inherited a full house-length of day lilies and a peony (one of my favorite flowers):

Neither are open yet but that doesn’t stop ants from crawling all over them…

I also bought another of my favorite plants this weekend ($29.99 down to $15.00 tax-in!), a Forever & Ever hydrangea. It is a hydrangea that blooms repeatedly all summer. They come in different colors, I will show you later what it looks like, for now it is just starting to peek out:

I only did one small planter box this year. Once the yard gets established I’ll spend my summers planting a lot more annuals. I couldn’t resist the new black petunias though:


I wasn’t the only one busy working in the garden this weekend…


It’s that time of year folks. Spider season. I don’t mind though, I’d much rather spiders (who stay outside) than millions of ants (infesting every nook and cranny of my house).

To summarize, here’s an idea as so how far our exterior has come:

Now, with new siding, driveway and windows, a wicked garden (go me!) and some old fashion TLC:

It’s coming along nicely if I do say so myself.

Now if only I could get the grass looking better. This picture is making it look better than it really does, or this is the yard’s ”good angle”? You saw what we had to work with in the ‘before’.

Any tips for a GREENER LAWN?

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April 16, 2011 · 10:19 pm

Living Room Reveal

We’ve lived in our home for 8 months now and the majority of those 8 months the living room looked like this:



Fun right? It. was. a. nightmare. Between being kitchen-less for 4 months and having to live in this, we were seriously questioning our sanity as to why we decided to do such large reno’s while living through it all (in our first year or marriage too). But we made it and are starting to truck along. The first big change were the floors. The previous owners had carpet but installed hardwood in the main living area just a few weeks before we took possession (we since continued the hardwood into the kitchen reno too).

We moved into the house with our leather furniture from the apartment (which I was never fond of but were great apartment size…) but during the reno’s Lily was able to run through the chaos in what we call ”nuclear mode”. She was the only one of us who found fun in all this mess. She ran through the boxes, up the boxes and everywhere in between the boxes, including the much hidden leather furniture. She discovered leather provides a nice grip for her little paws and provided her with a launch pad for so called nuclear mode. Needless to say, when we uncovered everything and started to put things away as some of the reno’s and painting wrapped up, we discovered all the nice little picks and scratches in the leather from feline nuclear attacks (look it up, it has to be a real thing). So as much as hubby cherished the beloved (or I say uncomfortable) leather, off to the furniture store we went (secret screams of joy inside, Go Lily!). After we got the new couch set and coffee table, the living room started to take shape, it’s pretty much done now we just need to dress the walls up a little more, here she is today:


We bought the couch set on sale for a great price and we originally walked past it because in the show room the fabric looked very gray, which I love but I also knew gray wouldn’t work for our plans in the living room, but after we saw the fabric in a more natural light we realized it was actually a nice shade of brown and looks great with the paint, which we both LOVE (who knew one could love a shade of beige so much?). Originally we we’re a little scared of the red in the pillows (or I should say hubby was a little put off by the red) but we both love the pillows and are loving the red. We still have a little dressing up to do with the living room but it’s come a long way!

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