Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 4 - The Bathroom

We're now onto the bathroom in part 4 of the house tour.

I really like the bathroom - it's the first time in a while I've had a more modernized bathroom with regard to fixtures and tile, so I wanted to take advantage of that fact and use a more modern color scheme. The color the walls were painted were a bland dark tan, which just blended in with the tile and made the room look very dim and dirty.

Before:

To remedy the bland color on the walls and to give the room a more modern feel, we went with a dark, charcoal grey - Behr's Nature Retreat (430F-5). It made all of the features of the bathroom stand out and overall just cleaned up the entire appearance of the room. We are considering a new shower curtain, but since I still love our Lenox Chirp one from our previous apartment, which can be seen here in its former setting, I figured I'd stick with it till I found something I love more.

After:

Photograph of a traditional japanese tattoo by Jayme Thornton.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 3 - The Kitchen

The kitchen, while not the most impressive room in the house by far, has improved a lot with an intense cleaning, swapping out the outlet and light switch plates and just a few coats of paint. The dingy tan color definitely had to go. There isn't a whole lot to say about it, except that it does need renovations, so we're pretty limited on what we can do to improve it.

Before:

I picked a very bold green for the walls - Pesto by Behr (color number 440D-5), which happens to be one shade darker than the dining room (seen here). I really like to use shades of a few colors rather than a multitude of different colors. It makes the rooms work together rather than just be a kaleidoscope of color, which I find tends to make people feel uneasy.

The bold green made the contrast between the white trim and the walls a lot more dramatic so you didn't focus on the things we can't do much about (namely the floors and that the cabinets need repairs / replacing). We have a few more improvements that we're going to do, such as replacing the light fixture and possibly changing out the cabinet hardware, but it's pretty much where it's going to stay.

I can't complain too much - it's the largest kitchen I've ever had in my years of renting, so I can live with the less than perfect aesthetics. It does have some features I really like though, such as the original small rounded corner shelves that flank the sides of the upper cabinetry over the sink, which allow me to display my awesome set of original 1964 New York World's Fair drinking glasses.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 2 - The Dining Room

Happy October, everyone! I've been so happy to be able to comfortably have the windows open in the house lately - it has such a wonderful cross breeze! Lots of stuff coming up to do for October - sweet hubs 31st birthday, a trip to South Carolina for the state fair, a trip to the mountains, some pumpkin picking, hopefully lots of baking! I love fall - it's absolutely my favorite time of year.

Anyhow, now that I've professed my love of fall, let's move onto part 2 of the house tour - the dining room! You've already seen a sneak peek of it here in our how-to post on recovering our dining room chairs, but here it is, in full effect.

A few before shots:

And now the after:

Painting by Ashley Love

TCB Cross Stitch by the amazing Kristy Kizzee (aka Bombastitch)

Coney Island poster by Michael Michael Motorcycle

I actually quite liked the color of the dining room before, but unfortunately, it didn't go with the color palette I had in mind, so it had to go. We replaced it with a nicely pigmented, but light shade of green called Desert Cactus by Behr (color number 440D-4), which is a few shades lighter than our kitchen that you'll see in part 3 of the house tour, next week.

Design in My Home: House Tour, Part 1 - The Living Room

Sweet hubs and I have finally gotten to the point with the living room that we feel comfortable sharing photos of it. There's still work to be done, but we're pretty happy with the progress we've made.

Here's a before shot of what we were working with:

To those who love red, I apologize in advance, but I truly hated the color of the living room before. It was not quite brick red, and not quite burnt orange, but this grotesque hybrid of the two. It repulsed me and therefore had to go immediately after moving in.

We chose to go the total opposite of what was there previously and cool that baby down with a nice dark teal, specifically Mirage Lake by Behr (color number 500D-6). It did everything we hoped it would - made the white trim pop and made the floors stand out so much more.

See my favorite lamp by Grenkol? It was a perfect fit for the bookshelf.

Aside from painting, the house overall was in pretty great shape - we did also end up swapping out all of the outlet and light switch covers in the house. The ones originally in there ran the gamut of almond, white, and my favorite - painted over to match the wall and cement the plate in place. I can't really complain though, like I said, it was in good shape.

Now, as for things we still need to do - we definitely need a curtain solution. I hate mini-blinds, especially cheap plastic ones. Our cats apparently hate them too - our sweet little Abigail has a mission to break every one of them. We're doing pretty well so far. (Insert sarcasm here.) We're thinking of either going for roman shades with a textured fabric or a natural wood roll down - we shall see.

Another little project I'd like to tackle is putting in new window hardware. The hardware that is currently in all of the windows in the house as well as the knobs and pulls on the drawers in the kitchen are all very old and very worn down. Aside from that though, we're in good shape for having been here two months now.

One of the challenges we ran across with this room is the awkward layout. We hadn't initially noticed it when we viewed the house (not that it would have deterred us from renting it - the neighborhood and the price were too fabulous to pass up on), but it did cause us to think more than we wanted to with regard to our furniture layout. I must say, I'm really glad we decided to keep our "apartment sized" furniture. Had we purchased a larger couch, we would have had to eliminate some furniture and we just aren't quite ready to do that - we love our mid-century hand me downs!

We're quite pleased with it. I'm sure as time goes on, we'll play around with it and maybe find something that works better, but for now, it definitely feels like home.

Design in My Home Project: Budget Friendly Landscaping

When sweet hubs and I found our darling little bungalo, we fell in love immediately. It was the perfect size for us (it's a small house and coming from NYC, we didn't need a cavernous space to fill with excess "stuff".) It's not a newly renovated place, but its got a lot of charm. That also meant it needed a little elbow grease, specifically on the outside, which Jesse was itching to get his hands on. It had been so long since we'd had our own outdoor space, that doing little bits of landscaping was one of the major appeals of the house. Keep in mind, this is also landscaping from a couple of novices... the most either of us has ever really done with regard to landscaping was raking or cutting the grass. 

Over the last month, we've become best friends with our local Lowe's store. We've done little bits here and there, and finally, the front is now starting to take some shape. We didn't have a huge budget, and to be honest, didn't really want to spend a lot of money on a rental property, so I wanted to share the little things we did, that made a big impact.

First off, this was what we started with:

Full frontal of the house. Note the overgrown landscape beds and unruly, unpruned trees and plants.

Close up of the overgrown and dead leaf filled landscape beds.

Close up of the walkway landscape bed and vine impressions left on the brick.

It wasn't terrible, by any means, but it could have looked better. A lot better. So here's what we've done...

- Raked out and mulched the landscape beds. (Cost: $2.50 x 10 bags of 2.2 cu ft brown mulch = $25.00

- Sprayed down all of the sidewalks and stairs with water (Cost: Free)

- Cut the grass (Cost: Free)

- Pruned the trees and pulled weeds from the landscape beds (Cost: Free)

- Planted five ornamental grass plants (Miscanthus sinensis 'Variegatus') in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $3.00 x 5 plants = $15.00)

- Placed three solar powered lights in the small landscape bed by the front walk (Cost: $2.50 x 3 lights - $7.50)

- Planted a geranium plant and a salvia plant in two planters that we found (Cost: $9.00 for the geranium, $1.50 for the salvia = $10.50)

- Planted a small container herb garden with mint, dill, rosemary and chives (Cost: $3.50 x 3 plants, $1.25 for packet of dill seeds, $4.77 for a small bag of potting soil, $6.96 for a black heavy duty plastic urn = $23.48)

- Threw down some grass seed in bare areas on the lawn (Cost: $10.14 x 2 bags of shady grass seed = $20.28)

GRAND TOTAL: $101.76

We still have a few things we want to do to the front - the main thing being that we need to put two pieces of landscape timber to finish the front bed (you can see this on the walkway shots). Once we buy the timber, we'll be right around $105. Not too shabby!

Another project for a little later on is that we want to scrub off the vine remains on the house, but we need to figure out a strategy for that (to power wash or to scrub brush).

Here's the final product (until we decide to do more):

I love the dark brown mulch - t adds some much needed contrast to the front of the house.

Close up of one of the landscape beds.

Close up of the brown mulch.

You can see where we need to lay the landscape timber on the left side. Also, I just love the ornamental grass!

Close up of the geranium and the salvia plants.

Ornamental Grass

My sweet little herb garden. (I'm very excited about this.)

Design in My Home Project: Recovering Our Dining Room Chairs

Recently, sweet hubs and I acquired a fantastic mid-century modern dining set from his mother for our new home. In addition to a dining table with a removable leaf and six chairs, the set also includes a beautiful credenza, which unfortunately won't fit in our small home's dining space, so that will be saved for the day we buy our first house.

The dining set is in pretty great shape, considering it's age and the fact that between it being used and it coming into our possession, it was living under a bed for a few years.  It needed a little love and was be back in fine condition in no time.

Hey look! It's the first interior reveal of the house:
the dining room, which we painted in Behr's "Desert Cactus"!

Our first step to bringing the set back to its former glory was to recover the chairs. We recently went on the hunt for fabric that would fit stylistically with it but also give it a little bit of a modern flair. Our search unveiled lots of gorgeous fabric in many styles, colors and textures - but we couldn't find something just right - it all seemed to be missing the most important thing on our search - our budget!  For those of you unfamiliar with purchasing fabric - yes, it can absolutely be an incredible solution to freshen up a piece of furniture or a room on a budget, but it can also get very expensive, very fast, especially when you have champagne taste (in fabric) as I do.

Anyhow, after lots of searching, both online and in-stores, in New York City as well as Atlanta, I came across a fabulous little website called Newtoto. It was perfect on several levels: reasonably priced, had lots of options for modern prints and most of them were heavy duty (ie. resists spills and tears - perfect for cats and messy eaters). They even allowed you to order free swatches. I picked out my top three favorites and three days later I had my swatches in hand.

(Fabrics Left to Right: "Network - Frost" Terratex Panel Fabric $7.50/yard, "Maxim - Sesame" Crypton® Jacquard $10.64/yard, "See Saw - Granite" Crypton® $6.50/yard)

And the winner was: See Saw in Graphite! It was absolutely perfect. The moment my grubby little fingertips touched its thick, beautiful texture I was in love. Yes, I fall in love easily, especially when wonderful textures are involved.

But I digress... I got online and ordered my fabric immediately.

Fast forward to 5 business days later...

The day that our delivery was scheduled to arrive, sweet hubs and I ventured to Hancock Fabrics and our luck was with us - they were having a 40% off sale on foam! We walked out of there with four pieces of foam to start recovering our chairs as soon as our shipment arrived that evening.

And once we got home, our fabric was at our door. We then began recovering.

This was what we started with:

The chair before, which was covered in a red vinyl
that just didn't match our color scheme at all.

Sweet hubs and I then disassembled the first chair (unscrewed the seat from the frame) and took off not one, but two layers of different fabric and multiple layers of batting and foam - some of which I'm sure was from 1970 - and removed all of the staples left from the previous recovers.

Sweet hubs removing staples.

After removing the staples, we cut the foam to the size of the board. Once that was done, we cut the fabric. I don't know about anyone else, but I always get so nervous making "the first cut". Be it wrapping paper, fabric or cake, I'm always nervous that I'll mess it up.

Sitting on my knees, taking a deep breath before cutting the fabric.
Very dramatic, I know.

Once the fabric was cut, next was stretching the fabric over the foam and board and stapling it to the back. It's not nearly as difficult as it sounds - you just have to be careful to make sure you eliminate ripples and whatnot on the corners when you're stapling. And stretch the fabric tight. You want it to be nice and smooth. (I failed to capture any photos of the starting point since we were both doing this at the same time, but when you're doing this, your fabric is on bottom with the correct side (the side you want showing) down on flat on a surface. You stack the foam and then the board on top. When stretching and stapling, you want to start with one side, then do the side opposite of that, and so on. It keeps the fabric taught.

This is what it should look like mid-way through (keep in mind we had a little too much fabric left over, hence sweet hubs trimming it):

After you finish, you simply place the cushion back on the frame and screw it back on.  Voila!

I'm not going to lie - this was my first time recovering a chair. It was surprisingly easy, once we figured out the logistics. And when I say we, I mean that after the first chair, sweet hubs decided that he enjoyed recovering that first chair so much that he actually took over the project and finished the rest of them solo.

I'm a lucky lady. I'm even luckier because now I have a rad dining set.

That's all for now folks!