Archive for December, 2011

505

Merry Countermas To Us!

Posted by
December 7, 2011

They’re here. And they’re spectacular.

Just as a reminder, the cave room looked like this back when we moved in last December:

But back to our brand-spanking-new Corian counters. I didn’t expect them to feel as chunky, heavy, and stone-like as they do. They’re like marble without the veins. Seriously. Nothing plastic-y about them. And they’re sleek but sort of matte too if that makes sense, which looks/feels really chic and sort of honed-marble-ish (according to our installer the white matte ones are the only ones that don’t show scratches, which will definitely come in handy). So yeah, it’s safe to say that we’re completely smitten.

Of course things were looking a bit rough when they went in, but we’re used to the room looking like crazytown by now:

One of the coolest things to watch was how they made them completely seamless by filling the cracks where the slabs met with some sort of glue-caulk and getting it suuuuuper hot with these defibrillator-looking pieces:

Then they were flash cooled and the installer polished them until the seams were completely gone. Seriously, I’ll give anyone who can tell where they were a hundred bucks because it’s impossible. Oh but for this step of the project Burger, Clara, and I went for a nice long walk and John shut himself up in our bedroom because it was a little fumey while the glue-caulk was heated up and cooled and smoothed down (but it thankfully wasn’t a dusty or messy process, which was nice). So I didn’t come back to chaos, just beautiful white amazingness with the fan going and the windows open.

Here’s where one of the seams ran (right up this corner) before he worked his installer magic. No evidence of it at all, right? Three cheers for shape-shifting counters. And yes, that is a baguette. We’re fancy like that.

The guy was awesome about talking us through maintenance stuff. Here are a few of the fun things that I stood there and actually took notes about because I’m ridiculous (in my defense, the guy seemed to be entertained by my furious scribbling):

So that combined with the fact that John’s sister has had the same exact counters for five years with three kids and a big dog (and zero repairs/stains) makes us deliriously excited. And I’m happy to report that we’re not being nearly as anal as we were with our first kitchen’s granite counters (the light color of them really freaked us out in the beginning). We’ve jumped right into using our kitchen even more – so things like spaghetti sauce have already made an appearance without any disastrous results.

Oh but there is one problem. Our sleek new counters make our old cabinets look like crapola by comparison…

… but once we sand, prime, and paint them (along with fiiiinally replacing the eyeball hardware) they should be worthy of such pretty countertop company. Can’t wait to rebuild/cut down some matching doors and get to the whole priming & painting step.

You can read all about why we chose white Corianand how much it costs here, and how the templating process went here. This post is just really about photos. Glorious, glorious photos of the counter that we waited 20 sinkless days for (read more about removing the old counters and sink here).

See that hulking 3 foot by 5 foot peninsula? Pictures don’t capture how big it really is (it’s larger than the wood dining table that we used to have in here). That baby is pure joy. So much space to spread out and bake/craft/eat/serve up appetizers, etc. The kitchen is pretty much 100% more functional and there aren’t even stools there yet (or any wood trim pieces on the back and side of the peninsula to hide those ugly brackets)…

Oh yeah and see those counter edges on the peninsula above? They’re gently curved, so there’s no pokey part to stab Clara in the eye or John in the hip or me in the belly (yes, we’re all dramatically different heights around here).

And for those wondering how we’ve been dealing with an in-progress kitchen and asking if we’ve been eating out every night, we’ve actually been really lucky to have a fully functional fridge, stove, and dishwasher this time around (which was not the case during our first kitchen gut job). So we’ve still been eating/cooking at home without counters and a sink (we just used a piece of plywood leaned on top of the cabinets as prep space with a cutting board and other platters and plates to keep us from actually prepping food on the plywood). But the whole washing-pots-and-pans-in-the-tub thing was getting old. So happy to have this guy back in action:

Our counter fabricators even left us a handy little cutting board that they made out of the sink hole for us, which can also be used as a trivet (super hot things shouldn’t be placed directly on Corian counters, but we never put hot stuff on our old granite counters without a cutting board or trivet, so we should be cool). Oh and for anyone local wondering who we used for installation, we were beyond thrilled with Five Star (our installers) who were hired through Home Depot (where we ordered our Corian). More on that here.

Oh but wait, before the counters went in we hid a little time capsule behind one of the cabinets (which will only be found when our counters are someday removed).

John sweetly wrote it. It reads:

Today our new countertops are being installed. We are a family of three (well, four if you count our chihuahua Hamburger). I’m John Petersik (age 30), my wife Sherry (age 29) and I moved here 11 months ago in December of 2010 with our daughter Clara (age 1.5). We write a blog about our home improvement adventures called Young House Love (www.younghouselove.com). If you’re reading this it means you’re probably getting new counters too. Hope you enjoy them!

Here’s how we hid it behind the corner cabinet by the window (stapled to the back of the cabinet in a ziplock bag).

Ah memories. We can hardly picture the top of the cabinets anymore. Isn’t it weird how your eyes adjust so fast? So next up we have to cut down and hang a cabinet for the built-in microwave next to the pantry, start trying to retrofit/build matching doors for the secondhand cabinets that we added to the room, prime and paint the cabinets, tackle the backsplash, hang our built-in range hood and floating shelves, redo all the lighting, lay the cork floors, install our new stainless dishwasher, add crown molding, etc. Whew. Might not be done until late January (we originally were aiming for early Jan) but we’re inching slowly towards the finish line. Just taking things one day at a time seems to be the secret to sanity. That and washing things in the sink again. Oh man, it’s good to have that guy back.

Psst- I’m over on BabyCenter talking about our plans to build a play table for Clara, and sharing a roundup of the ones that have us inspired. More on that here.

Before & After, Our Current House
505

  Leave a comment

767

Living Room Cha-cha-cha-changes

Posted by
December 6, 2011

There’s something about being nearly a year into living here that makes it feel like we’ve accomplished a fair amount of “evolution” over the last 357 days (not that I’m counting…). I guess it’s because living somewhere for a month isn’t really a lot of time for tweak-age, but twelve of those in a row – well, it’s enough time to get things going. Like living with a floor plan for 11 months (just to be suuuuure) and then knocking out a wall that we’ve wanted gone from day one:

It’s also enough time to make a few furniture and accessory changes as we transition from working with what we have (like random stuff carried over from our first house) and first-instinct choices to a few more thought-out decisions. Yup, these things apparently take time – at least in our experience (remember this post on that subject?). So here’s the story about a pretty sizeable three-fer tweak of epic rug, ottoman, and chair proportions.

We haven’t made any major furniture/accessory purchases since the just-moved-in phase when we got our sectional, our first rug, our bed, and our big dining room table. Then we went on a building/DIY kick for the next almost-year (making our $104 console table and our $124 wall-to-wall double desk and saving nearly 4K by laying our own stone patio and getting a ton of estimates to save 3K on our kitchen wall-opening). We’ve mostly just been picking up super inexpensive secondhand furnishings since moving in (like our $35 desk chairs, $25 dining chairs, and four secondhand kitchen cabinets for our in-progress remodel for under $100).

So after many months of building up the savings account and waiting for things that we loved to come along, it felt nice to actually buy them. And since we had some “store credit” towards Joss & Main from curating a sale with them as a side gig (more on that here), we loved that we could put that towards our living room tweaks, especially because it’s one of our most used rooms, so we’ll definitely notice and appreciate it. But now onto what we tweaked and why…

For the last almost-year we have loved our fluffy green shag rug (it was great for a wiggly crawling baby and a wobbly toddler – and was so thick and inviting that many an adult found themselves sitting/lying on the floor). But there are a few issues that have popped up as Clara has grown.

# 1. Let’s just say that finding milk dripped and goldfish or cheerios crushed into our plush rug was less than pleasing. Yes, we’re one of those casual families who doesn’t have a no-food-in-the-living-room rule (I mean, peanut butter & jelly or a bagel with cream cheese isn’t living-room approved, but dry crackers and a sippy cup of milk are). That’s just how we both grew up and we really appreciate the this-house-is-not-a-museum vibe, so we plan to keep it that way. And although vacuuming or a bit of scrubbing (for spilled milk) got ‘er done (and Burger was awesome about hunting down the occasional goldfish before we even knew it’d gone missing) the rug was still a bit higher maintenance than a lower pile one would be now that we have an energetic toddler.

#2. The size. In our first house both our living room and den rugs were just 5 x 8′ since the rooms there were so small. So although we knew that our new living room was much larger, somehow an 8 x 11′ rug sounded like it had to be big enough for our 25 foot long room. Well… try as we might to “adjust” to it, it always felt a little small (we’re definitely still learning how to decorate a larger space). Like our giant sectional was just baaaarely contained on the boundaries of the rug:

So when I saw this giant (10 x 14!) 100% wool rug for $599 (down from $798) on Joss & Main I got excited. And nervous. That’s not exactly peanuts around here. But it’s a huge rug – and rugs that size that we like are usually 1-2K (which made me fake ugly-cry on at least three occasions). It almost felt impossible to find something extra large, low pile, and our style that didn’t end in three zeros. So $599 started to sound pretty good. At least good enough to contemplate for a little while.

After mulling it over for a few hours, I decided to show John to see what he thought (we have a full agreement agreement, so we don’t buy anything that we don’t both love). That way if he nixed it I could just close the window and stop thinking about it. But when I went to show it to John, he had it up on his screen (he also gets Joss & Main alerts and had clicked on that rug and left it open on his computer to “talk to me about it” a little later). Crazy, huh? We were both secretly mulling over the same rug. It was meant to be. So we gritted our teeth and put in our order. I’m not going to say that we didn’t have sweaty palms, but we went for it.

Since we’d been temporarily using a too-small placeholder-ottoman that didn’t have storage which used to reside in our first bedroom as a side table, we also found ourselves pining after this big tufted leather storage ottoman. Again, it’s not exactly a cheap addition to the room. At all. But nearly fourteen cubic feet of additional hidden storage was a huge draw (it’s almost 3 x 3 x 1.5 with an easy-open hinged top). Of course we also appreciated that it’s a correctly-sized counterpart to our giant sectional (as opposed to looking like a too-small donut hole) and that it isn’t hard and pointy for little toddler heads (but can be used for serving food & drinks with the addition of a nice big tray). Yup, she’s versatile. And we never could have sprung for it at 900 beans, but at over $500 off… well…

And then somehow this $169 chair (down from$339) said “how you doin’?”…

…which was especially convenient since the parson’s chair that we purchased for $70 from Target about four years ago was looking a little rough due to tons of use which led to one side of the faux-leather cracking so it looked like this:

So we waited patiently at the door for everything to arrive, pausing only to eat, sleep, change the baby, work on the kitchen, and blog. When everything arrived pretty much at the same time, it was sorta like Christmas. Literally, it kind of was (we declared these items to be our Christmas gifts to each other for last year, this year, and next year). Psst- pardon the rug wiggles, we still need to get a rug pad. And as for the art swap, I meant to blog about that a while back. It’s actually extra burlap-ish fabric that I used instead of the colorful paper. I love that it has more texture and doesn’t compete with the bright pillows and accessories.

Spending that kind of money on a rug and ottoman was definitely not a drop in the bucket for cheap-os like us. Heck even $169 for a chair isn’t usually our MO (we’re no strangers to spending $20-35 on thrift store or craigslist chairs). But it did feel nice to add up the sale savings ($199 + $521 + $170 = a whopping $890!). And more importantly, since we’ve worked our buns off to DIY so many projects over the last 11 months it meant that we were able to save a pretty nice chunk of change, so our bank account was thankfully just fine with the living room spree (we don’t like to buy anything we can’t immediately pay off – more on that here).

Of course we’re hoping to reuse the old round ottoman and the old living room rug in other still-evolving spaces (you know we’re use-what-you-got fans) and we might even try slipcovering the faux-leather chair in some fun fabric for another spot as well. So we’ll have to keep you posted on those cha-cha-cha-changes too. Of course we still have about a million other working-with-what-we-have items going on, like the wrong sized rug in the office, a too-small TV and media cabinet in the living room (we hope to build a nice media center to balance out our chunky distressed console table) along with many completely-missing elements (like a large buffet/console table with art and a rug in the entryway off of the dining area and an entire playroom and sunroom that have yet to be tackled along with all of our bathrooms). But we’ll get there someday.

Knowing that our first house took us 4.5 years to complete is a great comfort to us, because it takes away the we-want-it-all-done-now pressure. These things take time. But we’re feeling really good with our one-year-in progress (see a lot of that here). How about you? Do you have a “magic number” of months or years after living somewhere when you finally start to feel more settled and “evolved” (after feeling around in the dark for a few months while you get your bearings)?

Psst- To anyone looking to purchase the rug, ottoman, or chair – Joss and Main has flash sales (only lasting a few days) so of course by the time we got this stuff in the mail and took pics they weren’t for sale anymore. But lots of their stuff can be found on wayfair.com (though it’s not usually as heavily discounted over there) or you can get on Joss & Main’s mailing list here (that’s an instant invite, so you don’t have to wait). Hope it helps!

Our Current House, Stuff We Bought
767

  Leave a comment

260

Pre-Counter Progress

Posted by
December 6, 2011

We were feeling a little less than pumped about how unfinished our “new,” tile-ready walls were looking…

… mostly because we found ourselves staring at that mismatched unpainted paneling (shudder) and those ugly unpainted/stained/gross parts of the ceiling that were exposed when we removed the upper cabinets.

So what’d we do? Why we got a-paintin’ of course!

The paneling took two coats of primer and two coats of paint (just to be safe). And the ceiling took… well, more coats of primer and paint than I care to share (I lost count, actually – maybe five or six?). Since some of it was totally unpainted and other areas were stained, we just wanted to be extra sure it looked seamless with the rest of the ceiling when we were done. Thankfully, after lots o’ coats of Kilz CleanStart primer (it’s no-VOC) and the ceiling paint that the previous owners left us in the basement… it all matched in the end. Can I get a whew?

The effect was much improved kinda-sorta improved. I mean it’s still a very raw space. But once we get the new counters installed (we hope to share photos of that shebang tomorrow!), get molding back around the window, add some backsplash tile, redo the lighting, paint those cabinets, and lay our cork floors, things should look a lot more polished. So we’re happy to be inching ever so slowly towards the finish line.

The last thing we had to do before the whole counter installation was add those darn support brackets that we mentioned back in this pre-Thanksgiving post. Basically we learned from the counter template guy that any overhang over 10″ needed some support (our peninsula will have a 12″ overhang on two sides). We could’ve paid $300 to have the Corian reinforced, but the guy also mentioned a cheaper DIY option. It’s like he knew us.

So we bought six 10″ steel brackets in the hardware aisle at Lowe’s and Sherry did her favorite thing (enter spray paint, stage right). At $6 a piece it came to $36, which isn’t free, but sure beats 300 big ones.

Once they were dry I brought them in, along with some scrap pieces of wood that I cut into 12″ sections. The template guy said we shouldn’t just screw the (heavy) brackets into the cabinets alone, but instead should put some wood inside the cabinet to help them hold nice and strong by drilling into that thicker wood surface hidden behind the cabinet.

So after measuring and marking my cabinets to make sure the brackets would be evenly spaced, I loosely hammered my scrap wood in place on the other side of the cabinet (if this isn’t making sense now, it will by the end of the post… hopefully).

To screw them in, I used another scrap piece of wood to act as my temporary counter so I was sure to place them at the right height (to be sure they would carry the load of the overhang without being too high or too low). Then I secured the bracket with three screws.

Here’s how it was looking after I secured the first three brackets in place. Of course, once the counters arrive we’ll also screw them into the Corian from below (Corian has wood reinforcement stuff to screw into underneath it whenever it’s manufactured for an overhang).

And although once the counters are installed and the cabinets are all painted white the brackets will barely be visible, we’re still thinking that we’ll add some shaker-style panels to dress up the back (and side?) of the peninsula. That way those will add some detailing and also allow us to completely hide the brackets behind some panel trim (by routing out the back of it and laying it over the brackets to conceal them). Hopefully it’ll be a fun challenge. I’ll keep you posted on that when we get to that step.

So here’s the kitchen in its counter-ready state. Oh, perhaps you’ll notice that we also primed a stripe of the refrigerator surround right where it meets the counter:

We didn’t want to prime and paint the cabinets before our impending counter installation (when our granite counters got installed in our first house, the white cabinets required lots of touch ups due to tons of scraping and shoving to get the heavy, tight fitting counters in place). So we’d rather just cover the counters and paint stuff afterward. But we thought that little stripe of primer applied beforehand would make it easier to paint right up to the edge of the counters without leaving a sliver of wood peeking through (now if there’s a tiny gap between the paint and the counters, it’ll be white and not brown, so it should blend right in).

It’s looking somewhat like a kitchen, right? Oh but of course ignore the wood chairs (they’re not counter height or the right color so they’re just place-holders for now).

In keeping-it-real news, the kitchen is actually looking more like this:

Of course, as parents when we saw those exposed brackets our “Toddler Impalement Device!” alarms went off, but thanks to some leftover cabinet shelves, we fashioned a dummy counter to make the edges more visible to Clara (and her sometimes clumsy parents). Having the chairs there certainly helps too.

Maybe we should just cancel our Corian order and learn to love these?

Yeah, or not. So excited that our next update for you guys should be INSTALLED COUNTERS. Hopefully tomorrow morning. Woot!

Oh how joyfully we’ll use the sink (my have we missed it!). Merry Countermas to us! We actually have a working fridge, stove, and dishwasher so we’re still able to cook at home (thank goodness) but washing the not-dishwasher-safe-stuff in the bathroom sink/tub is annoying. Is there anything you guys are anxiously awaiting? Have you done any ceiling priming & painting lately? Did you lose count of the coats. Oh man, it feels good to be done, doesn’t it?

Psst- We’ve listed our old granite counters on craigslist for anyone who is interested. You can find more info on them here.

DIY Decor, Easy Upgrades, Our Current House, Painting Projects
260

  Leave a comment

4,794

Fab Freebie: Home Sweet Illustrated Home

Posted by
December 5, 2011

***This giveaway is no longer accepting entries – see who won below!***

Random.org has surprised us this week and selected a male winner for the first time in foreverrrrrrr (shocking, we know). His name is… Thomas (and he’s looking forward to time off this holiday season). Congrats dude! (Congrats buddy? Congrats fella? I dunno, I’m so used to saying “Congrats ladies” I’m kinda at a loss).

One of our favorite things to give are custom house portraits (we’ve actually purchased two for my parents in the last year – and even bought one for ourselves). So as we enter the giving-est time of the year, we figured it would be fitting to give one of you the gift of a house portrait too. We recently discovered Rebekka Seale‘s too-charming-for-words illustrations (Sherry’s ridiculously smitten), so wrangling her for a giveaway was at the top of our holiday to-do list. Happily, Rebekka was game. So she’s here to offer up a gift certificate for a custom house portrait along with the winner’s choice of any art print from her Etsy shop. Feel free to keep them for yourself, or wrap ‘em up and put them under the tree for someone else. Note: Rebekka’s all full on house portrait orders until after Christmas, which is why she’s doling out a gift card for one, which can be redeemed after the holidays.

Note: We aren’t paid or perked for hosting these giveaways, we just do ‘em to thank you awesome folks for stopping in. See our Giveaway FAQ page for more info. Pics courtesy of Rebekka Seale.

Fab Freebies
4,794

  Leave a comment

244

Calendar Girl

Posted by
December 5, 2011

We’re still working away on the kitchen, so we’ll have update post #561 for you soon (kidding, it’s probably more like #19 or something – but still). This week we’re hoping to share lots of major progress (new counters and a working sink again – finally!). In the meantime, it’s about time we got into the holiday spirit. There’s just something special about spending our first real Christmas in our new house that makes us want to go all out. We moved on the 13th of December last year, so we were technically here for last year’s holiday season, but we were living out of boxes and Clara was too young to really get excited about all of the magic that makes the season so special. But this year it’s on! So I kicked things off by making a little advent calendar to enjoy with Clara:

Oh but here’s how it looks from her point of view (gotta soak up the days that she’s shorter than me, because I’m sure they’re numbered):

This little holiday project was only $7.99 because I used things that we already had and only purchased one thing: this scarf hanger from Ikea:

Allow me to paint you a picture of me at Ikea when the idea slowly hit:

I decided the three extra circles could be “free spaces” and the rest of them could sport numbered tags and ornaments. Bam: instant advent calendar. It’ll be a fun daily activity to do with Clara (we’ll hang an ornament a day on the tree together as we work our way through the calendar).

I actually whipped it up on December 2nd (procrastinate much?) but alas, we have yet to set up our tree (another sure sign of procrastination). So we’ve been admiring the ornaments as each day ticks by… hoping to get the tree up within the next few days so we can “catch up” and hang five or six ornaments on the tree all at once. Then we can go day by day from then out…

As for how I made it, I just took metal ornament hooks that we already had on hand and stuck various ornaments through them (if they didn’t have hooks already). Then I looped each hook over the circle or bar above each circle (all of them had circles above them except for the top row which had that bar). That way each ornament hung into the circle under that and was sort of framed that way. And of course we worked in some quirky ornaments in honor of our other kiddo (Burger). There’s the hamburger ornament that we found on clearance after Christmas last year at Michael’s for 50 cents:

And the snowflake frame with his cute mug in it from a few years back:

And of course there’s a disco ball since we love to dance (that one doesn’t have anything to do with Burger, except he might get picked up and swirled around the room in celebration after we hang it).

As for the tags, I just cut a tag-ish shapes out of cardstock 25 times (using the first one as a guide and cutting around it like a template to make the other 24). Then I used a hole puncher to allow them to slip over the ornament hooks. But before adding one to each ornament’s hook I googled around for a nice font online (and found this one). So I glanced at it while sketching each number onto my cardstock tag with a pencil (it’s nice to have type inspiration nearby when you’re free-handing something – just for reference):

Then I just traced over each sketched out number with a pen once I liked the shape.

They’re definitely not perfect, but they’re pretty cute:

Oh and I hung it with a removable 3M hook thing, so I wouldn’t have to make a nail hole in the front of our coat closet door:

So we hope to have a bunch of fun holiday stuff going on for the next few weeks among kitchen updates and other projects. Count on posts about tree decorating (we’re doing a tabletop one and a full sized one) and even some outdoor stuff (we’re bound and determined to hang lights and really get festive). Oh and not to mention that Mrs. Limestone sweetly invited me to partake in her fun little Secret Santa thing with some awesome fellow bloggers…

… which means I have to make a few gifty goodies and secretly mail them to someone (can’t tell you who) and see what turns up from another mystery blogger. Here’s everyone that’s in on it:

Should be fun, except that I have total stage fright and can’t think of anything creative to send. Here’s hoping a few days of advent-calendar-ing get my juices flowing. I wonder who has me. Any guesses? We’ll have to try to figure it out together when something shows up!

Oh and speaking of holiday stuff, West Elm asked us to round up a few of our favorite items over on their site (we weren’t paid or perked, it was just for fun). So you can check out our picks here and then click the arrow to scroll through all of our dorky quotes.

But enough about us. Have you started decorating for the holidays? Are you totally done already? Are you advent-calendar-ing? Have you ever used something from Ikea in an unusual way? How about Secret Santa experiences? Did you manage to give the perfect thing? I’m just hoping I don’t totally choke.

Holiday Hijinks, Our Current House
244

  Leave a comment

Page 6 of 7« First...234567