Dining Room Catch-up

In this post, I'll try to catch you up on all that has happened in the dining room since we moved in.  Everything that was changed in the living room and the dining room was happening simultaneously so sorry for the lack of good chronological order in my posts!

First things first, since the whole house was antique white, trim and walls, I decided I wanted to paint the dining room in addition to painting the living room because I wanted to get a little more contrast so the trim would pop more.  I was just going to go with a darker neutral shade, a light tan.  However, Trey got involved with the paint samples and suggested we try something darker or something greener.  Here are the four colors we decided to get samples of.

I was going to paint the dining room the top left color - Mushroom Bisque (Behr Premium Plus Ultra).  Trey accompanied me to Home Depot and grabbed the other three colors - clockwise from top right is Pure Earth (BPPU), Exploring Khaki (BPPU), and Lion (Behr Premium Plus).  After putting all four on the wall and checking it out in daylight and artificial light, we settled on Lion, a pale sage green color. 

After the paint, came the furniture.  We purchased the dining room set and china hutch from a family friend for a great deal (Thanks Celeste!!) and put it in the room.  We still didn't have a rug yet, but we were expecting our first house guest (post coming soon) and I wanted to have as much of the house looking normal as possible. (Ignore the boxes in the hutch picture, we hadn't put all our china up yet)

As you can see, the walls turned out quite nicely!  The color also looks beautiful with the blue of the living room in your line of sight so that's just an added bonus.

A few days later my mom sent me an email saying that JCPenny was having a huge home decor sale, with some of their rugs being as much as half off!  Jackpot!  So I hopped online and found a 100% wool rug that was almost half off and ordered it.  Mom was kind enough to purchase it for us as a housewarming gift which made it all the more wonderful.  Here's a shot of it.

It has the same color green as the walls and helps to bring in more color variety than I'm afraid I would have been able to do without the rug!  Here's a shot of the whole room, keep in mind that this is still a work in progress.

The drapes were left by the previous owner and I'm still undecided on them.  I tied them up so they wouldn't get in the paint.  Future plans for this room include getting the table "set" with a centerpiece and pulling out our chargers, napkins, etc, getting a console table for the blank wall you see at the back of the picture, hanging the mirror you see at the back on the wall it is leaning against, and getting a new light fixture.  The current glass and brass fixture just isn't working for me.  In the living room, we mixed more traditional lines and accents with the contemporary lines of the furniture we already had before moving here.  With this furniture being much more traditional, I'm thinking of a more contemporary light fixture, maybe a linen pendant similar to this one on overstock.com.

Or this one...

Who knows!  So, that's where we are with the dining room so far.  More updates to come!

Losing my need for matchy matchy little by little

I have always been one to like things to match and be symmetrical...almost to a fault.  The incessant need almost drove me nuts as a child because if I stepped on a crack in the sidewalk with my left foot, I had to step on the next crack with my right foot to even things out.  The older I've gotten, the more OK I am with things not being perfectly symmetrical or perfectly matchy matchy. 

My first real test....throw pillows.  The pillows that came with our couch are lovely, but they don't really match the concept of the room I was going for.

See?  I didn't really have a plan for replacing them at the time, but knew they were NOT going to work for me.

I went to Birmingham a week or so later to go shopping for ideas for the sun room with Kristin, Trey's sister.  We started out at Southeastern Salvage (wonderful place!) before heading to Garden Ridge so Kristin could get some new planters.  Well, Garden Ridge has about 4 aisles-worth of throw pillows so we decided to have a little look-see.  One thing led to another, and the next thing I know, I'm walking out of there with 8 pillows for the living room!  It took quite some time for she and I to settle on colors and patterns, matching and coordinating, but here's what we came up with.

For the love seat, two beautiful linen pillows with light blue stitching and a third pillow with a neat green, blue, and brown print (if they would have had more than one of these pillows, I would have bought a ton of them).

For the leather chair, I found this really neat silky blue pillow with star burst patterns all over the place.

For the couch, I found two blue pillows and two predominately brown pillows that have a flower pattern on them.  I'm still undecided on this combination and think I may end up going back and exchanging the two darker pillows for something with a more abstract pattern and probably a little more green, but in the mean time, they are working out nicely.

Even though there is still a bit of matchy matchy in the pillows on one particular piece of furniture, the overall look is one of coordination rather than matching.  One small victory for me.  Maybe one day I'll be able to have ALL different pillows without a single one looking the same....well, maybe not, but I think this is a good start. 

Thanks Kristin for helping me to put this look together!

The Southeastern Furniture Expedition

Trey and I have been married for a little over 2 1/2 years.  In that time, we have only lived in apartments.  Going from college to an apartment, we had just enough furniture to make it in a 2 bedroom apt.  Two and a half years later, still using our stuff from college, we decided it was time for an upgrade!  For various reasons (health, job, etc.), we had decided while living in an apartment to not purchase any new furniture until we bought a house with the exception of a breakfast nook table (our first piece of furniture together)...

and a coffee table. 

We constantly said we would wait until we got a house because it literally felt like we were on the verge of getting a house several times over the past few years.  Needless to say, until this summer, we were still using furniture we used in college.

Trey's sister, Kristin, told us about this amazing furniture store in Ft. Payne, AL.  Atkins Furniture (lovingly referred to as Dogtown) is 150,000 sq. ft of wholesale furniture.  We had purchased our breakfast nook and coffee tables at their sister store, Alabama Furniture Market, in Calera.  AFM's prices are a lot better than generic furniture stores, but Dogtown's prices are even better, so Trey and I made the drive up one Saturday morning to take a look. 

Oh. My. Goodness.  We found a sofa and loveseat,

leather chair and ottoman,

and the highly elusive corner TV armoire

all for a really great price...like we got the TV cabinet 60% off its list price.  The only downside of buying furniture in Ft. Payne is that you have to pick it up yourself, they don't deliver to Montgomery.

Enter Trey and a 27' U-HAUL.  The day after Labor Day (he had been in Virginia Beach Labor Day weekend for a half-marathon) he went to Nashville to pick up a dining room table and hutch (left background in first picture) we purchased from a family friend,

then to Dogtown to pick up all the furniture mentioned above, before finishing up in Arab, AL, at my grandparents' house to pick up my piano!  He got back to Montgomery at like 10:30 PM where he and my dad unloaded furniture until about 1:30 AM.  Obviously, Wednesday morning neither one of us were at our finest.

Fortunately, Dad and I had been able to move all the rest of the furniture in our apartment over to the house over Labor Day weekend so that was a relief for Trey I'm sure! 

Images courtesy of Ashley Furniture: Showroom,  Ashley Furniture: Showroom, and TheFurniture.com.

Project Numero Uno - Floors

After we picked out the blue for the living room walls (from my last post), but before we painted everything blue, we set out on our first major undertaking - sanding and refinishing all the original oak floors.  By "we set out on our first major undertaking," I meant we paid someone else to do it, of course!  We spent the night in the house the day we closed and the work started the next day.  They started on a Thursday and we could get in the house and start working again the following Saturday (about 5-6 business days after beginning).

If you will remember in my first post, the house had decent floors to begin with. 

All ~2500 square feet of this house has oak floors with the exception of the laundry room (linoleum, which Trey is going to tile over eventually) and the two bathrooms (tile).  In several areas of the house the floors looked very worn and even scratched down through the original finish.  We thought the investment on the front end would not only make the interior of the house much more pleasing, but would also increase the value of the house for the future.  The guy that did it, Matthew, did a fantastic job and gave us the best price in the area even though he had to drive down from Birmingham to do the work.  If anyone needs their floors done in the Birmingham area, we highly recommend him and would be happy to give you his contact info.

So, here is a shot of what it looked like once he finished.

We went with MinWax English Chestnut for the stain and LOVED the color.  They turned out a little darker and a little redder than our original floors and we could not be happier with the results!

Inspired by Domino

I figured when I told Trey I wanted to paint our living room Robin's Egg Blue he would fight me on it.  Let me back up a little.  When we entered into contract on our house, I had a mild freak out.  I am not a very creative person and I am definitely not good at decorating from scratch.  However, I am good at learning, so I set about to try and learn how to decorate or at least copy people who did know how!

At Books-A-Million, I found this wonderful book.

I had never heard of Domino before but I believe there is also a magazine.  Since I purchased this book, I have seen their name dropped in various other DIY and home decor blogs.  Anyway, this book is full of beautiful pictures of perfectly designed rooms including this one,

I ADORED the colors used in this room and really loved the muted Robin's Egg Blue walls in such a traditional setting.  I thought, I love blue, maybe I can pull this off.  I didn't want to try to pull off the green and yellow furniture though.  I thought the whole picture was beautiful, but not really practical for someone who can't afford to change out furniture any time trends change.  For that reason, Trey and I decided to go with very neutral furniture (linen and chocolate colors for every piece in the living room) and bring in the greens and yellows in other accessories in the room.

First, I made a trip to Home Depot (which is becoming one of my favorite places) to try and find the perfect blue.  I settled on these two - Opal Silk on the left and Harmonious on the right, both Behr Ultra Premium Paint & Primer.

There is only a slight difference between the two so we had to take it to the walls to decide.  In the mean time, I found the perfect rug on HomeDepot.com.

This is just a small shot of the 7' X 9' rug but it had most everything I was looking for - neutral base color, just enough blue to make it work with the walls, but enough green to instill green as one of the primary colors for the room.  It also has a darker neutral color that is just enough yellow to make other yellow accents look like they belong.

Now we had to decide which color looked best with the rug.  After painting a patch of the wall the day after we closed, and looking at the wall in both artificial light and the light of day, we went with Opal Silk.  After applying two coats and cutting in all the trim, we were very pleased with the results!  The blue really makes all the trim and molding pop! (Please ignore the quality of this picture; it was taken on my cell phone)

As far as the paint and painting tools we used, we were very pleased with the Behr Paint & Primer in one.  It was a little more expensive than the other brands, but the paint was so thick and smooth we will definitely use it again.  We rolled everything except the areas around any trim or molding.  We started out taping the trim with painters tape until we realized that the previous owners had painted the trim with latex paint...over oil paint.  Needless to say, when we started pulling up the first piece of tape, a lot of the paint on the trim came up with it.  After that, I looked to DIY bloggers Sherry and John at Young House Love for the answer.  If you have never read their blog before, you HAVE to start!  Anyway, they suggested using the Premium XL Tight Spots 2" Angle Short Handle Brush in their blog, "How To Paint Trim Like A Pro."  They got their brush at Sherwin-Williams, but we had Home Depot giftcards so I got the closest thing I could find - a SHUR-LINE 2" Trim Brush.  This brush was a few dollars more, but it has a teflon surface protector that makes it paint really smoothly and also makes it easier to clean up.

So that's how my living room ended up blue.  My paternal grandmother would be so proud!

Closing time - every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

We moved to Central Alabama, Prattville specifically, Halloween weekend 2009 for a new job for me.  On August 25th 2010, we started anew in Montgomery, Alabama, closing on our first home!  This new beginning came from the none-too-early end of our beginning in Prattville.

We didn't move anything into the house the day we closed because the very next day we were commissioning some work to be done on our floors (post to come).  Trey tells a much more colorful version of our first night in the house, so I'll let him tell it!

So, Amanda and I are a little sore this morning, but elated to finally have OUR house!   With the guys coming in today to refinish the hardwood floors, we couldn’t move in any real furniture yesterday, but we just couldn’t keep ourselves from staying there last night.  So, Amanda crafted a wonderful bedding solution while I was in class last night—a twin size blow up mattress flanked by a sleeping bag in the middle of our bedroom.

Well, as you all know, I am quite the gentleman; so, I happily gave the luxurious air mattress to my beautiful bride.  But, as soon as I laid my head/hip on the sleeping bag, I found out that hardwood floors are…well, HARD!  So, I talked Amanda into splitting the TINY twin air mattress with me, and it is a good thing both of us exercise pretty regularly.  Guys, you couldn’t have fit a paper clip between us; we were crammed on that thing like sardines!

Well, if any of you have witnessed Amanda sleep, you might of notice that she tends to twitch a little while falling to sleep.  Heck, who am I kidding, Amanda CONVULSES when she falls asleep!  So, we’re crammed on this air mattress like it’s a life-raft in the middle of the Caribbean, and about the time Amanda has her first seizure of the night, the house settles and I hear a loud POP!  Now, I am a self-proclaimed chicken, and I have already convinced myself that there are some lingering “spirits” in our house.  So, when these two events coincided, I jumped maybe three feet off that mattress!  After that, I was able to convince myself fall asleep, and everything was cool until this morning…

One of the first things Amanda says after she wakes up this morning is, “CRAP!  I forgot to pack any towels!  What are we going to do?”  After scratching our heads for a few minutes, we put our engineering training to good use, and figured out the perfect solution.  Let’s just say that if you ever sleep on our twin-size sheets you might get a faint whiff of coconut shampoo and Suave body wash…:)

Needless to say, it was a fun and memorable first night in the house, and now, we have a good story to tell our kids one day…

(Amanda again) The next morning, we made sure to take pictures of the way everything looked before so we could do some good comparison pictures later.  We also made sure to take a picture of us in front of our door numbers.

 
Hope you all enjoyed the story of our first night!

Craig's List, what a steal!

I have this friend in Birmingham, Lanie, and I'm pretty sure we are twins born 4 days apart and separated at birth.  She and her mom, Gwen, are the best bargain shoppers I have ever seen!  There is an amazing story behind almost every piece in her home about the deal that she got (just ask her about the $0.01 rug).  Maybe she should have her own blog...

Many of you are aware of Craig's List in a, "don't answer solicitations or you might be murdered," kind of way.  I'll admit, until Lanie, I had never been on the website.  Our new home is a 3BR/2B house and as you might have remembered from the Catch Up post, we were still using college furniture.  This just meant that we had one full bedroom suit and a futon (which we actually sold while still in Prattville).  We needed two more beds!  Enter Craig's List.  I found this jewel for only $200.

Yep folks, that's right, a headboard, bed frame, box springs, and SERTA MATTRESS that had been situated, unused, in a spare bedroom for 2 years for only $200.  Aren't you proud Lanie?!

I was perusing the website a few weeks later looking for a mirror to hang just inside the front door.  I was looking for something with a traditional touch since we are trying to soften some of our more contemporary furniture in such a traditional home.  I found this antique powder room mirror in Hoover.

I'm afraid the seller didn't realize the value of what she had until it was too late!  This beaut was listed for only $20!  At the close of the transaction the seller made the comment that her mother was upset with her for selling something so valuable for such a cheap price but that she didn't know it was expensive.  I hated capitalizing on her mistake, but I wasn't about to pay more than what it was originally listed for. 

So, long story short, if you need something and don't mind it being owned by someone else first (which usually depreciates the item's resale value exponentially), check out Craig's List!  Happy hunting!

Catch Up

So, I probably should have started this when our journey started a few months ago.  Then again, I've been known to procrastinate (I finished putting together our wedding album a few days before our 2nd anniversary...).  It would probably be best if I just went ahead and started from the beginning.

We closed on our beautiful house on August 25th.  Some of pictures below were from the previous owners. 

It was built in 1927 though the former owner thinks he may have a deed that dates back to the 19th century.  What can I say, I'm a sucker for old houses.  It's located in the Garden District in Montgomery but I'm pretty sure everyone just refers to that general area as Cloverdale, so that's what we'll call it too.

Here's a quick rundown of the rooms in the house (again, from the previous owner)...

Living room

Dining room

Sun room

Kitchen with built-in china cabinet

Guest BR #1

Guest bath

Hallway with 4 built-in bookshelves

Guest BR #2

Master BR

Guest bath

Office

Back deck

The house has so many wonderful features about it.  Fenced in backyard.

It's made up almost entirely of hardwood (oak, to be exact) floors.

There are several rooms with dental molding (ignore the wire "Last Supper").

The doorknobs are either glass or ceramic throughout and there are lots of windows and french doors. 

Plus the entire house was painted this antique white color so we had a blank slate to work with. 

However, there are a few features about the house that are not so wonderful, but we'll get into our projects in later posts.

Trey told me just before we closed that he had a present for me.  Just to give you a little background, I have been obsessed with address stamps for years.  I LOVE it when I see a letter from someone that has a cute little stamp on the back with their name and address.  I'm not exactly sure what it is...maybe just the fact that it's proof of living the American dream.  Then again, maybe it's just one more thing that can be personalized :)  Anyway, I had been looking at several online in anticipation of having one as soon as we got into the house.  I had designed a couple and mentioned it to Trey and he oddly asked me to make sure I let him see them before I ordered anything.  Little did I know, he had already designed and made one himself!!  He gave it to me the week we closed and it is perfect, take a look!

One other thing to mention before closing out the "Catch Up" blog, we put down a deposit on a Weimaraner!!!  We will get little Cooper sometime in November but after he is born (sometime this month), the breeder we got him from will be posting videos of him as he experiences his first 6 weeks of life with them!  I'll add the link as soon as we get an update.

I think that about covers it.  I apologize for this post bouncing all over the place and for my bad picture-taking skills.  It probably would have been easier to read if I would have just written as it was happening!  I never thought I would be one to blog, but I'm excited to share all of our house/life updates with everyone all at once!!