what color was that??

Our front door is Autumn Fire by Valspar (Exterior).

Our living room is Filtered Shade by Valspar.

Our fireplace is Lilac Muse by Valspar.

Our bedroom is Elephant Gray by Valspar.

Our trim/molding/interior doors on the first floor is Lilac Muse by Valspar.

Our closet is Autumn Fire by Valspar.

Our bathroom is Hunter's White by Valspar.

Our guest room is Lilac Muse by Valspar.

Our guest room door is Enchanted Forest by Valspar.

Our kitchen walls are Ocean Storm by Valspar.

Our kitchen cabinets are Lilac Muse by Valspar.

Our sun room walls will be Lilac Muse by Valspar.

Our sun room ceiling will be Autumn Fire by Valspar.

After April showers.

I had my first bridal shower over the weekend and was given quite a bit of fun stuff for the house! I am thrilled to say that all of my thank you cards are written and most of the things are unpacked just waiting to be used (and a few have already been put to use, like the dish scrubber...)! 

The lighting in our living room at night leaves much to be desired (which should change sometime!) but I wanted to show you a little bit of what things are looking like now. Pardon the low quality iPhone pictures...

Our living room has furniture once again! Isaiah finished painting last weekend and my mom and I vacuumed tons of dust out of the furniture and put it back where it goes for now. :)

We still have some paint to scrape off the window, but the after is SO much better than this before...

Our dining room finally looks like a dining room. :) The desk in the corner should have a new look one of these days, and that will hopefully be the home of our piano, a buffet (which we're still on the lookout for) and who knows what else. :)

Since we painted the outside of our front door, and the living room walls, the inside looked pretty sloppy being a nasty off-yellow. We chose Elephant Gray by Valspar. We have it chosen for another project that should be done within a month or two. :)

(See, I told you the lighting was bad!)

Before:

After:

There is SO much change since we bought the house just two months ago! I'm pretty impressed with us being two amateurs with two (beyond) full time jobs and planning a wedding, not to mention taking care of other house stuff that's not so fun. We'll share more on that later!

Different strokes.

I finished project number one (that wasn't just demolishing something)! :) Since I finished this one, the shower has also come together too, so I'll have another update there when we have a shower curtain and it's in functioning order (this weekend hopefully)! 

This 1950's house came complete with a red fireplace (which was previously gray, I believe) and I knew something had to be done about it, but I didn't wanna venture too far into the unknown, so paint is where it starts!

When we looked at the house, the fireplace looked like this. There was no shutoff valve for the gas line, no liner, just lots and lots of red. Since I've had pinterest for quite a while, I knew that painting a fireplace wasn't a big deal. One thing that pinterest doesn't really show is painting a stone fireplace (there are lots of brick ones, but not many stone ones). 

We opted for white since it's versatile and clean (but that didn't really need an explanation...). I'm excited to paint the walls even more now that I saw that they weren't really white anyway. The color we chose Lilac Muse, by Valspar. Isaiah has some painting experience, and he prefers either Valspar or Behr Premium. So we just picked one. :) Choosing a white might be even tougher than choosing a color (like, how in the world to you know that you picked the right one???). We picked one that had more gray/beige than blue or pink in it. It should go well with the wall color we've chosen (which should be up after April 12)! 

Since the red of the fireplace was pretty hefty, we got some paint+primer together. The project wasn't very big, so we got a quart of Lilac Muse at our local Lowes. The cost was $15.28 for a quart, which I'm pretty sure isn't cheap (at least in the paint world), but that is the price we were willing to pay to not look at that red fireplace anymore! The paint+primer was a great choice for this project, because, honestly, it took one complete coat. The only places that required more were the deep cracks and crevices in the stone and around the mortar. Since I was so excited to tackle this project, I just used a brush, but I think a roller might've been easier. :/ Oh well!

 

I started with the mantle just to see what the white would look like, then I painted in the cracks. But to be honest, every time I realized that there was a stone that needed paint, I got distracted from the cracks. So the entire thing was covered by the time I finished my "first step." ;)

This is the only "final" picture I have for now, even though I have finished the bottom right next to the tile. It's definitely an improvement! Right now, we have several paint samples on the wall just above the fireplace, so it wasn't accompanied by yellow walls for long!!!

Until next time...