The current state of affairs.

So it's been forever since I've updated the blog, and for that I'm sorry, but while I wasn't blogging, I was finishing up my third year of teaching! Since I survived, I decided I should probably start working on the house again! Isaiah works in the farming industry so he doesn't have much free time either, so when we do work on the house, we try to knock out an entire project in a very short amount of time, like crazy people. The other side of that is us taking about an hour to work on something (which ends up being mostly set up and clean up)!

Our house is starting to look and feel more like a home now! I have a couple before pictures and several after pictures that show some of the progress over the last three months! :)

Back when we first got the house. :)

Today. :) Full of wedding stuff, red furniture, and board games!

Our kitchen when we moved in. :)

The same view from our current fridge placement. We're trying to figure out what exactly to do with the odd space in our kitchen, but we're thrilled that our kitchen isn't tiny!

The front bedroom when we moved in, with green carpet and all!

The front bedroom today (as I finally unpacked most of the stuff)!

The empty boxes from moving, our new curtain rod for the living room (Threshold from Target), and the beautiful oak mirror my dad made that still needs to find a home on our wall. :)

Our front door. :) [Elephant Gray, Valspar]

Our Kenmore gas range. :)

The linen closet portion of our linen closet...

and the paint store portion of our linen closet. :)

My desk in the front bedroom (complete with Mrs. Meyer Clean Day Lavender countertop spray, which is my FAVORITE). 

The before from our master bedroom...

And the after! The walls are Elephant Gray, by Valspar (the same as the inside of the front door).

Our dresser and TV. :)

AND the inside of the closet! We used Autumn Fire, by Valspar (the same paint as the outside of the front door).

And we painted the vents white too, and I think it looks awesome. :)

A bolder picture of the closet. :)

And that's how things are looking nowadays! We have high hopes for some other projects around the house, but with work and wedding planning, it'll take some time. :) Thanks for stopping by and being patient! We're learning to love working on the house together, and we're excited about all the fun stuff we get to show you down the road!

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!

Shut the (red) Front Door!

a.k.a. the post that we tell you why we haven't been updating a ton...

So this home improvement stuff is fun, but when both of us work full time, and we have to fund every project we do (while we're planning a wedding, a marriage, and a million other time consuming and expensive things), things don't always look SUPER glamorous in the blog format. So this post will be more like I'm spitting out all the things I remember from the past two and a half weeks (yikes!).

Two weekends ago, I moved out of my apartment, and all of my stuff moved into the house with Isaiah, and I moved into my (future) in law's house. Since things have been moved, Isaiah is living in the new house with all of my stuff. :) It's starting to look like a fixer-upper turned bachelor pad with lots of unpacked boxes and chick stuff here and there.

The bathroom is at a stage of partial completion (meaning that the shower helps you get clean and the toilet flushes). More on that in the near future also. :)

(and yes, that shower curtain was already mine)

The main update I have tonight is paint!!! We scheduled a painting party with our small group about a month ago, so we had to pick out some paint colors and get lots of prep done! Some of our close couple friends came over yesterday with brushes, rollers, paint trays, and a song in their hearts.

This is what painting after sunset looks like. Our house doesn't have any light fixtures in the living room. :/

Lots and LOTS of sanding and prepwork went into the living room and hallways. We removed the old crown molding (that wasn't even touching the ceiling) and we (Isaiah) had to remove some liquid nails from the wall, and patch holes where the molding was. The trim was covered in more than one thick coat of lacquer and that all had to be removed also. Our Friday night consisted of sanding, sanding, and way more sanding (and sweeping walls). We took our dust-covered selves and went to Lowe's to get paint and supplies for Saturday. :) 

After several paint samples (eight to be exact), we decided on Valspar's Filtered Shade for the living room. :) We are thrilled with our choice. It makes the house feel so much cleaner, new, and fresh!

[Valspar Filtered Shade]

Progress!!! That yellow really stood out once we used a cool, clean color!

This is also the "basically finished" product. After this picture was taken, Isaiah touched up a few spots and painted the baseboards white. We used the same color for the trim that we used for the fireplace (Valspar's Lilac Muse). 

I will *fingers crossed* be able to take some more final pictures tomorrow with sunlight lighting up the room. The white trim makes EVERYTHING look more fantastic! 

While we were at Lowe's picking out paint, I reached for a paint chip of a FABULOUS fiery red (after seeing a room I LOVED over at apartmenttherapy.com) and I asked Isaiah if we could use it for a certain project (more on that later too!) and he replied "Sure! Let's just get a gallon and paint the front door too!" So... a gallon of this beauty came home with us too! :)

(front door before, complete with weird, crusty tape stuff. and that door handle was our very first home-related purchase!)

Tada!!!!! :)

So now, we're the New Kids on the Block (our WiFi name!) in the corner house with the red door. :) 

Until next time, I'll just be sitting on the plasticy stuff admiring the beautiful walls and trim. ;)

P.S. Our yard is huge and we met the neighbors, but 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...

 

All about how eighty degrees is not alright, and neither is pink paint.

I promise some more exciting posts are coming soon! I have to be moved out of my apartment this coming weekend (which is a time-sensitive issue) so the house renovations have been the less glamorous stuff, but I'll give you a weekly recap anyway!

My parents were in town for the past couple days, and other than helping me organize/downsize my apartment into boxes and lugging it across town, they helped with a few things on the house. :) 

This week...

1. We installed a new thermostat that is easy to use!!! (The last one seemed great, but we couldn't get it to work consistently, so we opted for the programable thermostat that my dad bought for my apartment a couple years ago. Long gone are the days where we walk into a house that is 80 degrees simply because the thermostat is stupid! (or we are...)

2. My dad took down the crown molding (that wasn't even close to the ceilings! That alone makes it feel like we're headed down the right path in a lane faster than the slow lane!

3. Isaiah has nearly finished tiling the crazy (not level or even) shower. :) 

4. We got our washer, dryer, and refrigerator installed! And they sing to me whenever I'm around... literally...

5. We picked out a paint color for the master bedroom and purchased a few things that will get us closer to the painting process (like drywall compound to fill in holes and some caulk to fill in some gaps here and there). More on this soon!

6. My mom ever so lovingly scrubbed several of our kitchen cabinets and got them so much closer to clean-enough-for-dishes! :) I am super thankful for the time she spent on those greasy, grungy cabinets! 

7. We picked out cabinet hardware for the kitchen. :) More on that later too!

8. We made some necessary purchases (like more garbage bags, and a mop bucket, and a garbage can, and a step ladder). These are things that are necessary, and basically necessary all at once! Adulthood/homeownership is tough sometimes!

9. We finished up ALMOST all of the tackstrips and staples from the carpet. The only ones left are the ones in the living room coat closet. Almost done! :) 

10. I moved a decent amount of my stuff to the house also! Isaiah gets to learn VERY soon the joys of living with all my stuff without my lovely presence. He's in for a real treat! ;)

11. AND... we were given some furniture, including but not limited to a clean queen size mattress and box spring, a clean twin size mattress, box spring, and frame, a kitchen-size table and four stools, and a living room chair and ottoman. So basically, we'll have enough beds to accomodate an army (or three extra people, whichever needs some space). And that's not including the furniture we both already have. :) God has been good to us and shown us His goodness in SO many ways! People really have been taking care of us. :)

{Seriously, starting next week, the projects should be more exciting, like what paint colors we picked and how nightmarish the tiling in the bathroom really was...}