All posts in Before and After

A Magic Carpet!!

by readmakedo on December 7, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Livng Room with No comments

[Note: Sorry for the hiatus! Turns out that a month of every birthday ever + Thanksgiving = Very little free time! Lots of fun projects to share with you though. For starters...]

We are pretty pumped.

Why are we so pumped? I’ll give you another hint.

YUP. After living here for a year, we bit the bullet and bought a new rug. You know how you’re supposed to “Go big or go home”? Well what do you do if you’re trying to go big AT home? I guess you go really big. Like, 9 feet by 12 feet big. That’s pretty dang big.

“Hey weirdo, why are you so excited about a rug?” you might be asking. I have a 2 part answer for you.

1) You’ve obviously never seen Aladdin.

2) You’ve never struggled with carpet shopping.

Our old rug was one that I had came to after a series of poor choices. It was a jute, 5×7 rug from World Market that was mostly intended to be indestructible. I had purchased the jute rug to replace another rug, after I learned that black dog hair + white shag rug = THE WORST DECISION YOU COULD EVER MAKE. I bought the jute rug as a sign of resignation. I had given up the dream that I could ever own anything beautiful, sighing softly to my two black dogs and saying “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

When we moved into our new house, I decided to put the jute rug in the highest traffic area, since I knew it would see a lot of Schipperke wrastlin’ (for adorable footage of my dogs wrestling and being BFF’s, you’d better click here). I also put it there, because I simply had no better place to put it.

The main problem with the rug was that it was too small for the room. I’ve talked about before how the biggest problem with our living room is it’s one big long hallway. In some ways, having your living room right next to your dining room is fun, but in other ways sometimes you feel like you’re just hanging out in your dining room. And that’s weird, right?

“Hey living room, how you living?”
“Oh hey there dining room.”

I googled lots of random phrases in the past like “How to make your living room not so lame” or “How to deal with living in a bowling alley”, and found a lot of great advice about how to deal with making a non-room feel like a room (especially this article from Houzz, super helpful). And that answer 90% of the time had to do with establishing a sense of place with the right size rug. (The other 10% had to do with finding furniture that broke up the flow of the room, which we did by buying our new sofa with a chaise).

In order to get a rug to truly “fit” a room, it should be large enough to extend under all or most of the furniture in the room. Uh, unless we lived in a 5×7 room, our poor little jute rug wasn’t going to do that. Sorry, bro. So we looked and looked, and finally found this 9×12 beauty on Overstock.com for about half of what a normally priced rug would cost. AFFORDABLE!

So after I dragged a 97 lb rug into my house all by myself (LIKE A BOSS), we unrolled that bad boy, lifted up all the furniture (it was a lot a lot a lot of work), and got it in there.

JERRGGGGGGGGG. That was the noise I made while we positioned everything. Seriously, do you realize how hard it is to move a rug this big????

After I caught my breath, I managed to put everything back and then that’s when some angels came down from on high and sang to me as a heavenly choir. They were all:

HALLELUJAH.

HALLELUJAH. HALLELUJAH. HA—LE—-LU—-JAAHHHH.

We had a party last weekend too (that you will hear about in the future), and people totally were all hanging out by the fireplace in the living room, dogs were chilling on the floor, it was a comfortable place to be. Also, does this rug look familiar to you? That’s because we totally have its friend rug in the office!

BOOM. Check out that Moroccan motif throughout our house!!

LET’S RECAP why this rug is so awesome!

1. It makes the room feel more like a real room, and not like a bowling alley.

2. I can go sock-free on it and still have cozy toezies.

3. It’s super beautiful.

4. Potentially magical qualities.

5. It visually creates a flow between the living room, dining room and office, while still separating each space.

So that’s why I’m so excited about a rug. Now go forth, and be excited about rugs too.

Sofa City: Large & In Charge

by readmakedo on September 18, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Livng Room with No comments

Well, that arrived way faster than I thought it would.

A little while back, I wrote about how our Ethan Allen sofa just wasn’t cutting it for us anymore. Sad, but true. While the sofa remains one of the prettiest pieces of furniture I’ve owned, we realized that it wasn’t doing much for our long ~~bowling-alley~~ living room. So we did our research and ultimately decided on the PB Basic sectional from Pottery Barn, in a linen. We were torn between the linen or the brushed canvas, and ultimately went with our gut and picked the linen. It’s so flipping pretty too, it was totally worth it. Our biggest concern with the linen was that it wasn’t going to hold up against Skipper’s bear nails, but the dogs don’t come on the sofa anyway, unless they are invited by a human and there is a blanket for them.

BEAR CLAWS. ON A DOG.

It’s worth mentioning, any time I buy a new piece of furniture, especially if it’s custom furniture (you can’t take it back!), I pretty much always cry. I go through this weird buyer’s remorse thing: What did I do??? Why did I get rid of my old [WHATEVER], it still worked!

This time I ALMOST did that. But I was distracted by something else: I had never measured that we could actually get the furniture into the house.

Ruh roh.

Our Ethan Allen sofa BARELY fit in when we moved in, and even still we had to take it through the garage, then into the kitchen, then into the living room, because it wouldn’t make it through the front door. Now I was thinking “This sofa is longer than the old one….if we couldn’t get the old, smaller sofa in, what are we going to do??”. I would lay awake in bed at night, worrying about it. I tried measuring, but since it’s a 3D object, I had no idea as to what that was going to mean for fitting it through a doorway. Jason suggested we consider researching removing the sliding glass door in the backyard, and fitting it through there. I imagined a worst case scenario, where we couldn’t fit the sofa in through the garage or the back door, so we would be forced to leave the new sofa in the garage until we eventually do a kitchen model in 5+ years.

The delivery guys showed up, and I immediately explained how worried we were the sofa wasn’t going to fit through the front door. The guy kind of scrunched up his nose at me and was like “Seriously? No, it will be fine.” Turns out, the sofa was a true sectional, and came in two pieces. They came in through the front door, and the delivery took less than 5 minutes. So much for all that worrying!

At first my feeling towards the sofa wasn’t tears (like my normal reaction), but just: “Oh. Is that it? Huh.”

The sofa didn’t look much larger in our space than the previous one had. I wondered if the whole thing had been worth it. If all this pointless worrying, the expense, and going through having to consign our original perfectly good sofa was even worth it. I didn’t feel like I wanted to cry, I just felt nothing.

Then I sat down on it.

HEAAAAAAAVEN.

It got better still: We had a party over the weekend, for 6 people total. In the past, no one ever sat in our living room unless they were watching TV. Now, we comfortably sat everyone, and we had an awesome conversation flow while we played a game. That had never happened before with our old sofa!! The old sofa only could fit about 4 people on it, we discovered you could fit 7 (or maybe 8!) on the new one!

We still need to jazz up the new sofa with some throw pillows, and steam the slipcovers so all the wrinkles come out. We want the room to feel a little more relaxed than it previously did, but still classy. It just comes down to finding the right accessories (Case in point: the giant metal coffee table/storage ottoman we got from World Market). So far, so good!

And as for our old sofa? We’re consigning it. Let me know if you’re interested in it, it’s a great piece of furniture that still has a lot of good years in it, we want it to find a great home!

Now if you’ll excuse me, the sofa beckons.

Work with What You Got

by readmakedo on August 28, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Home, Landscaping with No comments

Or: Love the One Your With?

As you all know, our patio was brought to it’s glorious fruition last week. I am still really pumped about it, you have no idea how awesome it feels to be able to walk outside and walk around in my backyard without tripping over re-bar, or getting a weird pebble in my shoe.

So now that the patio is done, it’s time to (Step one) figure out furnishings, and (Step two) start getting stuff planted!

We already had a few furnishings from my old patio. We had our boneyard of old wrought iron furnishings in the side yard (a.k.a world’s largest spider habitat)….

freaking. terrifying.

…and this bench from Cost Plus, pictured here in my old backyard.

Yeah I was outside painting one day. My old backyard was awesome like that.

I previously had re-painted and spruced up some select pieces from our backyard, and mixed those in with some unpainted, mismatched chairs we had (you can also see them all in the photo above).

[Side note: See those unplanted Oleander trees in the waay back of the yard? We've got a big plan for those! But that will have to wait for another post.]

Next, I found a home for my lovely bench along a previously very blank wall.

“I ain’t going over there.” – Skipper

Lookin’ good, bench!

Now we just have to take care of that creepy tree branch that continues to encroach upon our walking space in our yard. At first, we felt like it was a welcome, quirky addition to our space, but it is no longer welcome. Apparently, spiders are not limited to living in our side yard only, and I’ve had too many spider + my mouth close calls (I thought the only way you could swallow a spider on accident was in your sleep? Isn’t that the agreement we have with spiders? No? Ok then).

So we’ve still got a ways to go on our backyard, but it’s nice to see it coming together even more. Now I’m just crossing my fingers for an Indian Summer in October so I can have a pool party for my friend Carrie‘s visit.

The Hot Seat!

by readmakedo on July 17, 2012 in Before and After, DIY, Home, Uncategorized with 4 Comments

Last week, I shared with you my dream for revamping our wrought iron furniture on a budget. I wanted to reclaim my chairs from spider habitat to something actually useable and not terrifying to sit on.

I was able to fix up two of the chairs and I am so stoked on them. Take a look!

Yes, you are only seeing one chair. The other was actually drying: it needed one more coat of paint so I decided to let it sit and rest while this one glorious chair got the spotlight.

It was really easy and only took less than an hour really, but with big breaks in between. I went to Michael’s and picked up this amazing spray paint by Montana Gold called “Poison”….eegh I don’t know about that color name, but the pigment itself was gorgeous!

So here’s what the chairs looked like originally:

Sad. Nasty. Gross.

I already had some sandpaper, Rustoleum Primer for metal surfaces, and clear Rustoleum Enamel coat, to prevent the furniture from rusting more over time.

I sanded off as much of the existing rust and loose paint from the chairs as I could. Then, I cleaned them with some Comet and let let them dry.

Already looking more fresh!

Next, I sprayed them all over (underneath too, the seats were really rusty!) with the primer to prevent any further rusting, and nay more from forming. After I let them dry for about an hour, I went back out with my green spray paint and put my first coat on.

The key with spray painting is you have to have light strokes, always keeping your can of paint moving. If you keep painting in a single area for too long, the paint piles up and can drip. Sad

One more green coat + some drying later, I was able then to seal them with a clear Rustoleum Enamel coat. This is especially important for the paint I purchased, which is not necessarily an “outdoor paint” but is an artist’s acrylic. I won’t worry too much about that over time though. Acrylic paint is plastic based, so it is extremely durable in many different applications.

That’s about it! A really easy + inexpensive project, for really major results. I can’t wait to use them! Now if you’ll excuse me, that magazine & grapefruit soda pictured have my name on them.

Pre-Fab to Post-FAB! or: Trapped in the Closet Part II

by readmakedo on June 7, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Organization with 4 Comments

Hello! Well, I’m back from Europe. The second half of our trip was great, though in unexpected ways. I got some sort of insane French Flu that lasted for 4 days straight–how is that great you ask? Well, I suppose for most people it wouldn’t be. But the company I kept during that time was the best I could have asked for, and it was nice to know I’m married to someone who will always take excellent care of me, even in a foreign country where we don’t speak the language, and apparently they don’t believe in Pepto-Bismol. Seriously, it’s apparently illegal.

I’ll share some more about our wedding and a few other stories from our trip next week, but in the meantime, here’s a little something we’ve been working on.

Remember this?

An extra bedroom in our house had been converted into a den off the dining room, and I decided it would be great to use as an office / studio. More importantly, that meant we had to find an elegant solution for how to utilize what once was closet space when this room functioned as a bedroom.

We figured the best way to go is to find a low-cost way to create a built-in look. Why low-cost? Because we’d like to keep it so if whoever buys this house in the future feels the need to convert this den back into a bedroom, it will be worth it. Also, because who wants to spend thousands on cabinets? Nobody.

There was an AWESOME reader-submitted makeover on Young House Love that featured a similar project, with some beautiful results.

So we added some pre-fab cabinets. Well now these pre-fab cabinets are POST-FAB, because we fancied them up quite a bit.

F-F-FANCY! How did it get so fancy?? Let me tell you!

For starters, the pre-fab shelves don’t hold much weight when they are this long. So we doubled them up, and glued them together with wood glue.

Next, we added some trim along the outside/front of the shelves, they hang down a bit from the top so there’s a little bit of a lip.

The best part of all, is the shelves are still completely adjustable, so even though these look like custom-built cabinets we can still move the shelves around as necessary.

Check out this detail shot, where you can see how smooth the trim looks.

SO SMOOTH! Like a James Ingram song.

Also, we added this cute little toe-kick on the bottom, to make things really looked finished. So classy!

We still need to match the floor-board color, since in the past it had been re-sanded but not sealed for some reason.

I can’t believe what a difference trimming out this cabinet made! Also, the room looks 10,000 times cleaner now that it’s painted. It’s exciting to have some built-in shelves again to display all my favorite things (like my gigantor Charley Harper illustration book!). I’m still considering painting the back of the built-in a fun bright color, like maybe a sunny yellow or lime green. What do you think?

Shut the Front Door!

by readmakedo on May 8, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Painting with 3 Comments

Ever since we moved into the new house, I’ve had mixed feelings on our front door. Our old house had a red front door, which always seemed really warm and inviting to me.

(You can see it peeking out behind that Japanese Maple tree in the pic above.) It was so charming, and really made the house feel special. So you can see my mixed feelings when I moved to the new house, and was greeted with this:

Yup. A super shiny, black front door. The patio is already pretty dark, so this door was not doing anything to help the ambiance.

I was pretty creeped out by the black front door. I believe other people were too, a suspicion that was confirmed on Halloween last year as I sat home alone in my Princess Leia costume, waiting for trick-or-treaters and got hardly any. Okay, it’s not like the front door forced me to let my inner Liz Lemon out, but it still is too creepy!

I was left with so many questions: Why didn’t I like the black front door? Was it giving me some sort of subliminal message through color? What would be a better option? Then I did what I do best. I googled it.

Immediately I found some really awesome articles about historical meanings of different door colors, feng shui guidelines, and more awesome info. Turns out red historically means a place for travelers to stay! Cool, except I don’t want any Civil War re-enactors to come to my front door hoping for lodging and a place to stable their filly.

I tried to consider too what I had seen done a lot recently (Reds, yellows), and what might look best with the house. Trying to stay true to the homes mid-century ranch history, I knew I wanted something bright and funky. Then I found these pictures on Remodelista.

Some might say I was green with envy. I would never say that though, because that would be a terrible pun.

According to this article, a green front door can represent connection to nature (awesome), safety (love it), and prosperity (sold!).

While we were in the midst of Ultimate Paintathon of 2012, we took about half an hour and knocked this bad boy out. I bought a small can of Limeade paint from Benjamin Moore in a satin finish. Boy, does it look awesome.

“Oh Hi! I hope you like the green front door. I can’t see it, because I’m colorblind.” – Skipper

I love how the green looks against the super soothing greige we picked in the living room. I took these photos mid-afternoon, so you can see how the door is really bright against the darker patio. It livens up the front of the house a TON, and I know it’s probably a little premature, but I bet we’ll be getting way more trick-or-treaters this year.

What is your fantasy front door? Purple? Royal blue? Bedazzled? Leave a picture in the comments of your fave!

We Found the Perfect Greige!

by readmakedo on May 3, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Painting with 4 Comments

We found the perfect “greige”! Okay, the perfect greige for US. There are a lot of them out there, but we’re really pleased with the one we picked for our house. Now that you’ve seen the finished paint in my bedroom, it’s time for the big reveal of the paint color in the living room! But first, let me recap what our options were:

From left to right: Benjamin Moore [A] Balboa Mist (this is the color we ended up picking in the bedroom), [B] Silver Satin, [C] Moonshine, [D] Paper White, [E] Horizon.

After living with the color swatches on the wall for ~~too long~~ a while, I was able to get a feel for how they all looked at different times of day. The house is oriented with almost all of the windows facing North or South, which means the house actually doesn’t get a ton of light. Still, we felt like options D and E were too white, so those were cut from the team.

After carefully evaluating options A, B, and C, we ended up picking….

Option B!! Silver Satin!

Hooray!!

To those of you who loved option C, Moonshine, don’t despair! We used it in the office, right off the dining room.

Please, pardon the mess.

Lookin’ good, office! Except for..all of the stuff, everywhere. We’ll get to it.

It feels so good to have the house all painted, after living with the brown color since last year. I can’t say I miss it. What’s nice about the new color is it reads as a white, until you see it contrasted against the molding. It’s really nice. The biggest bummer is I’m not sure how I feel about my sofa (which I bought for my old home, where I thought I would be living in for a lot longer than I ended up being there). Me and the sofa been on the outs lately anyway. Don’t tell the sofa, I haven’t decided yet if we’re going to break up, or I’m going to slip-cover him.

Now that we’ve all enjoyed how nicely this has come together, here are some behind-the-scenes photos. Some of these were taken with my phone’s camera, because as you will see, it was difficult to figure out where my real camera went…

I love seeing how the two tones of paint look next to one another. It’s enough to make me think about painting an accent wall…Maybe later though, I need to put everything back first.

Jason and I, along with friends who have been over since the new paint job, all agree: the house feels bigger, brighter, and much happier. I can’t wait to start accessorizing with the new paint, and work in some pops of color. Isn’t it awesome how a new coat of paint can make you feel like you’re living somewhere new?

Bedroom is Done!

by readmakedo on May 1, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Painting with 3 Comments

YAAAY!! YOU GUYS!!! I’M NOT SLEEPING ON AN AIR MATTRESS ANYMORE!!! I’M SLEEPING IN A REAL ROOM!!! But that’s not the only reason I’m dying of excitement. This room looks AWESOME. I’m pleased as punch, honestly. In short, I’m so FRIKKIN EXCITED!

Okay, breathe, you can do this Kate.

Enough already, PICTURES!

WOW. This room looks so much cleaner than it used to. I actually want to hang out in here now! To recap, I went through the long and arduous process of picking out the perfect “Greige” and ended up selecting Balboa Mist for the bedroom.

A keen observer might notice a few things are missing. Go back, I’ll give you a minute.

Back? Great, here are the answers: For starters, there is no light fixture on the ceiling. But don’t worry, we have one and it is going to rule. Also, the wooden wall art (how would you describe that?) needs to actually be hung up. We also need a bed skirt (there is a sentence I never thought I’d say, but here we are), and eventually it would be cool to get some pillows to add a pop of color. Curtains would be cool too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Even still, I’m really pleased with this room. I think it’s come so far and it looks much more elegant than when I first moved in. My beloved Laura came over and saw the paint color, and gave this glowing review:

“The house looks so much more pulled together now than it did. Before, [when all the walls had swatches and some were patched] it kind of looked like when you go over to someone’s house, and like you don’t want to eat their food because you feel like everything is somehow going to be gross…but now, it looks way better.”

I liked Laura’s analysis. I call this the “Rapper’s Delight” Effect.

I need a reminder of how far we’ve come. Pinch me!

YAY. Pics of the rest of the house will be up on Thursday! I CAN’T EVEN HANDLE MY EXCITEMENT.

Paint Update!: Bedroom Edition

by readmakedo on April 26, 2012 in Before and After, Decor, Design, Home, Painting with 2 Comments

That’s right, I have news on the paint color front! We have been in the process this entire week of having the interior of the house painted, and it has been really exciting. So let me share with you what’s been going down.

For starters, for those of you who remember my quest for the perfect “Greige”: We picked a color! To recap, our dilemma was that the paint color needed to span the kitchen, living room, dining room, and hallway, since they are all connected. Gotta love these 60s Ranch homes. The existing color was lovely, but a bit too warm and heavy for my taste. I’ll reveal next week what color we ended up picking for those rooms (SUSPENSE!), but I can tell you we ended up picking THREE of the original six for the entire house. Variety is the spice of life, right?

Let me show you what’s been happening in one of the rooms that is [almost] done.

This is my room a week ago. You can tell it’s my room, because my BFF Skipper has his room in here too….his “room” happens to be a box in my closet, but he’s cool with it. You can see reflected in the mirror is the master bathroom, which (thankfully) we don’t have to do much painting in, since I just did that in December. The bedroom originally was that same brown color (which I found out, is called “Wise Owl” by Kelly Moore), but you can see that we had to re-texture the wall behind the bed. That’s because there was a super charming AC unit from probably 1963. It was rad. Just kidding, it was horrible, which is why we ripped it out of the wall and never looked back.

I actually managed to dig up old photos to give you an idea of the “before”.

So there is the before. Check out that AC unit in the wall. Sigh, I still miss it.

Totally kidding.

Well, the bad news is I don’t have some sort of gorgeous fantastic “After”, but just progress so far. The paint is LITERALLY still drying, and I ain’t putting my clothes back in a wet closet. But still, you can see the color, which is really exciting. So the color we ended up picking for the bedroom?

Drumroll pleeease……….

BALBOA MIST!

Here’s a shot of the room with one coat of paint…

and two coats (done!).

This photo is taken facing towards the bathroom. Yes that is all my stuff on the bed. Yes that is my good friend Skipper with a cone on his head. He’s also had an exciting week.

It is fun to look back at all the little things we’ve done that have made a big difference since we moved in last fall. If you look at the picture of my room from a week ago, you can see that we added crown molding (which makes the room feel way fancier!), and added crown molding to the top of the closet track.

It’s really exciting for me to look back at the starting point, and how things are coming along. Even though I’ve been slummin’ it on an air mattress in the living room all week, seeing things shape up makes it all totally worth it. Plus I can fall asleep with the TV on, so that’s pretty cool too.

Isn’t painting awesome? If you have any before and afters of paint projects from your house, I’d love love love to see them. Email them to me at readmakedo@gmail.com – Afterall, who doesn’t love a good Before & After?