Guest Bedroom Paint!

The guest bedroom is so close to being done!  I'm excited that our guests will finally have somewhere to stay instead of the couch!  The carpet is ripped up and the room is painted, hopefully this week we will get the trim finished up and then we can move in all the furniture.  We inherited a bunch of bedroom furniture from Josh's grandpa.  We decided to go with a beachy/carribean theme for the room and found a perfect dark teal for the walls.  It's Valspar's Sea Song so of course Josh approved!!  Here are some before and afters of the floors and walls.  I'll post again when we get it finished!

Before:

And after!

Gorgeous wood floors!  Who carpets over that??

Love the color!!  Can't wait until its all finished!

The *almost* Finished Bedroom!

So this is a WAY overdue post because it's been done for a while.  I was hoping to get the curtains for the closet up first and post about it being totally finished, but I'm thinking that might be a while, so I figured I'd show what we have now!

First, the closet.  I posted way back here about the what we were planning to do.  Well, it turned out amazing and we love it!  Here is few before pics:

And here's what it looks like now!

Like I mentioned, we are planning to get a sheer white curtain to hang as doors so we don't have to stare at the clothes all the time, but apparently I don't know how to measure because I bought the wrong size curtain rod.  So once we get a new one that will be up and the bedroom will be finished!

I already posted about most of the other details, so I'll just show the final results with everything all together.  Here's what it looked like when we moved in:

 And here is our bedroom now:

It's so nice having at least one room in the house that feels done!

Our first piece of art

After Josh's Coast Guard A-school graduation, we drove down to Key West to spend the weekend.  While we were there we decided to go into an art studio to look around.  Earlier in the night Josh was talking about how his boss had bought a something from this studio and we mentioned that it would be awesome to buy something, but it was definitely not a serious conversation.  As we walked into the gallery, Josh was like "maybe we should buy something?" From that point things just started falling into place.  We saw a painting that we both loved (a rare situation!) and started talking to the manager about it.  Then we found out we could get a great deal on it and that made up our mind! Here is the painting:

The color is amazing and we love it!!  We had it shipped to us and it is now sitting on the mantle waiting to be hung in our front living room as soon as we finish the floors and painting.



More Bathroom Updates!

The last thing Josh did before he left was to refinish the cabinets in the bathroom.  We used a product called Cabinet Transformations by Rustoleum.



It was a pretty easy process, basically 4 coats and you're done.  It made a huge difference in the bathroom...

Before:

 And after:

I also did do a few things while Josh was gone...one of these was to install curtains in the bathroom.  As you can see in the before picture above there was a lovely valence on the window when we moved in.  We got rid of that right away, and since the window is frosted we didn't need to get another curtain immediately.  Here is what we ended up with:

Nice, simple, clean.  Way better than that valence!  And, I installed it all by myself which makes it even better!

The one other thing I did was to buy some fabric that matched the bathroom.  I framed pieces of these in brushed nickle frames that match the rest of the bathroom hardware.  I haven't hung them yet because I'm not quite sure where to put them!  My mom is going to help with that sometime soon...

Unfortunately the bathroom still has a lot of work to be done.  The floor and shower need to be retiled, we need to refinish the bathtub, get new sinks, and probably new countertops.  Right now there are a lot of colors between the greenish walls, brown floors, blue counters.  Once we are able to redo the floors and counters things will look a lot better.  But at least it looks so much better than the baby blue mess it was when we moved in!

I'm back!

We are finally back to doing our home renovations!  While Josh was gone for two and a half months for Coast Guard training I didn't really get a lot done.  Now that he is back and we are getting settled back into a routine we've been able to get back to working on more things.  I have a bunch to post and I'm hoping to get those posts up in the next few days.

The bathtub is white!

One of the worse parts of the bathroom (after the half painted floors) was the baby blue bathtub. For some reason I never got a full picture of the tub in all it's baby blue wonder....but here is the best I have of a before, seen in the mirror:

The tub was the same color as the painted tiles surrounding the tub, except the paint was coming off in a few spots, showing the white underneath. 

We started the process using the Citristrip that we used for the floors.  That got us to this:

And then to this after a few more coats:

In other words, the Citristrip was just NOT working well enough.  So we decided to bust out the toxic heavy duty stripper.  That didn't get us much further.  Then we decided to use the paint stripping sander we had borrowed from my parents.  After a few hours (thanks Dad and Josh!) we finally got to this:

Imagine that...a WHITE bathtub! We are thinking we will have someone come in to refinish it since its not in the best condition, and also get some new tub hardware.  The next step is figuring out what to do with the blue tile surrounding it.  We want to figure out something that won't be a long and complicated project, but also won't break the bank...



We have a bed!

Finally, after over a month in the house, we set up our bed last Thursday.  It felt SO great to finally be off the mattress on the floor, I didn't realize how big of a difference the bed made.  Believe me, it is much more comfortable!  We also got new sheets which match perfectly with our walls and with the picture that will soon be up above the bed.

And, we have a dresser that actually matches our bed!

We are still waiting for the last of the closet parts to come in so we can finish moving all of our clothes into the bedroom.  We also still need curtains/blinds, which will hopefully be coming this week.  But, the most important part of the bedroom is finally done!

Bedroom Floors are DONE

We officially have finished hardwood floors in our bedroom!  After we ripped up the carpet we knew they wouldn't need much work, but we did want to do something to make sure they would stay in good shape.  We ended up sanding them once (much thanks to George for all the help!) and doing 3 coats of polyurthane.  It was super fast and super easy--according to Josh, I didn't help with this one.  Now all we need to do is put the trim back around the bottom of the wall and we will be set to move the bed and dressers in.  Here's a look at the process...

I'll hopefully have the final completed bedroom post up in a few days!

Pirates Coast and Hidden Lagoon...

Our bathroom is painted!!  One less room of gross grey/blue paint!  Picking the colors for the bathroom was  a little more complicated than the bedroom.  The newly uncovered tile is tan, the vanity cupboards are dark brown, and the counters are navy.  And then, all of the awesome new towels we got for the wedding are seafoam green and grey.  Since we decided we are not going to tile right away, I had to try to find a color that would work with the colors already there, but also go with the towels and the color scheme we want eventually.  I ended up settling on a color that was a few shades lighter than the green towels, which just happened to be Pirates Coast from Valspar.  Of course that got an immediate approval from Josh (as I mentioned before, he picks colors based on their name).  Once we got it on the walls, it ended up being a lot lighter than we expected, really it was almost white with a slight blueish-green tint.  Since it was so close to white, we decided we would do the trim a darker shade.  A few shades darker ended up being Hidden Lagoon, and what better color to go with Pirates Coast than that!

Here is the bathroom before the new paint:

 

And for good measure a close up of behind the toliet:

 And here are the afters plus my new over the toilet cabinet (ignore the mess...we are still in the middle of a few last projects in there!)

We also decided to do an accent "wall" with the trim color since there wasn't a lot of trim:

Oh how I love paint!  Here are a few close ups of the details we added too:

Now if only the bathtub situation was figured out....

New Toilet!

Ok, so maybe this is a weird thing to write about, but I just had to share the exciting news of our new toilet.  Josh's mom bought us new toilets for both of the bathrooms over Christmas and we finally got one of them put in the main bathroom.  I never knew how big of a difference a nice toilet makes, but believe me, it does!  And not just a difference for the intended use, but it also just makes the bathroom in general look fresher and more modern.  So here's the before and after:

Of course the clean tiles and fresh paint on the wall add to the improvements!

Taking a Break

So I have to appolgize for the delay in posting.  I blame part of it on the fact that we have been right in the middle of about 5 projects for about 2 weeks now and I just kept thinking I wanted to wait until we finished to post.  But I also have to blame a little bit on me being lazy.  I think for a few days I was kind of on a bit of a home improvement strike and needed to just take some time off after a few weeks of working on projects with every bit of spare time.  But, we are back and so very close to finishing both the main bathroom and our bedroom.  So in the next few days I will be posting more, I promise.  So stay posted for some exciting updates!

Getting Rid of the Painted Bathroom Floors

One of the biggest questions I have asked since we moved in is, "Who in the world paints tiled floors?"  Apparently some previous owner thought this was a great idea, so they did just that.  To make it worse, both bathroom floors were painted baby blue (to match the baby blue shower and tub maybe?) and then to make it even worse, the previous owner was in a wheelchair, which caused the paint to get all scratched up so that the tile showed through in some spots. 

Here's a good view of the main bathroom floor when we moved in:

After some discussion, we decided we would wait to re-tile the floor for a while, and in the mean time, just remove the paint.  Of course the tile underneath does not match the grey and seafoam green towels and shower curtain I got for the wedding, but I think we can make it work until we are ready to take the time (and money) to replace the tile.  Even though it's not exactly what I would pick for myself, the tile underneath is actually in good condition.

We bought a huge thing of Citristrip:

The instructions say to wait 30 minutes and then brush off the paint.  After one coat and an hour, then another coat and an hour and not much luck removing the paint with either a scraper or a copper scrubber, we decided to really pile it on and let it sit over night.  I woke up in the morning to a bunch of bubbly paint:

I used a paint scraper and most of it came up pretty easily.  To get the rest up I used a copper scrubber, and repeated with one more coat of Citristrip and more scrubbing.  It was not an easy job, but now the baby blue paint is gone for the most part!  All that is left is a little bit in the cracks, we are going to try a grout stripper next and hopefully that will be the end of it.

Here is the before and after:

And a close up of the tile, not the best thing ever, but SO much better than chipping baby blue paint!