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.