Monday, November 30, 2015

Office

This room is still pretty preliminary so I probably shouldn't even post it. But who knows when I'll get around to finishing it so here it is!

I apologize in advance for the crappy iPhone pics.  I can't for the life of me find my Nikon camera charger. :/

Remember what it looked like before:


These shelves... They're great. But they were built so strange.  All of the shelves are different heights and some of them are awkwardly short- I can hardly even stack a couple books on top of each other. And then others are just massive and hard to fill.  Call me crazy but I'm itching to rip them out. (Much to Tom's frustration haha)


The rest of the walls were baby blue.  A nice change from the rest of the brown and green house.





I took those before pictures right before Tom painted.  I was 38 1/2 weeks pregnant and Tom had his first adventure painting a room all by himself.  I helped a little bit with some of the edging but he did it alone for the most part and he did a really good job!


And here it is today with a very cute baby rolling around ;)  Since this is Tom's office for the most part (he uses it to work from home on occasion hence the double monitors) we wanted to make it pretty masculine feeling so we went for charcoal walls.


This room doesn't have a light fixture which is pretty obnoxious.  But some of the outlets are wired to a light switch so I got this light kit and shade from IKEA and just plugged it into the outlet and now it works with the switch.  The inside of the shade is copper which is perfect because our desk legs are copper.
The campaign dresser was a classifieds score for $25 that I painted white.  I will have to post a before and after of that one of these days.


Eventually I want to get some pretty leather chairs in here but for now my ghost chairs will do.


And here are the bookshelves styled (for the most part). When we get wood floors on our main level, hopefully in January, we will have to rip out the bookshelves to put the wood under them to the wall. Then my plan is to do a wood wall on that wall and some industrial style shelving like in my living room.  I tend to lean towards a more clean look and these bookshelves are pretty but they just feel really busy to me. 

I also need a rug but that will wait until we get wood floors in here. 
So there it is. Our office in all her partially finished glory. That's real life though. A constant work in progress.

Thanks for reading!

xoxo Bre


Friday, November 20, 2015

The greatest chair find in the history of ever.

I mentioned a couple posts back about my little ghost chairs.


These babies are something I studied in design school.  I took a class all on chairs (boring, right? Wrong! I loved it haha)  Anyways.  These are designed by a Scandinavian designer named Philippe Starck.  I always wanted some but I knew I would never afford them.  I looked into knock offs but they're still like $90 a chair on Amazon.  That's not bad but I read not amazing reviews about them and I wasn't about to pay $90 for something that was just decent.
Well one day last fall in the throws of morning sickness, I was laying in bed looking on a yardsale site on Facebook when these chairs popped up 2 for $25.  She suggested using them on a patio... What?? NO!!!??  There was a line of people inquiring about them and I will admit. I did a dirty thing.  I private messaged her and offered her $50 with immediate pick up.  She accepted my offer and deleted her post.  I dragged my sickly self out of bed and picked up the chairs, threw them in the back of my car, drove home and dropped back in bed without taking a 2nd look at them.
And then I started thinking about them and I walked out to my car and guess what is on the back of these chairs??


Can you even see that? haha... Anyways, it says "Louis Ghost  Starck by Kartell"  Okay. These babies aren't even knock offs!! I literally wanted to do cartwheels.  A quick google sesh told me these pretties sell for $450 A CHAIR. Yep.
Basically I will never out-do myself ever again.
And that poor girl who had no clue what she was getting rid of...

That my friends, is the story of how I paid $50 for $900 worth of furniture.

The end.

(Dying to know... would you do it? Would you weasel your way into a sale if you knew you'd never forgive yourself for letting something go?  Or am I just a bad person?  Either way, I'm a bad person with 2 pretty chairs. :))

xoxo Bre


Thursday, November 19, 2015

DIY Industrial pipe shelves

I told you I installed shelves on my blank wall.  Here they are:


We really want more industrial elements in our home and what better way than pipe shelving?


For these shelves, I bought 4 black iron 1/2" floor flanges, 4 black iron 1/2" x 12" pre-threaded pipes (nipples), 4 black iron 1/2" end caps, a pack of brackets and 1 6' x 12" board cut in half.  


I mounted the flanges 2 1/2 feet apart, made sure they were level, and screwed in the pipe and the end cap.


 Meanwhile, I sanded my boards down, and stained them with a layer of minwax classic gray, and a layer of special walnut on top.


Then I placed the board on top, made sure it was centered, and secured it with these brackets.  These are half inch and I found them in the section with the lighting wires.  They were silver so I spray painted them oil rubbed bronze so they would blend in.


And there we have it! Industrial shelving in a day.
I still have one more picture to hang on the bottom left corner to make it more balanced with the mirror.

And yes. That is my Christmas tree. In November.  Sue me? ;)

xoxo Bre

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Livingroom Reveal

This was the biggest project I've ever done. Holy crap this was a beast and the fact that it's *done is such a relief.
*The asterisk is that we are going to install wood floors throughout the first floor.  But I promised Tom we'll enjoy the holidays with a clean house.  So the wood floors will wait until January.

Let's get started.
Here's the before:



The different colored wall issue that I had in my kitchen continued into my living room.  The top half was a tan with a chair rail around most of the walls and a darker tan on the bottom half.  And then some walls were just the darker brown for some reason.  Really random and really hard for me to look at.



This room went through such a process and so many tiny little changes it would be hard to document them all.


Here is a bird's eye view of what our living room looked like for a really long time.  It's a really small space and we want to eventually get another sofa or overstuffed chair for that wall on the left.  We had this big, pretty bookshelf but there was no where for it to go.  Our office has built in shelves, none of the rooms upstairs are big enough, and it wouldn't fit down our basement stairs.  So I sold it along with our Ikea rug.


Here is our living room with our new rug, blinds, and half painted.

I wanted to really lighten up this room and accentuate the high ceilings and natural light.  I also wanted to frame out the windows to give it a more finished feel.  


At first I picked the color on the bottom. (The color right above it is SW Alpaca)  It's a behr color and looked really pretty. So I had a gallon mixed up, brought it home, and started painting.  And it was purple. It doesn't look too purple in this picture. But trust me. My whole house would have been lavender and I would have cried every day.


The color I used in the end is called Alpaca by Sherwin Williams. 
It's a really perfect color.  It's gray with beige undertones so it's still warm and in some lighting looks like a warm white.  It does have lavender undertones in some light but that's a little of what I was going for. 


I decided to paint this room slowly.  I knew it was going to take a long time so I started in August.  I would spend a day painting one entire wall.  Removing everything, sanding, patching, edging, rolling, and when it was done, I would put everything back and clean all the paint supplies up.  This way we didn't have to live in a construction zone for months.  


I took a picture of my gallery wall, took it all down, left the holes, painted, and then put it back up.  Pretty simple. It only took a day.


The paint looks pink here... but it is not.


All the wood for framing the windows.


Once I had done everything I could reach, we rented scaffolding and spent the day painting, framing windows, and finishing up everything.



Look at how much wider the lower window looks than the top window.  Framing them out made them look so much bigger than they are.



The only picture I have of the 2nd story scaffolding is a snapchat Tom took. Sorry.  That was so high and scary we were just focusing on finishing.

Since there are so many windows, I wanted a sort of clean craftsman look.  Otherwise it could look too busy.


I can't even tell you the difference this makes in this room.  I painted the inside of the frames white and it opens up the windows and makes them look even bigger. (nighttime picture because it's impossible to see the details with the sun shining through them)


My mother-in-law bought us this mirror before we were married.  I have been dying to hang it over my fireplace but wanted to wait until I had painted and we could secure it into studs because it weighs probably over 200 pounds. 
Even though our house style is a little more modern/midcentury/industrial, I love the juxtaposition a classic mirror brings in.  Too much of one style is too much in my opinion.  I'm a mixer through and through.


I have already added some shelves above this little area since taking these pictures last week. I haven't gotten any good pictures yet so I'll post them later.  This is the wall the bookshelf used to sit on.  And these ghost chairs... Those are a story for another day :)


I also painted our fireplace white back in March.
It is amazing how much brighter it is in here!  


Here's the view of the couch from the other side of the room.

I couldn't be any happier with the way this room has turned out so far.  I still have a few projects to finish:  I need to order legs for the tv stand (tutorial coming for that too), install wood flooring, and I want to do something about the fireplace.  I'm not in love with slate and really want to get rid of it. I'm open to any and all ideas on that one. Anyways. Thanks for reading!

xoxo Bre



Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Dining Room Makeover

I had big plans for this room before we ever even owned the house.  In fact, my original goal was to paint it before we moved in.  But then the fact that I was still pregnant hit me in the face and I was barely able to even pack up my house in time for moving day. 

Okay so before:




This picture actually shows it. Every wall in my kitchen and dining room was a different color. It literally alternated from light tan to poo green to dark tan to poo green. It was just too much for me to handle.


Don't mind the mess. haha. Is it just me or is that a really bad green?



Starting to look so much better already.  But looking at this picture makes my body hurt again. Next pregnancy I'm going to do a lot less physical labor. Hopefully.




Almost done...


And finished! 
(Almost... minus that little corner my big belly wouldn't let me reach)


I love this blue.  It's moody in some lighting and vibrant in others. It's perfect.


I bought these little cardboard letters at hobby lobby and spray painted them gold.


And then I hung white curtains. (FYI... Ikea is my go to for curtains.  They're extremely long, they have a good variety of colors and styles, and the price can't be beat! The quality is pretty great too.)
For the curtain rods, I wanted very simple so I just bought plain ones without finials (I think from walmart?) and then spray painted them copper.  I usually don't spend much on my rods because they're mostly covered by curtains and I spray paint them 80% of the time.

I'm going to be honest with you because this is real life. This is how my dining room sat for months.


 Proof: A tiny baby Roman in the middle of the floor. 
Mid July I got the courage to start it up again.

Rewind back to April.  I bought a table off of a yardsale site.  The guy told me it was vintage Thonet which would be sweet. Still not sure if that's even true though.  
Here it is:


I really wanted a midcentury modern style table.  This one was a yellowed color but the shape was perfect and I knew I could refinish it. Plus: BRASS FEET!!! (heart eyes)


To remove the varnish, I used Citristrip.  It comes in a spray can so no mixing necessary. Just shake, spray it on, wait a while, (I waited overnight because that's the next opportunity I had to work again) and it scrapes right off.


Seriously I used a thin plastic putty knife and the thick varnish just scraped right off. Like buttah... I don't know why but this gave me so much satisfaction to do haha. 
**Make sure you wear gloves when working with stripper or it will burn your skin.


Still splotchy so I used a palm sander with fine grit sandpaper and gave it a really good sanding.  I wiped it off with a damp cloth several times in between and let it dry to make sure I got all of the varnish off evenly.


I used Minwax Special Walnut for the stain. I love this color. So rich and the perfect tone. Not yellow, not gray, just a good natural brown. I use it for everything because depending on the type of wood, it comes out a little different. You'll see in other places in my home.


This table I rolled with a foam roller and instead of wiping excess off, I just made sure I applied it very evenly.  I think it took 2 coats to get it the color I wanted.
Tip: if you wipe your wood down with a damp cloth right before you stain, your wood will absorb the stain better and more evenly.


I ordered some chairs from Target because they were having a really good sale.  And then they finally came and literally looked like kid chairs next to my table. Wah Wah. So I lugged them back to Target and went back to hunting for the perfect chairs.  I really liked this style and had my heart set on it.  But every single chair like this I could find was disappointingly small.  And then my sister texted me a picture of my chairs but tall at Downeast!! Yessss.  I called them and had them order in 4 for me and picked them up a week later.


Then I found this light from West Elm and pretended to be an electrician and installed it myself. (thankfully I took a lighting class in design school haha) 


I really wanted a fiddle leaf fig tree for the corner but couldn't find one anywhere. If you're in Utah, Cactus and Tropicals in Draper has the most amazing selection I've found! See?


Anyways, there's our dining room and kitchen!  I will eventually paint my cabinets white, redo the backsplash so it's not so busy, and install granite or quartz countertops.  But for now it's functional and not horrible.

xoxo Bre