instagram updates

While I'm not putting my blood, sweat, and tears (literally) into our new house, I've been out and about taking in design inspiration. I'm lucky to live in a city that has so many fabulous showrooms at my doorstep. This bath design at the Ferguson showroom was a showstopper. I'm debating between brass and chrome for our bath and/or kitchen, and change my mind almost daily on this!

 I got a tour of the Subzero/Wolf showroom a couple of weeks ago to get inspiration for a kitchen/dining project I've been working on - This dining room was spot-on!

Here is a peek at my design plan. Google SketchUp *might* finally be growing on me.

We tiled and grouted our floor in the guest bath in preparation for the arrival of our vanity. It got a little delayed, but it's definitely being delivered tomorrow. Be on the lookout for sneak peeks on my insta account!

Last but not least I visited Mili at the Kufri Life showing at the 2014 Artist Open Studios. I'm loving the new Spring designs as well as the addition of rugs!

On the list for this week: Having our final meeting with our contractor so he can get to work on the big stuff, finally getting sod laid, finalizing flooring choices for master bedroom and Charlie's room, and painting the fireplace. One thing I'm learning about this whole process is that nothing goes as quickly or smoothly as you expect. All of our timelines (and budgets) have gone out the window due to some shoddy DIY jobs from the previous owners (womp, womp), but we're hopeful our contractor can help us out of the mess and still have everything ready before our move-in! I promise to share more pics and progress soon, but right now there isn't a whole lot of progress being made :)

paint colors picked!

We're slowly but surely making progress, y'all! After going back and forth many times over this past month, we finalized our paint colors for the house yesterday! I'm excited to finally get started on the painting, because it's going to majorly transform the place.

Here are the winners:

1) Benjamin Moore- Oxford White

2) Benjamin Moore- Oystershell

3) Benjamin Moore - Cheating Heart

4) Benjamin Moore - Sunlit Coral

5) Benjamin Moore - Gondola Ride

6) Benjamin Moore - At Sea

home remodel update

Our guest bathroom is at a bit of a standstill while we're waiting for plumbing and fixtures to be installed. We've tiled the floor, and will start tiling the shower as soon as plumbing is completed.  I have very high hopes that it will all be completed next week, so check back soon for updates!

While we are waiting I've set my sights on Charlie's "man cave". I've finally decided on our wall color (Benjamin Moore - Gondola Ride), and we've purchased the lounge chair - I've wanted this chair for years, so I'm way excited for its arrival. It's funny that when I started designing this room I was trying to make it extra masculine, but I haven't been able to convince Charlie on anything in here except for the chair!

I'm debating on whether to do a daybed, sofa bed, or just a regular sofa in this room. We'd like to use it as an additional guest room, so right now I'm leaning towards this sofa bed from sofa.com. Flooring will hopefully be going in some time next week, and after that I'll be able to get to work painting and putting together this space!

project: guest bath

We started tackling our guest bathroom this weekend. We decided to start with this bath so that we had something nice for guests (and us) to use since the master bath will be a total gut project that we'll hopefully start in late summer/early fall. From far away this bathroom may not look terrible, but the tile was cracking, there was mold all along the grout lines and behind the tile, and it was also incredibly dirty and gross.

We're changing out the vanity, updating lighting, tiling, hardware, adding a new, deeper tub, and removing (hopefully) the bulkhead above the shower, toilet, and vanity. We haven't opened it up yet, but I'm hoping there isn't anything in there and it should be an easy removal.

Dirty, dirty tub, cracked tiles, and cheapo toilet. This is all going!

Don't even get me started on this texture. I hate, hate it. The previous owner also textured the ceilings with a completely different sponge texture, so it's a total mess. I purchased a drywall sander and (hopefully) will be sanding down these walls. I really hope it goes well, because I would love to sand down the rest of the house, too.

Chipping these tiles off the wall was surprisingly satisfying. I did most of the shower while Charlie tackled the vanity demo.

I'm going back and forth on whether or not I want to keep this privacy wall. I'm leaning towards yes, only because the toilet and tub area of this bathroom are about an inch and a half higher than the vanity portion (you can see the previous owners remedied this by stacking two transition strips on top of each other, ha!), and I'm not ready to commit to having someone come in and fix that so I'll probably just work with it.

source: Apartment Therapy

Here is a photo of the tiles we will be using. I love how classic and clean this combination is. We're going with gray grout so the contrast won't be as severe as it is in this photo, but it will still highlight the shape of the tiles, which a I really want. You can see the rest of the fixtures that we picked out on my home board!

Our goal is to have the bathroom completed in three weeks, but I'm optimistic that we'll be finished in two. We're also making major progress on our backyard. We're trying to get someone to come out and lay sod this week, and all we'll have left are flowers and furniture. After all of our hard work I can hardly wait to see it come together!

project: backyard

This weekend we got a little taste of what the next few months will be like while we renovate the heck out of our new house. We started with the backyard because we wanted to get all of the work done and the grass planted before the Texas heat sets in. While the backyard didn't look too bad from far away, once you got up close it was a mess. There was also an old, warped deck that was poorly put together, but at the same time terribly difficult to remove. It was full of concrete work that we weren't expecting, and when they cut the boards, they just left the extra pieces under the deck along with a huge amount of rock that we had to clean up. There was a good 3-4 inches of dead leaves and weeds in all of the flower beds, along with a bunch of dead, diseased, and overgrown bushes on top of it. It was so far gone we decided to just take most of it out and put grass in its place. We want a place for Tobias to play and we just want it to be clean. Currently it is a breeding ground for snakes, spiders, lizards, and many angry ants, and we want to spend our time lounging by the pool, not worrying about whether or not we're going to be bit by ants and spiders.

(Sorry these pictures are blurry. Charlie changed the settings on my camera, and I didn't notice it as I was quickly taking these pics!)

This is how it is currently... I have to keep telling myself that it will get worse before it gets better, right? This is after ten 30 gallon bags full of yard debris had been cleaned up. We're hiring someone to haul away the old deck boards as well as the red brick trim along the pool and the various other random stones that were littering the yard. We're also cutting down the bush blocking the sidewalk by the house, the bush behind the diving board, and removing the diving board. After this is done we're getting pest control out to get rid of the critters, planting grass, and power-washing the concrete. Then I can finally get around to the fun stuff and order all of our patio furniture. I expect we'll be finished in the next week, and the grass will hopefully have filled in over the next six weeks before we move in.

 I'll make sure to share the after once the project is complete!

we're in!

Oh, hey. Remember me? I've been a bad blogger recently, but for good reason. We've officially closed on our home and got our keys yesterday! We're about to kick it into high gear for renovations and we'll hopefully be in the house by mid-May. 

I'll be sharing what we're doing room by room over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!