On Christmas Eve, we painted some random spots we had that needed touching up. I mentioned the holes from our curtain rod in my Christmas To-Do List post.
When Mike installed our new speakers (which he still needs to post about!), we got a new drill hole in our dining room wall. So we decided to finally break out the can of Benjamin Moore’s Waynesboro Taupe.
What a difference with some daylight, huh? 🙂
Then into the dining room…
Thankfully, the touch up spots were flawless.
Since I love this paint color and it’s one of the few true taupe colors I’ve found, I decided to try a swatch for our bedroom. While Mike had roller in hand, I asked him to put a tiny bit on one of our bedroom walls. Then he did this…
He is laughing hysterically at me in this picture because after he rolled past the 2 inch mark I was like Wooooah! Hey! What the heck are you doing?!? I said a swatch!!! Apparently he has no clue what that means. Sort of like how I’ve been telling him since we moved to bend at the knees (we ended up in the emergency room with a pulled out back earlier this year) and just a few weeks ago he told me he had no clue what that meant. Oy!
So I currently have this on my wall…
And it’s definitely too dark. We actually have the lighter, neighboring shade from the color swatch (Himalayan Trek) in our entry way and upstairs hallway and it is way more gray than taupe. Anyone know a good light taupe color that’s not too gray and not too beige? We have a possible contender just beyond that door in the walk-in closet, which I am planning on finally sharing with you tomorrow!
Oh and this title? We painted and then made lasagna. True story. We’re trying to diversify our skills 🙂
I mentioned in my last post that I had a new Sunny inspiration…
Since our bedroom is all fancy looking with it’s new floors, I’ve started to think about what I want to do with the room. Okay, I’ve been thinking about it for months and changing my mind over, and over, and over again.
Originally, we registered for king sized bedding from Macy’s…
We only had a queen sized bed, but we weren’t sure if we’d be able to afford nice, new king sized bedding when we moved into the new house. So when we spotted this, we both loved it and wanted it. Problem was, it was discontinued. Since we are picky, my mom ran out the next day and hunted down all of the pieces, had them mailed to her and gave it to me at my bridal shower.
I still love the refreshing teal tones in this bedding, as well as the crisp white, but I have a habit of decorating with blue. Our family room/kitchen is blue, the dining room and living room have shades of blue. I didn’t want to get trapped into the blues/browns again. I love white crisp bedding and against our new dark floors I knew white would look great. But with pets, white is very hard to maintain, as is anything too dark. So I knew I wanted something primarily white, but I was leaning towards a neutral toned bedroom.
Then I saw it was similar to the bedding in the boys’ room on this season of Jersey Shore…
I was nervous about what was going to go down in those beds this season, so I decided to shop around.
(Btw, I loved the living room area on this season of Jersey Shore with the graphic red/white curtains…)
So some other neutral, patterned bedding I was considering was…
This West Elm bedding which was similar to the above Crate and Barrel bedding. It’s apparently not available anymore.
I also like the organic factor of this Imperial duvet cover, also from West Elm…
So I was obviously favoring West Elm. One day a week or two ago, I went to the West Elm website to see if they added any new bedding when I discovered this…
It’s the Octagon jacquard duvet cover… it’s orange and reverses to a side with more white than orange. Given my new love for orange and after spotting this, I decided that I wanted some white and orange bedding. But this bedding wasn’t exactly doing it for me, so I set out to look around.
But it was too orange and not enough white for me. So I checked my usual places, Target, Pier 1, Ikea, Google, but I couldn’t find anything I loved. Then in a last ditch effort, I went to Walmart.com…..
Exactly what I had in mind! It’s the Divatex Diamond Duvet Mini Set in Spice, and it also comes in black and white. The great part is, it was on sale when I ordered it so I paid $35 for a king duvet and shams, plus like $2 to ship it. The whole ‘mini-set’ aspect (just the duvet & shams) was appealing because I could still use my nice Hotel Collection white sheets and bedskirt that my mom gave us as a wedding gift. A little mix of high end, a little mix of low end. Throw some accent pillows on this bad boy and we’re set!
I plan on putting the teal bedding in the guest room, since I still love it and can’t bear to part with it. And I figure since I plan on using white sheets, I may want to change around the bedding from time to time. That is, if it goes with my fancy plans for the rest of the room 🙂
I finally have some real progress to report…yesterday our new floors were finished up!
As a recap, before…
And after!
Top of stairs before…
And after!
We obviously still have some finish work to do. That wood piece up there needs to be stained, the riser needs to be touched up with some paint, all of these nail holes need to be caulked and the new molding painted…
We are going to be very busy the next couple of weeks since we hope do this all on our own!
View from master before…
And after!!
Notice a theme here? My cats (especially Macky) are total photo bombers. I think we’ve trained them to pose for the camera so that the minute I pull one out, they are all over me. Many times during this whole photo session I suddenly saw Macky’s snout in my view finder…
And now for the elephant in the room, our new wall! It’s not done being spackled, nor is it painted, but it’s there!
Empty bedroom before…
And after!
Our room is still plenty large. Our friend Chris did a great job making the wall look like it’s always been a part of the room.
Here’s the in-progress iPhone shot of the wall again…
So we still have two windows in the sitting room and plenty of space. Unfortunately, we have no light fixtures in the sitting room and I rarely get home before it’s dark, so the pictures of that part of the room are crappy. Oh and that part of the room is also dirty, since the drywall isn’t done and there are still some materials in there. Hopefully I can snap some better pictures this weekend…
You can still see a little bit of the structure from the inside of the sitting room, but I’m sure we can come up with something to do with it!
Hey and there’s a glimpse of Darwin and our awful paper blinds!
Cue a panicked blurry Macky since he was closed out of a room for about 2 seconds. If you’ve seen his carpet shredding skills, you know he does not like being left out…
So now we have to caulk and paint the hallway molding, touch up some scuffs, then do the same in the bedroom, paint the new french doors, paint aaaall of the walls, get some window treatments (finally) and figure out what the heck we’re doing with this space! But more on that later… 🙂
As I’ve mentioned and previewed in my last post, this week we are having hardwood floors installed in our upstairs hallway and master bedroom. Wait what? Don’t we have brand new carpet? Yes we do, but like many things in this house it is your run of the mill, builder grade, vacuum-leaves-marks-on-it, carpet. And I hate it.
Our reason for going with this carpet was to save money. It was the standard carpet, meaning we didn’t pay anything out of pocket for it. We had the vast color options of white, pink, blue and this. I wasn’t a fan of the gold hue, but the upgrades were pricey. Our bedroom is so large that even just a “level 1” upgrade (read: same carpet better colors) would have cost us $1,000. And that was just for one room. We decided to upgrade only the 2 rooms downstairs that have carpet (the family room and office) to a berber style and live with these until we could afford otherwise. Here’s Macky modeling a close up..
The carpet actually didn’t look as gold as I thought it would, and I was thinking I could live with it a little longer than anticipated. But then this happened…
We had this problem in our condo and knew it was only a matter of time before it happened here. Macky is a master carpet seam finder. And he’s also a very high maintenance, needy cat. Think puppy with separation anxiety and that’s Macky. So I was painting Brielle’s letters in a spare bedroom one day and he got extremely upset that he couldn’t get to me. I ignored the crying for no more than 2 minutes when I heard a tear. Yes he found the seam. It was all downhill from there.
We didn’t get too upset about it, because we had spare carpeting and knew it could be repaired. But then something else began happening. This is a very embarrassing topic that few pet owners discuss, but I’m going to go there. Darwin started peeing on our carpet.
I know, you’d give your cat away, yell at him, spray him with a water bottle, whatever. But you see, Darwin has a neurological disorder called cerebellar hypoplasia. We knew this when we adopted him, and it actually was the main reason why we did adopt him. We lost Macky’s brother, Sunny, to feline panleukopenia when he had just turned two. When we saw that cerebellar hypoplasia could be caused by a pregnant mother surviving feline panleukopenia, we knew that Darwin was a survivor and felt immediately connected to him. Plus he happens to be orange, just like Sunny, and the sweetest little thing you’d ever meet.
I found this video of a cat with Darwin’s disorder. As you can see, his disability doesn’t affect him too much and isn’t very noticeable most days…
So we didn’t know at the time, but Darwin’s disorder can cause litter box issues. He has trouble keeping his balance and sometimes misses the box. So we can no longer use litter boxes with lids and we cover the surrounding area with puppy pads, incase he misses. But I think that sometimes he confuses cheap, fluffy carpet with a puppy pad and goes there. It is not at all a behavioral issue with him and he honestly thinks he’s going in a litter box. Luckily, he kept to one end of our hallway.
We cleaned it almost daily with our Bissell Spot Bot and Hoover Carpet Steamer, so we never got that “cat lady” smell in our house. But we never, ever, eveeeer want to get to that point. We knew it would be nearly impossible to stop him, so we made the decision to tear up the carpet in the hallway. We feared he would then start going in our bedroom, so as a preventative measure, we also tore up the bedroom carpet since the hallway leads directly there.
And while we decided to tear things up, we figured we’d get some new baseboards to match the higher ones the builder gave us downstairs. And while we were at that! Our bedroom is massively huge, like in a bad way.
This is the view from where our bed sits (though taken before we moved in). That little area back there is our “sitting room”, but it makes for a quite uncozy bedroom. We have just a bed, 2 night stands and a dresser, so this is my view every morning.
We wanted to eventually add a wall here to separate the rooms. Keyword: eventually. Many people immediately tell us that this room would make a great nursery, though I picture it being my art studio of sorts. Either way, it would need a door to keep out the terrorizing cats, but we wanted to keep that open feeling.
So the solution? Build a wall with double french doors.
The doors are being installed as I type. Once it’s all done and the dust has (been) cleared, I will get some after pics up.
But the moral of the story here? Our cats are very important members of our family, so we make sure this house works for all of us. Luckily, this time, the level of style in the house improved thanks to the cats. We knew that carpet doesn’t really work for us, but we gave it a second shot and hoped for the best to try to save money. Though we sacrificed our planned vacation, major office remodel, food, clothing to eventually end up with hardwoods… our floors are going to look pretty awesome and I am very excited to see the outcome! Plus Darwin just looked at me like he was sorry, and he melted my heart. One more time for good luck!…
In June 2009, my husband and I signed a contract on to-be-built home. As the neighborhood grew around us, we jokingly referred to our home as the lil house that could, since it is the smallest model in the community. We know, we know, it is not small by any means.... read more.
