How I spent my summer vacation

When I first started this blog I planned on having lots of how-tos (man they are a pain to put together, hence their absence) and a detailed log of all my home renovations.  I figured the whole world my mom would be waiting with baited breath to see the exact color gray I finally settled on, or how high my baseboards were.  We've been hacking away at this blog for months now but I have yet to share a single renovation image.  Poor you.  There's so much I still need to do before our house even begins to resemble my decor fantasy but we've already done a lot in the 3 short months since we've moved in, I think it's time to give Matt and I a smallish pat on the back:

living room

Here's my light-filled living room, I bought the house for it's high ceilings (the lowest one is 10 feet) and ginormus windows, also because Erin almost fainted from hyperventilation when we first toured the house. So Far I've ripped up the carpet, laid white and gray concrete overlay;  painted the walls gray; stenciled the big wall with the pretty pattern shown here; and ripped out the old door (to my bedroom) and put in this lovely vintage door on barn tracks.  We also installed the floating shelves, which are haphazardly arranged at present.  The furniture in this photo does not represent the arrangement I plan to maintain, but it works for now.  I also want to paint that door but, hey, one thing at a time.

Here are some progress photos:

stencil partial

the most tedious project of my life.  Thank god for beer and ladders.

before before

doesn't that tile around the fireplace and the band-aid colored paint make you want to puke?  Me too, which is why I have photo #2 of Matt ripping the tile off the floor, what a good husband.

fireplace

the fireplace as it stands today, still needing tile and a paint job.  Note:  Matt took the tiles off the floor in front of the fireplace but my dear, sweet mother actually removed the heinous offending tiles from the facade.  On the left are the lovely 6" baseboards we installed.  I hate wimpy short baseboards and my big-tall ceilings beg for a substantial anchor.  I love them.

couch

here's my couch that I recently painted and recovered.  I still need to make bolster pillows.  I also want approximately 864 more bright pillows to throw across the back.  It's no dream couch, but for $130 off craigslist, it will do for now.  Plus, it's much better than it was before:

couch before

eeeewwwww, my eyes burn.

This weekend I started to move into the hallway:

hallway

right: before with band-aid walls, band-aid carpet and my cute husband.  left: I've ripped out the baseboards and the molding from around all the doors (MYSELF!) and painted it white, the lines are chalk lines I put up last night to mark off where I will be painting stripes.  When complete, the hall will have alternating 6" white and gray stripes.  We also took out all the old hollow-core doors and replaced them with these vintage solid ones.  They will be painted white along with the new trim / molding / baseboards.  New handles too.  Which reminds me, anyone have a good handle source? I found a few I like, but at $200 a pop I think I need to keep shopping.  I'll give you the afters once the hall is done.

gold panther

And just because I couldn't leave you with a picture of my ugly half-completed hallway, here is a shot of my GOLD panther table.  Erin does not lie, I will spray paint anything gold, especially if it is a panther that wants to hold my cocktails.  

I chose not to bore you with photos of the dream closet renovation we did, but just so you know we're not sitting on our fannies around here, I'll tell you that we knocked out a new door in the wall (on a whim at midnight one night) so we could have 2 closet entrances, installed a boat-load of shelves and rails and hung a sweet globe lamp from the ceiling.  Now Matt isn't even allowed to put away his own clothes, I do it myself so that they can always be perfectly neat and organized, he makes a big boy mess.

So, there you have it, 600 projects down, only a million-gazillion to go.