Cheers to Digital Baby Booties

I started reproducing this really awesome wine painting Andy and I spotted in Paso Robles two years ago. Call it nesting, call it tying up loose ends, but I wanted – no, I needed – to finish it before Chelsea arrived. I joked that this process was my version of knitting baby booties. This is your mom, Chels, she likes wine and she works on the computer a lot.

After a few rounds of proofing, the final product just arrived from the printer and we are really happy with it. While it doesn't keep her tootsies warm, Chelsea loves the colours and she shouldn't be outgrowing it anytime soon.

Our Bouncing Baby Closet

I feel like we birthed this closet renovation. During the gestation period, which was about 4 months, we wondered what kind of closet our giant hole in the wall would grow up to be, we made and revised plans for it, it wore us out, and at the very end, we were seriously uncomfortable. For this delivery, though, Andy carried the weight.  

Click for more photos of the project

Back in May, we hired a contractor to combine two awkward closet spaces in our bedroom into one cohesive closet. The job would take him 2 weeks and was to begin immediately after Memorial Day. Instead of showing up to work on the first day, we got a call with some lame excuse. Ah, the start of an ugly pattern.

The no-show excuses continued at a steady pace – we got em all: car broke down, broken water heaters at other job sites, even the rain somehow affected his work schedule....he had more emergencies than the fire department. After 3 months of excuses and no end in sight, we couldn't take it any longer and fired him. It wasn’t pretty. Want to know what else wasn’t pretty? Me, pregnant and not sleeping in my own bed for 3 months...that makes for one cranky, pregnant lady. 

Sans-contractor and no strangers to home improvement projects, we knew we could finish the job ourselves but we had to shift it into high gear so we could finally move out of the guest room, which will soon be the baby’s room. Unfortunately, the closet required a plethora of pregnant-unfriendly activities before it would be complete – like painting, staining and heavy lifting – which meant our usual work crew of 2 was down to 1.

Andy is a superstar. He slaved over this thing on weekends and in the evenings after work and made more progress in one month than the contractor did in three. The finished product looks fantastic! 

Out, Damned (Colonial) Spot!

We appreciate the character of our old house. We had better - there's really no other option than old when you live in Boston! The antiquated china cabinet in our dining room, however, has never been something we appreciated. Really, what the heck am I supposed to do with a china cabinet?! I don't have - nor have I ever wanted - china; knick-knacks are just not my thing; and clutter makes me tense. I've been struggling with what to do/how to fill this space since we moved in.

So what to do? I was ready to take a sledgehammer to this tired, colonial-era built-in while visions of design inspiration from California danced in my head (chunky/rustic woods, exposed brick, reclaimed wine barrels) . . . but we needed to do this project on the cheap and also keep resale in mind. Sigh. Limitations can be so creatively stifling.

Confused, stiffled and sort of uninspired, we approached this project in a way we usually don't - without an end product in mind. At the very least, we thought we should clean it up a bit, after all - this thing had been caked with at least 500 layers of paint since prohibition. So we started there.

We removed the doors first to strip them and discovered we liked the cabinet sans-door. (We left the framework intact though, in case the next owners want to reinstate the doors.) Then we installed faux brick, added some more brick texture and painted it white. As subscribers to the "Candice Olson school of home improvement," we also added lighting, of course. Next we removed some of the shelves for stripping and discovered we really liked the open feel, so we kept them out. The remaining two shelves were stained the same colour as our neighboring sideboard in the butler's pantry.

My handy Andy went the extra mile to modernize the PBB-era drawers (pre-ball bearings) and completely rebuilt them so that they actually slide out easily. I am so grateful that he has spared me of the violent tug-of-war battles I had to undergo in order to access our table linens. There's nothing better than form + function!

Our organic home improvement process brought us from china cabinet to minimalist niche. We haven't found the perfect one object to put in there yet but we're loving the transformation and feel like we made it compatible with our style while also making an overall improvement to the room. See the before/after photos + the process here

Burn, Baby, Burn

I barely unpacked from Tanzania and I found myself into a new project! We had been thinking about making an extension off our patio for a chiminea for awhile now. Somehow, though, we got carried away while watering the garden last week...watering turned into clearing out an area...which turned into a visit to Home Depot for materials. Yikes! Put the breaks on! I still have massive amounts of laundry to do! All of the sudden, wham-o! A new paver mini-patio with a brand new chiminea. This turned out to be a way less ambitious patio than the one we built a few years ago, thank goodness! In the end, we’re feeling very Californian with more opportunities to spend in our garden. See the photos of the small patio and the chiminea in our backyard.

I'm slacking - I didn’t include a post about our new fireplace from last winter, which was a big deal for me. So, keeping with the fire theme of this post, I'll inform you that we installed a gas fireplace in our living room. This project required a ton of research and persistence on my part over the 3 winters we have spent in our home thus far...I needed a fireplace in a bad way! We finally found one that fit in our space and complied with all of the annoying Boston-area codes. End the end, we stayed warm this winter! Click on the photo to the left to see it larger.

Cha Cha Chia!

We are lucky to have a massive and healthy bleeding heart bush in our backyard, I adore the blooms on this plant and watching it grow is one of my favorite things about spring. I have to admit though, the growth is a bit freakish...it's kind of like a Chia Pet. I decided to take photos of it every so often this past month just to prove I'm not exaggerating.
See a series of photos here - "It's fun, water it and watch it grow!"

Butler's Pantry Completed

By the time we tackled our butler's pantry, we were a fine-tuned renovating team! The pantry housed original stuff to the house, but not in a cool way - it was just old and tired. Even still, the room provides lots of storage and additional space for food prep, which we love and need - so refreshing this space has been on our list of to-dos for awhile.

We replaced the original Formica-topped cabinet with a piece of furniture we modified to look like a built-in unit and later topped with granite to match the kitchen. We also enclosed the open storage nook with new cabinetry to sit above our wine fridge, which we very happily promoted from the basement. The final project was installing custom shelving for our glassware. And as always, we did lots of repair work to the walls, added new trim/molding and paint.

We got pretty creative and managed to complete this space very cost effectively: The cabinet was from IKEA (on sale to boot!); due to the unusual size of the storage nook, we were forced to get custom cabinetry but managed to find a place that builds custom cabinets by machine instead of by hand, which saved a bundle; and our slab of granite was recycled (a remnant from another kitchen) and was waaaay less expensive and a green solution, which made us feel nice.
Check out pics from the project here

Bring it on down to Arborvitaeville!

So I stopped whining about the backyard and we got to work. We cut a new, curvy bed along the fence to accommodate 12 arborvitae trees. These little guys are supposed to be fast growers and should form a nice, thick wall of green in a couple of years. Our arborvitae bonanza took 2 weekends to complete + a Riley record-breaking 5 visits to Home Depot in one day. We're quite pleased with the results - it's better than it was before.
Grow, baby, grow....can I feed them steroids?

Butler's Pantry - In Progress

Once he saw our handywork in the mudroom and the basement, our butler was all in our face about updating his space, the Butler's Pantry. He can so persistent sometimes...so we appeased him and demo-ed the room to started from scratch. New cabinetry and granite counter tops are all in the plan. We're pretty stoked about how our new space off the kitchen is shaping up!
Ask Jeeves, he'll gladly give you a tour of our progress this month.

Decking Facelift

Yup, we're obsessed with home improvement projects. We stripped and stained our front porch, our upstairs neighbors' deck and ours. This might be one of the least riveting entries into my blog...but well, it took a large chunk of our free time so it will take a small chunk of the blog. As a result, the wood looks healthier and will be protected from the harsh New England winter.
Enjoy (?) our photos here.

Dried Out, Rebuilt and Ready to Go!

Our basement flooded about a month and a half ago and since then we've been on a mission to get our media room/office back to its original splendor: We installed subflooring, patched, painted, sanded, made shelving, dealt with 2 annoying insurance assessors, got half of the walls reinstalled, carpet replaced, rewired...as Andy says, and we're back! New wall colour, newly refurbished stairwell, new (and way better) carpet + an organized basement to boot. It's so good to have our space back again.
See some of the progress here.

Fence Facelift

It's been awhile since our last home improvement project. Our backyard rocks but the fence has been neglected and was in need of some TLC. It's a multi-stepped process to refurbish the wood: first we applied a mildew removal solution and scrubbed each plank until our arms fell off (arduous but totally fulfilling because they sparkled when we were done). Rinse, dry and then the stain was brushed on. Unfortunately, we had to stop halfway since rain was in the forecast. Looks like we have our work cut out for us next weekend!
Major improvement! Images here!

Too Much HGTV

We've seen it on HGTV and we went for it! Demolition, tiling, dry-walling, mitering...and we've unleashed it all on the tiniest room in our house, our mudroom. This small space started off with a really poor excuse for flooring and overly-patched, old plaster walls and now it's something totally different. Once we finished tiling the floor, the walls paled in comparison, so we tackled them next. Check out the two set of photos:
1.) FLOOR: tile install
2.) WALLS: bye-bye horsehair plaster

Be a homeowner or just look like one

Maybe we've been watching a little too much HGTV but we decided to build a fieldstone patio in our yard. Our landlords are paying for the materials and we're providing the labor. Call us weekend warriors, call us crazy...or just call us when you want to dine alfresco.
Check out our progress on the patio here.