Weekend Projects

It's amazing how much a house can change into a home over the years. We bought this house in September of 2008, so we've been here about 2 1/2 years. Here is the first post of our 'finished' house, where every room was painted and more or less 'done'. So much has changed since then!

We have a bigger, darker, square table in the dining room that seats 8 friends or family members. There are at least 2x as many cityscapes hanging on the walls in our master bedroom, plus we added one country scene on the opposite wall (it's the difference between the crazy/cluttered city and the simple country...get it?)

The guest room is a much nicer shade of green and does have quite a large collection of family pictures on a couple of walls. It's supposed to be a future baby room, but I like it so much I don't know if I'll want to convert it!

But the biggest change from those pictures is the loft area. It was orange then. I lived with it for maybe a month and then painted it Kilim Beige- the most popular color and the most boring one. And I loved it! But with our subscription to This Old House magazine, and me working at a paint store, there are too many ideas floating around to stay boring for long.

So I put together a scheme for some stripes to liven up the top half of one of the loft walls. I wanted to pull together colors that are all over the house- the chocolate brown in our furniture, the pale green in some pillows downstairs, the red in the office, white to tone it down, and the blue that I love and want to paint the dining room (note the Kilim Beige on the bottom). So here is what it's looked like for the last few months:

I may have mentioned that I'd love to have a library, and we have a ton of books that had no place to go, so I convinced Bean that we should hang some shelves in the loft and make it a library. So on Easter Sunday, we made plans to get it done. Here he is at work:

Have I mentioned that we love Ikea? I don't know what it is, but we like the clean lines and industrial style. To my delight, Bean said that our loft looks like the Ikea showrom after we were done! Here's the finished product:

I was finally able to hang up this photo and signature mat from my graduation in 2006. That was the last time I saw Donna before we found out she was sick. We had a great time that afternoon and night, and it was after that she told me she really liked Bean and she was glad I was going to marry him.

I also had a plan to display every holiday card we have for every year of our marriage, so I'd started putting them in frames. So here are the first three years. I can't find the one from 2010, so as soon as I do, it will be in that last frame. And we'll have to add onto this each year!

I just love our new library!

Another project I convinced Bean we needed to do was to stain the fence. It's not very big- 61 linear feet. I knew it wouldn't take very long. So that's what we did this morning. Here are a couple of before shots:

And a couple of afters:

We only got the outside of the fence stained this morning because it was really cloudy and looked like rain. And the stain is supposed to be on for at least 24 hours before rain is expected. So we are hoping we don't have any problems! I should be able to get the inside done in the next week. Here's a color comparison from the inside gate:
This makes me question my color selection- it's really pink!- but it looks better than the old stuff, and the overall finished pictures make it look really good. Besides, our brick has a lot of pink so it just might work. So I'm excited! Hopefully I can ignore the pink tones when it's all done and we sit out on the patio and enjoy it!