February 14, 2013 - Office Makeover - Update!

The painting in the room is complete!!!  Yay!  We picked out two rugs that match.  A small on for in front of the deck door and then the larger one for in front of the vanity.  The colors help tie the colors in the room to the bathroom tile on the wall.

I also ended up spray painting the mirror's white trim to match the rest of the hardware and fan.  Loving it!

After cleaning out the rest of the loose items, Evan and I moved my studio stuff up and it looks great!

The old computer table was too bulky and we put the corner table in to help keep the room from looking too cluttered down.

We are tempted to get rid of the futon, but it works well in front of the sliding doors.  It is easy to move to get in and out of the closets.  Plus it is an extra space for someone to sleep if we have company.

We are getting anxious for the counter top as we prepare the tile around the sink to get a feel for what it will look like.

February 4, 2013 -- Office Makeover - Update!

Color Swatches!  I realized I have not put down the colors we selected for the walls and trim.  Lowe's Valspar paint did well in our bedroom colors, that we went with them again.  The Wall color is Woodrow Wilson Blush and the Trim is Rustic Oak. 

For our Sink, we went to Home Depot and decided on the color Indian Summer in the Onyx Collection for special order to fit it in our small 48" opening.

Home Depot also had a good price on small mosaic tile by the square foot.  We went with the one on the right.  It has the dark blue from our curtains, the tan from our wall and the greys to neutralize it all and best of all some natural stone to make it look rustic.

After painting the sliding doors, I was happy I had.  It makes a big difference in the look of the room.  It also takes the 70's look out of the house, too.  I used the bronze spray paint to paint the door handles as well.  Nice touch. 

I did not want to paint the interior of the closet, but hunkered down and did it anyways.  I was afraid I would not have enough paint.  I wanted to make sure I had enough to finish the bathroom after installing the sink and back splash.

I reinstalled the light fixture after spraying the housing with Rust-oleum Oil Rubbed Bronze paint that make the lights look so much more pleasant that the stark white.  The vanity cabinets finally got their coat of Rustic Oak color to bring it into the future and out of the nasty white look it had.

Yep, this tile is a perfect fit for our colors in the bathroom and helps tie it to the rest of the room.

While going nuts with spraying all the hardware for the vanity in the Bronze spray paint, I also painted the blades on the ceiling fan.  It was a 80's Oak fan with chair caning  on the blades.  I liked the looked, but not the color.  The Bronze color was the look this room needed to make it more finished.

After all the doors for the vanity were painted, I installed all the hardware back on to get a feel of what it would look like with the bronze knobs.  Looking good!

The Original Yellow House.

For sixteen years of my life, I lived in this house and it was not originally yellow.  My mom and dad purchased this house in 1978.  The small 800 square foot house was her grandmother's on her dad's side and was built in the 1920s.   After 21 years of life that was held within its walls, it definitely left an impression on the five people that lived in it before we packed up and moved on July 4, 1999.

 My mom and dad took on the challenge to fix this diamond in the rough with a little help from my eldest brother, whom was just a toddler at the time.


One of the biggest things that a homeowner can do to make their house look and do better, is replace the roof.  Once Evan and I replaced ours, a since of security and ownership resided.


I am really glad my parents decided to go with yellow.  I can't see any other color that would do to make that house ours.

 The white trim and the sun-kissed yellow really made that house look loved and well cared for versus the run down gray and dark green shutters.  It says to you that it is a happy house and welcomes you to it with a smile.


I am amazed at my parents' hard work and how much they transformed that house.  They transformed it from the inside out, but I think they worked the outside first.  The upstairs was an apartment that was originally rented out and they used it to live in until they updated the entire first floor.  It was small and had a tiny cramped kitchen and bathroom.  That apartment upstairs was later used as my brother's bedroom and studio for my mom's artwork.





This past fall my cousin got married and invited Evan and I, along with my middle brother and mom, to her wedding.  We packed up our two dogs, my mom's dog and cat into a rented RV and headed over.  Once we got there we peeked by our old house and took a snap shot of it.  I was amazed to see that it was still yellow after 30 years!  Not to mention how tall those trees had gotten.  The two oak trees, the red on the left and the green one on the right, are from the set of Ernest Scared Stupid!  The green one has gotten so tall!  Unbelievable!

2008 Repairs -- Our Bedroom

One of our main priorities before we moved into our new home was to get our ugly, splotchy grey bedroom in shape so we could have a good place to lay our head at night. It was small and quaint with lots of light and plenty of room for our queen sized bed.

This first picture was taken when we viewed the house for the first time.






My original 'worry' of this room would be the fact that the room had a stretched out carpet and a circle outlined in the paint where I feared a tree limb had crashed through the roof and into the wall. The previous owner had the roof patched up with different colored shingles from where a tree limb had fallen and damaged the roof. I digress as I will most likely every time I talk about the previous owner and their lack of ownership when it came to taking care of this house. Upon removal of their stuff, bed namely, was a huge crack that went from the corner of the window all the way down to the floor. It runs about two and half feet across. Just another unsightly reminder of our underlying foundation issue.

So, off to Lowe's we went to pick up a few supplies for fixing up our new bedroom. Paint, brushes, buckets, joint compound, painters tape, plastic sheeting, rollers, and misc. other supplies to get our new room back into shape. We left the carpet down while we worked and started with a good patch up of all the pin holes, cracks and gashes in the walls. Along with that, we covered all the outlets, ceiling, vents and switches with the blue tape.

After looking at the outline on the wall where I originally thought a tree limb had pushed through the wall, I discovered that they did a poor job of patching it up, had turned out to be where a head board used to be. The color of the walls was a mixture of light grey and dark grey speckled or sponged on all over it. Not very pretty. I wish I had a close up of how disgustingly, ugly it was.

While living in our apartment still, we came to the house after work to get what we could done before we had to make the final move over to official homeowners. We pretty much had two months to get everything transferred over and fixed to livable standards.

While the compound dried and looked awesome and smooth enough to paint, we hit up the trim in a light cream with two coats. The ceiling had its coat of paint and made it look nice and white, too. Then we used primer to cover all that depressing grey and patchwork we just made. The room had been transformed. We felt a sense of great accomplishment when we painted over that last bit of greyness. It was so beautiful.

In the meantime, my head board I purchased at Office Depot was sitting in the living room awaiting its base to be made. This head board was actually a really nice hutch that was sold separately from the matching computer desk. Another customer didn't need the hutch and someone had mentioned it would make a great head board in their bedroom, but never bought it, so I swept it up for real cheap and stuffed it into my tiny ION. I spent more money on the supplies to get the base built, but was impressed with my idea and grateful for my mom and dad's help on making it happen.

When we picked out colors for our room, it was a design element we wanted for our apartment we were moving out of. The theme was Asian based off of my brother's two photographs he took in Korea during his first visit. Other additions to this style was the two lights we purchased at Target and the four hanging origami crane decorations I made from some similar ones we saw at a local shop in Brookside. The back wall is a darker green and the three other walls are a calm lighter green accented with the creamy white trim. We bought two sample paint tins and I tested them out and was so happy with the colors.

I was eager to get to the house straight from work and get the things we needed done.

Next, the doors of the closet came off to be painted. I believe it took three coats. I should have sanded and primed them before using the nicer paint up. The same happened with the inside of the door to the room. We left the outside facing the hallway natural to go with the rest of the doors in the hallway.

The closet was no fun task either. It was dirty and dark inside there. We went with the darker green to use it up, as the one wall did not use much of the gallon at all. It makes it look bigger too.


Once we got all the paint its second coat throughout the room, we took off all the blue tape. The room was really looking pretty sharp. Our hard work was paying off.


Plug and vent covers were screwed back on and our cool new window shades installed.

Evan worked on replacing the switch on the fan to get it working.




My dad showed up for the fourth of July and helped us get some cleaning done around the house.







He also helped rip up the carpet and finish fixing that fan. We didn't know what we were doing.

Our handy new shop vac was really good at picking up our trash.

Later my Mom and Dad came back and helped fix up the head board base and lighting so the touch sensor would be reachable in bed.

Once I finished sanding and staining the base to match up with the head board, we installed it after we had moved our stuff in and started decorating.

~~VOILA!~~

June 2008 - Our Small Yellow House

Evan and I purchased our first house. Yay!

We've known each other since November 1999. Our first date was under the stars at Smithville Lake viewing the Leonids the night before my midterm freshmen art school final. Got married in Gatlinburg on top of an Appalachian Mountain in 2003.


This small house needs loads of work. Being that it needs loads of work, we got it for a decent price. I still, to this day, think we could of gone lower on the deal. Alas, Evan assures me we got a good deal. So I try not to 'worry' on such a thing. Lots of 'worrying' commenced once we bought the house.


The A/C unit was from the '70s. We replaced it in the fall of '09 after trying to keep it going. I think the repair guy kicked the condenser too hard and killed it. Whatever. I am glad we replaced the old thing. It was ugly and loud.
The roof was worn out and needing replacing. The inspector gave us an estimate of 2-3 years left on it. HA! It leaked that winter and we replaced it in the spring of '09.
The windows were old and some cracked. The main window in the living room cracked majorly the first winter and had it replaced the following fall of '09 along with our two bathroom windows after freezing from the poor insulation that gave way to drafty bursts of cold air while taking a shower at 4am in freezing temps in the middle of winter.

After moving in, we discovered a lot of new cracks and settlement throughout. We had a thorough inspection and even had the guys come back to double check on things before buying. However and knowingly, we still bought the house with such great foundation problems. *Sigh.* Ambition and hope drove us to keep going with this great deal we stumbled upon. The market was lacking with buyers with the failing economy and the incentive to get a $7500 interest free loan from the government to help with some costs on fixing up the house, we pushed on. (It was used to pay for our roof and windows. We will be paying it off for the next 15 years. Thanks Bush. If we waited another year, we could have gotten the $8000 new homeowners credit and not have to pay the government back. Lame.)

The water heater's thermocouple went out in February of '10 and we spent the night at a Holiday Inn up the road for Valentine's Day to get ourselves a hot shower and bought us a new one from Home Depot, whom had a local heating and cooling repair place come and install it. Evan tried his darnedest to get that thing going again. Would have worked too if the stupid replacement had the right type of screws. They screwed on the opposite from the way the Whirlpool one went on. After too many COLD showers in the dead of winter at 4 am, it was time to replace it.

The previous owner had paid for foundation repairs to have piers set up to hold up the house in the settling clay. (This clay proves a nuisance throughout our gardening woes as well. Gotta love the Midwest.) It cost her $15,000. The process destroyed all the landscaping around the west side of the house from the front door to the south side where the fire place is located. It was all a pile of dirt. My dad helped level out the dirt and make it slope away from the house so that the water draining from the house would seep back into the foundation and cause more problems. He did a good job. He got the grass mowed and trimmed with our electric mower and weed eater. Cleaned out our garage and helped tear out the carpet in our bedroom. Installed a garage door lifter and grilled some awesome hamburgers for us. He was a great dad.

Here's a bit of back history on why we were so eager to move into our small yellow house.

This house sits at the end of a no outlet street of which three other houses share and a small church that sits across with a small lot of land next to it. A right of way for power lines sits on the north side with the Ford assembly plant. (It is not viewable, but a little aromatic for my taste on days they are painting the F150s and Escapes. Those days are far and few in between. And it is a bit noisy, but I've grown to adjust to it with it being more of a white noise calmer.) The neighbor's house behind is set back a bit so it is not directly behind us, but more behind our neighbor next door to us on the south side. His house practically sits 30 feet away from ours. Our house is our first true bit of solitary after living in the art school's dorm rooms and the three apartments we've moved from. All every bit annoying and rambunctious with noisy people. Let alone being within ear shot of some stranger peeing like they just drank a gallon of water while you are trying to sleep. Blah. Not to mention the all the La guaracha sabrosona music blasting and vibrating the floor below you while you try to watch a movie or read a book. AHHHH! It drove me mad. I was ready to move. No holding back. This house spoke to me to move in and we made it a point to make that happen.

I had my doubts. I didn't want to move in after all the inspections and warnings from my dad. I didn't want to fall prey to the housing industry and be broke and fall into foreclosure. Evan assured me once again and said it was ours and we were meant to be here. So July 31, 2008, I turned in our keys to our apartment and the house was officially ours. That same day, Evan was laid off from his job.

Evan got a temporary job in the fall of '08 and was later laid off again in the spring of '09. During which his mom got really sick in December '08. Her cancer came back and her treatment for it knocked her off her feet so to speak. He spent a lot of traveling back and forth to Shreveport to help out which worked out for being out of a job as he spent a month in Shreveport taking care of her. She passed away on July 4th of '09. At the same, my dad got really sick with cancer as well and only after fighting it for a year, he passed away in March '10. I spent a lot of time helping out with him as my mom did her craft shows in the summer of '09. Our first three years have been rough after our initial move in.

Don't get me wrong. It wasn't all bad. We had good times in between all that sucky, crappy, terrible time. Evan's brother got married in Las Vegas in August of '08. His sister got married in May of '09. His mom was able to go to both. We had our camping trips, fishing, festivals, our cute puppy dogs, and best of all our family. There was and still is to this day, Flannigan's Right Hook. If it wasn't for their music. I don't know how I would have gotten through all the hardship.

Some how we survived. We persisted. We moved on.