Showing posts with label repairs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label repairs. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

2008 - Beautiful Stair Case Rugs.






While shopping at JOANN one day in 2008, my mom and I stumbled upon a book that had a picture of a stair case with really cool rugs covering up the tops of the steps.  Of course, for the sake of making the project more interesting, the stairs had some really beautiful wood work on the edge of the stairs that I wish I could incorporate as well.  Sigh.  The real reason of this post was the idea of having something to cover up our beat up natural wood stairs.  They are simple to make and with all my mom's yarn that she had lying around, it was a fairly inexpensive rehab for my worn out stairs.

My mom agreed to work on the project with me and knocked five of the six stairs out for me.  She finished them and I got really excited about them and installed them on the steps.  I stapled them for extra security.  As you can see, the top stair is bare.  I didn't finish it.  Ever.  Several months later, my mom took the project home and finished the last stair.  I got about half way and didn't finish it.  I don't remember why I never did.  I think I messed the color pattern up and got upset about it and gave up on it.


As you can see, the second step is worn and ugly.  The first step is not any better.  I love how the rugs cover all that up and make it look so homey.  I put them all on in hopes that I would be inspired to get it together and finish my ONE rug.



Unfortunately, it sat under the television set waiting to be completed.  This was late 2008 before it made it to my mom's house to get finished.  Mid 2009 is before I finally installed it with the rest.  My mom ALSO made a larger one to fit the top step where the "All Things Grow With Love" rug (also made by my mom), but sits and waits (to this day) to be glued and now fixed after someone (dog or cat) chewed the yarn in one spot.

It is so funny seeing this picture as I sat on the couch taking it.  The living room doesn't even look like this anymore.  I just bought a new camera that day and was testing the quality.  Silly me.  Otherwise, I would have never taken this picture.  Number one, it's messy.  Number two, the subject is boring.  However, I do think it's a good visual of what the house looked like in 2008 and today so to speak, cluttered and messy.


Sunday, January 8, 2012

2008 Repairs -- Our Bedroom



O
ne 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!~~