There's nothing better than character in a house. Old houses are unique and tell a story, and my goal is to make our new house look anything but new. I think the pantry door and transom accomplish that goal pretty well.
I bought the door from the antiques fair in Round Top a few years ago (not the failure of a trip I blogged about, but a previous one) and paid $80 for it. Even though the green on my cabinets and the green on the door don’t match (or maybe because they don't) it works …
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The Most Organized Pantry in the World
Okay, that title might be a biiit of a stretch, but either way...the pantry is complete! I posted the first part of the pantry redo months ago, and even though we finished a majority of it soon after I refused to post it until it was 100% complete. Adam and have a problem of only finishing things 90% of the way and moving onto the next project (I even wrote a post about it years ago) and I’m breaking the cycle.
So as a refresher, here was the before...
(Yes, my house is messy. It’s …
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Planning and Building a Pantry (Part I)
A few months ago Adam and I finished our master closet, which became the first finished room in the house. It was so organized and amazing that we decided to skip some of the bigger projects we had planned and instead pick another tiny room and finish it 100%. We debated doing a bathroom, the office, or the pantry, and eventually landed on the pantry.
The pantry is 3 ft by 7 ft and is situated under the stairs, which means one of the walls is shorter than the other. It’s a tiny little …
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Master Closet Reveal!
It’s master closet reveal day! I showed y’all the fully installed but empty closet over two months ago, then I had a baby, the holidays came, things got crazy, and the final reveal has been a long time coming.
First and foremost, I am so in love with it. I’m not usually one to gush over things, but I’m also not used to awesome organized spaces. It’s always a goal of mine, but it never really fully happens. Not only is the closet really pretty to look at, but it’s also extremely …
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Planning and Installing a Closet System
*This post is sponsored by EasyClosets...and by that I mean that I received the closet system for free in exchange for blog posts about the closet and my experience. All thoughts and opinions are 100% my own.*
When we bought our last house, the master closet had a single rod and shelf around the whole thing. From day one we planned to rip out that rod and build an actual closet system that utilized the space and gave us the storage we needed. A couple of months ago we sold our house after …
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The Search for a Vintage Farmhouse Sink
From the time I started sketching up our new house on graph paper nearly two years ago, I knew I wanted a vintage farmhouse sink for the kitchen. Not a modern apron front farmhouse sink that are popular today, but an antique one from the 20’s or 30’s. Those weren’t my only demands though, no...I also wanted it to have a single basin, high back, and double drainboards. I was basically searching for a needle in a haystack....a very expensive needle, as it turns out.
SOURCE - $2,695.00 + …
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Kitchen Progress – Dark green cabinets, a rustic wood countertop, and lighting
Last time I did an overall kitchen update we had just installed the cabinets and it looked like this....
Well now we have not only moved in, but I’ve painted the cabinets, we poured our concrete countertops, added a wood island top, bought appliances, and installed our island lighting.
First thing first, the cabinet color. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how I went from wanting a light airy green to something dark and dramatic, and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased …
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A Corrugated Metal Ceiling
I know I keep talking about the hailstorm that hit earlier this year, but that dang hailstorm seems to have led to a lot of other things...like rustic beams instead of fake ones, a quick sale of our old house, and now a practically free metal ceiling in our living room.
Since day one Adam and I have planned to put a metal ceiling on the living room and master bedroom of our house. We have always loved the look, and we were so sure about it that we even had the sheetrock crew leave the ceiling …
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DIY Concrete Countertops, Part III – Sealing
If I’ve learned anything about DIY in the last 5.5 years of writing this blog, it’s that it’s all about the sealer. You could do the most awesome job ever on a project, and if you don’t seal it correctly it’s all for naught.
I knew I needed an amazing sealer for my concrete countertops, for three reasons....
Concrete is a porous material, so it’s susceptible to stains
Not only are our countertops concrete, but they are also white
I’m messy
So even though Z Counterform sent …
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DIY Concrete Countertops, Part II – The Pour
*Thank you to Z Counterform for sponsoring this post.
Alright, here it is...part II of my concrete countertop series! I know a lot of you have been patiently waiting for this post and I’m excited to share all the details. (Read part 1 here if you haven’t already.)
Before we get started on the tutorial, let me just tell you that neither Adam or I have ever worked with concrete, we are truly newbies at this. We spent a ton of time watching videos and reading tutorials online, but had no …
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DIY Concrete Countertops, Part I- Setting the Forms
Well, we did it...we actually poured our own concrete countertops! Adam and I spent hours and hours (and hours) researching this before we did it. We read tutorials and watched YouTube videos and generally felt prepared and confident...but honestly, the process still didn’t go quite like we thought it would. Turns out no amount of research or reading can compare to actually getting your hands dirty. I already knew that...but now I know it better.
There are a lot of steps and information to …
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House Regrets, Second Chances, and Glorious Glorious Beams
I have a story for y’all. It’s a story about regret, catastrophe, and despair. A story about second chances, a story about hope, and redemption.
It’s a story about beams. Glorious Glorious beams.
So a couple of months ago our area was hit by a series of massive hailstorms. The kind of hailstorms that hit hard and fast at 3am, bringing baseball sized hail to pelt your house and terrify your children. The kind that slams into your roof, breaks your windows, turns your car into a golf ball, …
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Installed Cabinets
Happy Fourth of July everyone! I was scrolling through Facebook today and looking at all the festive pictures and memes, and interspersed between and the red white and blue was this gem...
It made me laugh out loud...so I had to share, of course.
Anyway, in the last post I left you with a trailer full of cabinets...
and an empty kitchen.
Then one day this happened...
And now we have the beginning of a kitchen!
So, would you like a quick tour?
First up we …
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Cabinet Beginnings
One of the main ways we are saving huge amounts of money on the kitchen is by building our own cabinets. Way back when Adam and I were dating (as teenagers about 14 years ago) his family ran a custom cabinet shop. They built the cabinets themselves, which means that my handy husband isn’t new to this whole cabinet building thing. We got a quote for cabinets anyway (just to make sure building our own was worth the time and effort) and it came back around 10K. So far Adam has built and installed …
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Designing a Kitchen
Alright, it’s time to start talking about the kitchen in the new house. We’re moving in just over a month, (because we sold our old house! In a day! More on that later) and in order to move in we need a functioning kitchen. As a reminder, here is what the kitchen looks like in the blueprints....
Actually, here is the complete floorplan so you can see how the kitchen relates to the rest of the house.
As you can see, it is really really open. Which means not only does the …
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Painted Interior – Sherwin Williams Silvermist & Shoji White
A couple of months ago (how has it been that long already?) I wrote a post about choosing interior paint colors for our new home.
All those vertical paint samples above were the contenders, with the top white stripe being the trim color (SW Alabaster) and the green stripe being the kitchen cabinet color (SW Herbal Wash, but I later changed it to something even bolder).
In the end, Sherwin Williams Shoji White was the winner. I liked that it was white without being too blinding, and it …
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Interior Limestone
When designing and planning this house Adam and I knew we wanted a lot of rustic features inside our home. Metal ceilings, antique beams, shiplap siding, brick flooring, rock walls, and rustic wood ceilings and floors were all things we wanted to incorporate in one way or another. We particularity wanted an entire rock wall on one of the walls in the main living space. After finalizing our blueprints we were like “We’re going to put the rock wall HERE. Okay, no... here? Well, that won’t …
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Grout mistakes and installed bathroom tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Last month I shared with y’all the process of picking tile for our kids bathroom, and I’m happy to say that it's all installed, and we are that much closer to having a livable house! As a reminder, here is the tile we picked - a brushed marble tile for the floor, a tumbled marble subway tile for the shower walls, and a linear blue glass for the backside of the niches (all from Floor & Decor).
Originally Adam and I had planned …
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Choosing Interior Paint Colors
I don’t think anyone here would disagree with me if I said choosing paint colors is HARD. There are just so many options, and they usually look very different on the wall than they do on a little paint chip. Saying you're “just going to paint it a neutral color” doesn’t make things any easier either...even though it may sound like giving up. Neutrals are hard to choose because their undertones are all over the place and they change so much from house to house, room to room, and even depending on …
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Texture and Primer
For a long time I was doing really great at keeping up with blogging about progress on the house, but I’ve since fallen a bit behind. I’m going to do my best to catch up though, and today we have a thrilling post about texture and primer (which actually happened about two months ago).
So the last time I updated y’all on the inside of the house it had just been drywalled.
The next step was texture. I know that texture is very different based on where you live, and around here walls …
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Boys Bathroom Tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Alright, so it’s time to start diving into all the finish selections for the inside of the house. Up until now we have concentrated on exterior stuff, but the exterior is almost finished and so is the builder... which means that Adam and I have a whoooole lot of work to do in a relatively short amount of time. (We’re only having the builder build the “shell” of the home and are doing most the interior work ourselves). We have a lot to …
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