Weekend plans

Ed works four 10 hour days so we always get a 3 day weekend. It's good in some ways an sucks in others but it is our current reality. We have big plans for this weekend though! Friday is taken up by eye doctor appointments, my car going in the shop and a dentist and chiropractor appointment. In between Ed is planning to do some painting and prep for the new cabinets to go in the laundry room. I am excited!

Our weekend goals are:

• install cabinets in laundry room with under cabinet lighting
• prime and paint the powder room and entry from the garage
• replace the light fixtures we have either moved or gotten rid of

I know the list looks small but it's really a lot of work. If we have time we would also like to start adding the can lights to the classroom and run wiring for a 3 way switch in the dining room. Why there isn't one already is beyond me. 

There's not much for me to do really except stand around and be supportive so I will spend my time packing up the classroom and dining room because next weekend the new flooring goes down! Yahoo! I also plan to do some more research on the Keto Diet. Ed and I are both struggling with our weight (his tummy, my thighs) and I have heard great things about Keto. I am excited but I have to figure it out before we can start it. Tentative start date is February 1. 

Oh and I finally picked out and ORDERED lights for the kitchen island, over the kitchen table and even the front entry! I had picked some out on Wayfair.com but wanted to wait till closer to the time I needed them to order them and they are now out of stock. You'd think I would know better by now. If you find what you want buy it then and there. Although I have to say that I like the ones I did end up ordering better than the first ones I had picked out! lol Funny how that works but if I hadn't found any others I liked then I would have been in quite a pickle. That happened with the outside lights. I found what I wanted and by the time I went to buy them they were being discontinued and I couldn't find anything close to what I wanted. I bought what I could locally and ordered the rest from other stores to finally get all that I needed. What a pain that was. 

I will hopefully update with our new laundry room, powder room and garage entry next week. Fingers crossed it all works out! 

Thanks for stopping by! 

Chris

Another weekend of work

We actually had no plans to work over the weekend. It's funny how things just snowball with us. We decided to go pick up the cabinets for the laundry room that we were planning to do the end of the month. It would give us time to get them all together and such before we needed them. Well, one thing led to another and we ripped up the laundry room, powder room and entry from the garage. Everything came out and we went in with dry wall repair and paint. Ed also fixed the air leak at the electrical box in the laundry room. We actually had ice forming there due to the extremely cold temperatures we have been experiencing lately. And when it melted it ran down the wall. Not good. We do have plans to cover that box up so it's not such an eyesore. 

Before picture was from one of the listings when we bought the house. I forgot to take pictures before we ripped everything out. 

Here it is now. 

Do you see that pretty light? I talked Edward into letting me get the KRISTALLER light fixture from IKEA to put in the laundry room. It doesn't give off a lot of light but we are adding under cabinet lighting anyway. He thought I was nuts but it has definitely grown on him. I told him I wanted to have a "fancy" laundry room. lol It's not the biggest laundry area (more like a closet) so at least I can make it pretty. 

The laundry room is ready for the cabinets to go in this weekend. The powder room has been stripped of the wallpaper border that was put up by someone else. That stuff was a pain to get off. I scored it with the scoring tool and sprayed it down then scraped after 15 minutes then repeated. Yuck. And the paint colors are some kind of strange. No idea what was happening in this room with the paint, or throughout the rest of the house for that matter. 

This picture is also from the listing. Who thinks to take pics of rooms they don't like? lol I was so excited to rip that paper off I didn't even think about pictures. 

We found 3 paint colors in the powder room. Actually that occurred in a couple of the rooms on the main floor. No idea what was happening.

We are very happy with the way the living room came out with the new cabinets. I think the benefit vs. the effort was much greater than the original plan. If we had been able to do the original plan we would still be working on it and the house would be a bigger mess than it is. My dining room is now home to all of the stuff from the laundry room, powder room and entry from the garage. Ed took the dining room table apart and it's leaning on the wall behind the cabinets we will be installing this weekend but have yet to put together. 

One of the changes we are making to the laundry room is the door. It's a 32 inch door and it seems to take up so much of the room that we are going to change it to a 32 inch bifold door. It will make the room seem more open and actually give us a little more space for storing things like the vacuum. 

And to add more craziness to all of this? We ordered the flooring for our entire main floor and it will be here Saturday. We were waiting for it to go on sale and it did. It's 10% off plus Ed gets an additional 10% off using his military discount PLUS they are doing 11% back by rebate. Ed figured it was between 27% and 28% off total. That's a freakin' steal! When we bought the upstairs flooring it was 8% off plus military discount and we thought we had done well. I am so thankful for sales, discounts and rebates! Yay! 

We have a lot to work on over the next couple of weekends. Our daughter goes back to work from maternity leave on the 29th and I will be watching her 3 children aged 3 1/2, 15 months and newborn. Plus I am still homeschooling the boys so we have band, music lessons and ASL classes on top of our normal school work. Oh and I also have to do laundry and keep up the house! Luckily our other daughter is staying with us right now and can help out when needed. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

Living room: built in cabinets

So Ed did get the living room finished over the weekend. Well, a 4 day weekend. He is off on Fridays and took Monday off as well and spent most of the 4 days working on the living room. I am pleased with the way it came out! Here is a list of what was done, some of it was done the previous weekend and in the evening after work.

• Paint walls
• Paint ceiling
• Paint alcoves and shelves
• Paint crown molding
• Add can lights in ceiling
• Change out ceiling fan
• Change/add light switches to dimmers and fan control
• Put together and install four 24 inch base cabinets from IKEA 
• Put some shelving back in
• Make and trim out top for cabinets
• Put filler in for cabinets

BEFORE 

The paint colors made the room seem so much smaller. 

AFTER

The room is coming together quite nicely I think! 

Cabinets with shelving for storing games, puzzles and such. 

Cabinets with drawers to hold our numerous DVD's! I used the space under the bottom drawers to store other items such as the large Scrabble game and box set CD's. I moved the CD's from the entertainment center to the old DVD cabinet that looks like an old fashion card catalog. We will be replacing our entertainment center and furniture this summer. 

Here's the can lighting with the new ceiling fan. The old one was not our taste and had stopped working in clockwise direction anyway. 

Just look at that freshly painted ceiling! You can see where he stopped painting at the entry to the kitchen. I had no idea the ceiling was off white, not white. 

This I am excited about. I no longer have to stand on something or find a tall person to adjust the ceiling fan. 😉 I can also dim the lighting over the fireplace and the can lights that were just installed. Sometimes I want it really bright and sometimes I don't. I love dimmers! 

Here are the details:

• Two 24 inch base cabinets with shelves from IKEA with Bodbyn doors in off white
• Two 24 inch base cabinets with 3 interior drawers from IKEA with Bodbyn doors in off white
• Trim and filler pieces from IKEA in off white
• Reused shelving for top on cabinets and shelving above cabinets
• Wall paint Sherwin Williams eggshell color Accessible Beige 
• Trim paint Sherwin Williams trim and cabinet paint in Alabaster. It matches the IKEA cabinets perfectly. I was surprised because I chose the trim color before the cabinets! 
• Can lighting is from Lowes
• Fan is also from Lowes

We still have to pick out and install handles on the cabinet doors, paint the fireplace mantle, replace the tile on the fireplace surround, rip out carpet and put down Pergo to match the rest of the house,  paint the base trim and do touch up painting. Most of that won't be done until after the kitchen is done in May but we still have plenty to work on like painting the ceilings, remodeling the powder room and staining and installing treads on the stairs. Flooring will all be the same Pergo throughout the house so we will do that after everything else is done. Hopefully June. 

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris

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It's been a while...

Soooooo, I took an unintended break from the blog. Again. No, we didn't move again (Thank God!). Life just became overwhelming and I had little time to do much of anything for myself. We got through Thanksgiving, the birth of our 4th grandchild, Christmas and the New Year. Here we are January 3, 2018! I has been a whirlwind of shopping, babysitting, cleaning and trying to find my footing. Of course things are never dull around here. lol 

I had intended to post my outfits everyday and that didn't happen but I did keep track of them in my stylebook app. Here are my calendars for November and December. 

As you can see I am still loving and wearing my black leggings but I have added navy and gray to the rotation as well as a few new black ones. They are just so comfortable! 

Now that the holidays are over and we have put away the indoor Christmas decor we are ready to start the remodel on the main floor. Or so we thought. I spent a lot of time planning our living room remodel and I was so excited for it! We took our plan from IKEA's planner and went to the store and bought our cabinets. The plan was to use shallow cabinets in the area where we now have 4 alcoves on the left and right sides of the fireplace. That was the plan. Here's what it would have looked like. 

The plan was to have open shelves between the upper cabinets as well but the planner wouldn't let me add them because IKEA doesn't sell them. 

So off we go to IKEA to purchase our cabinets. It is snowing. It started around 3 pm pretty heavy. By the time we are headed out around 7 pm the roads are a mess. I mean a mess. We used the GPS to help us avoid traffic due to accidents and it kept redirecting us! What should have taken no more than 45 minutes took a little over 2 hours. What a night. 

We get home in one piece Friday night, with our cabinets. Saturday morning we get up and start demolition. Lucky for us Ed is a smart man. He slowly started taking the shelves out of the alcove and removed the wood that was hold the shelves up. He carefully put a hole in the wall between 2 alcoves and guess what he found. A gas line. Yep. A freaking gas line. I was worried there would be plumbing because there is a bathroom above the area but I never considered a gas line. Needless to say we covered all that back up and changed plans. 

We loaded up the shelves and took them back to IKEA. Have you ever returned anything to IKEA? It was a long wait but other than that it was quite easy. And the way IKEA does their cabinets everything is separate so we ended up returning 103 items which made up 10 cabinets with lighting. Then we headed to the kitchen area and put in an order for four 24 inch which 24 inch deep cabinets. We decided to just put a cabinet in each alcove and call it a day. Once they are trimmed out and we get the shelves up they will look pretty good I think. It isn't my original plan but it's going to work out well. The bright side is that it won't take us nearly as long to complete this way. Always find the silver lining. 

The goal is to have the living room painted and back together by the end of the month. Ed says sooner but we all know things happen. And they seem to happen more frequently around us!

Today we had a woman from Traemand, IKEA's kitchen planning and installation partner come measure the kitchen. She was an absolute delight to be around! The kitchen has been designed but I read that if you have the kitchen measured "officially" and there is a problem they are more willing to accept returns of products already opened. The fee wasn't much compared to the cost of a cabinet and will be refunded to us when we buy our cabinets anyway. She did all the hard work with measuring walls and things and sent it to me so now all I have to do is add my cabinets to it and send it back to her and she will make sure I got it right and didn't forget anything. As soon as IKEA starts their kitchen sale, which should be any time now, we will get up there and order our cabinets. We won't be gutting the kitchen until May but the sale only lasts so long and they only have it a few times a year. And 15% off is worth the little bit of extra effort. Plus we don't have to have the cabinets delivered until we are ready for them anyway. 

Now I am off to work on my kitchen plan. I will share that once I get the "official" version. 😉

Thanks for stopping by! 

Chris