RENO WEEK 2.2

THURSDAY: Dinner with the Holtgrewe's! Since we were somewhat "kitchen-less" they invited us over for enchiladas and margs! Let me say they were both phenomenal. Recipe for those enchiladas is needed ASAP :)

FRIDAY: Dinner out with Murph's college friends. We hadn't been able to have a kid-less night out with the Moh's and Carder's for months so we hit up Centro and El Bait Shop for some fun. We got home just before midnight and were exhausted. Lame, I know!

SATURDAY: Back to reno work it was. We got the cabinet bases painted 2 more times and called it good. They finally are a nice clean milky white color and I think we are both happy to be done with that job! We also got the house back to "normal". Since the flooring is not going to be here for another month we knew we had to get some functionality back and moved all of the furniture back to it's (somewhat) original place, picked up spare tools and paint, and did a general clean up. It's nice to have things back to where they should be! We also got the desk/vanity delivered and got it mostly assembled. However, I noticed a piece is backwards so we will be taking that apart at some point to fix. I also am considering distressing it a bit since it has already chipped. What can I say you pay $100 for a desk, you get a $100 desk.

Bases are done, AMEN!

SUNDAY: Reload the kitchen cabinets and catch up on house work day. We moved the majority of our kitchen things back to the door-less cabinets and attacked the piles of laundry that had accumulated over the last week and a half. I had to bar-tend at Hoyt for the evening but made sure to help Murph set up our sanding station in the front room. We decided to control the mess from the cabinet doors and drawer fronts we would tarp off a portion of our front room, so while I kept concert goers refreshed, Murph got to work on the drawer fronts.

That pretty much wraps up reno week 2. This week will be an assault on the rest of the cabinets, I hope to be painting this weekend!

RENO WEEK 2.1

In an effort to put up something shorter in nature I am breaking this week into smaller updates :)

TUESDAY: Murph got to work on removing the carpet and remaining trim in our family room and Nic was super sweet and brought us over some seriously delicious lasagna and salad. What a blessing! It was nice to catch up and enjoy some good eats. We also got some news from NFM regarding our flooring and now install won't happen until the last week in February. BUMMER! But this will allow us to fully finish our cabinet and drawer fronts before the flooring goes in, and I won't have to vacuum for the next few weeks ;)

WEDNESDAY: We tackled getting another coat of paint on the cabinets and they really started looking the creamy white we were envisioning. I was afraid it was going to take 5 coats at the rate the paint was covering (the idea is thin and smooth) but 1 or 2 more should do it. It is actually going on super smooth and I'm hoping the fronts go just as nice!

Coat 2 is up!

We won't be doing much on Thursday or Friday since we have dinner plans both nights but hopefully we will wrap up the base cabinet painting and get the kitchen somewhat back to functional over the weekend. And then the real challenge begins with the rest of the cabinet painting!

We've also decided on a new bathroom vanity that we are going to assemble ourselves. I was not super impressed with anything we were finding in stock merchandise at the big box stores so taking this post from YHL as inspiration we have decided to use a desk vs. a nightstand and retrofit it to meet our needs.

Nightstand turned vanity at YHL

We originally were going to stick with a pedestal sink but decided a little storage and counter space would be a good idea. So after scouring the internet we landed on an black writing desk and rectangle ceramic sink with bronze faucet, that will be only slightly smaller than the vanity we had in there originally.

Our new vanity, sans computer of course

This vessel sink won't be as dirty looking as the old one, and has that "farm" style I love,
not to mention a new ORB faucet!

There are several reasons we chose this setup:

• The original vanity was too standard for our (my) taste, had been painted, and was ugly, with an ugly counter top and terrible sea glass vessel sink. Like most of the original finishes it didn't match the style of our home.
• Since the bathroom is on an exterior wall our water lines come up through the floor and that cannot be changed so we needed something that would be easy to install around those water lines. I am almost positive the original cabinet was put in first and then the plumbing was run through it, we needed something simple.
• The drawer will be cut down on the inside to still function and hold any little things we need there in the future.
• The shelf is going to be flipped and will be at the front instead of the back allowing us to cover our exposed water lines with a basket and give us another little storage spot.
• We will be installing a chrome plated drain as well so the plumbing won't look cheap
• Making something ourselves is cheaper than getting something from a big box store. Most of the vanities we liked ran around $250-$300 just for the base, not including the sink or faucet, and we grabbed all three on Overstock.com for just under $350 after free shipping and a 10% off code saving us well over $50.

I'm sure this will be a somewhat challenging project for us, and I know it's not something everyone will love but I am excited to see a "custom" project in our house!

Eventually we will replace the ivory toilet with a white one and add some other accessories, I'm thinking of a making a mirror similar to this one, but that will be a ways down the road! Until then we will keep our focus on the basics, like how the heck we will assemble this crazy sink idea :)

RENO WEEK 1

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD! :)

Well we are officially into week one of our reno and what a week it has been! Here is a little timeline of what we did this past week:

MONDAY: We began the tear out and demo of flooring in our kitchen, bathroom and entry way. We removed the trim and baseboards and found that the linoleum was not adhered down but simply held in place by the quarter round trim. No wonder it was peeling up in a few places! So that was easy and we contemplated leaving this beauty down, but decided against it :)

Hello Beautiful!

TUESDAY: We were measured by a pro, Floyd. He laser measured our entire first floor, showed me some pictures on his phone of a tree falling on his cars in the snowstorm we had before Christmas and was overall pretty entertaining and very helpful. Floyd let us know we had a 1/4" layer of plywood under our linoleum that would need to come up to level the floors, that left me a little freaked out. If that stuff was glued down we would have some serious work to do! That night while I went to yoga, Murph dove into getting the subfloor up and thankfully a crowbar did the trick. The 1/4" plywood came up fairly smoothly leaving behind 100's of staples needing to be hammered back into the sub floor. This is where the work got dirty and we were ill prepared. While we had cleared a few things out we had no idea how messy this would be. When all was said and done our entire 1st floor was COVERED in dust. Old, smelly, dust. That's right, the couches, everything on our counters, us, Willy ... EVERYTHING. Lesson learned, empty out the rooms or do better prep work. Oh well, thank goodness our Dyson had it covered!

WEDNESDAY: Murph got right to work when he got home and continued the subfloor demo. We found that we would have to figure out a way to clean up the flooring at the base of the cabinets since the subfloor runs under them. We called it an early night and met up with the Holtgrewe's and Keraus' for some BBQ and discussion of Lance Armstrong.

THURSDAY: I had dinner with some high school girlfriends and my fearless husband kept trucking on the flooring and got everything pulled up. He also got the sink in the bathroom out and the top of the vanity. I did manage to begin chiseling on the subflooring next to the cabinets, this was going to be a tedious process I could see already. I also made an appointment to get a plumber in to look at installing a pedestal sink in our bathroom. Along with the chisels I brought home a Bagster dumpster, since we had no idea what to do with the mess accumulating in our house!

The Bagster in action!

FRIDAY: I met with the plumber and talked about moving our water lines to accommodate a pedestal sink. Murph also had heard on Pandora Home Depot was offering whole home instillation on laminate and engineered hardwood for only $397 so we made a trip there and back to Lumber Liquidators to make sure we were getting the best deal possible and to investigate upgrading the flooring to an engineered hardwood. We were almost sold on an engineered hardwood until the guy at both places poo pooed that idea. They said having a large dog and eventually kids would destroy the floors and we would be unhappy. Since we are doing the entire first floor and not just the kitchen they both STRONGLY advised us to stick with the laminate. We took our samples home and decided that Nebraska Furniture Mart still was giving us the best deal. I also spoke with NFM on the phone and tried to negotiate our price. We had run into a little issue where they told us the price on the floor when we put the deposit down was not correct and they would have to charge us more. On Friday I got them to meet us 1/2 way and our price was now $1.79 / sq. ft vs. the advertised $1.59. That night we continued to chip away at the subfloor near the cabinets and vacuumed and vacuumed the subfloor some more.

Subfloor is out, cabinets are ready for a facelift!

Our general contractor "hard at work"

SATURDAY: With all of our subflooring out we could now tackle the cabinets. Like I mentioned before they are getting painted and would need some prepping. We finally emptied out the cupboards, keeping only a few necessities out. We took off all of the doors and hinges and removed the drawers labeling them all so we knew where they would go back after painting. At this point I had a haircut and left Murph to sand away on all of the bases and uppers. When I got back Murph had 1 round of sanding done and I attacked round 2. Sanding created another mess, people who do this without emptying their cabinets are bat-shit-crazy, it was filthy and we washed the cabinets down no less than 4 times throughout the day. We also filled any dings and cracks with wood putty and applied a couple coats of deglosser to insure we had the shiny finish completely removed. The deglosser directions told us to get our coat of primer up within the hour so we wrapped up the day by applying a coat of primer to the cabinet bases. At this point we were pooped and called it a night.

Primed!

SUNDAY: We got up and went to 7:45 church so we could keep at the cabinets. But first it was time to get our Bagster set up and get some junk out of the house, the dust/dirt smell was so gross! We hauled out all of the subflooring, trim and baseboards. We set to work on the living room and completely emptied it, including all of that antique glass we just put away in there haha. Up came the carpet and the padding, more staple removing and a good scubdown of the painted subfloor since the previous owners pet's let behind some undesirable stains (ICK!). Since the "dirty work" was done I vacuummed all of the furniture down and we took a nap. After some video chatting with my family and a tour of the demo Murph headed out for a volleyball game and I set to getting the first coat of paint up on the cabinets. While Murph was out the Holtgrewe's made a very sweet cupcake delivery and I was so pumped to see 4 Sprinkles red velvet cupcakes hand crafted by them ;) When Murph got home I was about 1/2 done with the first coat so he took to removing our old bathroom vanity and began pulling our doors and door frames out since we decided now is the time to replace them with some better doors. I also fielded another call from NFM regarding the flooring and succeeded in getting them down to the posted price of $1.59 / sq. ft. on the flooring! It was a little work, and a lot of calm negotiation (not my strong suit) but we got the posted price and are happy with our bid of about $3,000 for all of the flooring, sound padding and instillation of about 727 sq. feet of beautiful handscraped laminate!

Coat 1 of "Cow's Milk" is up!

MONDAY: I got the bid for the plumber's work and about fell out of my chair with the near $1K pricetag. I began thinking of new and creative ways to accommodate a new sink in this little powder room. Here are some initial ideas of how we might be able to do a sink without moving our water lines or caring they are exposed: 

Love the towel rack, wire baskets and vintage table look

Thinking of a creamy white vessel sink and just a little counter space

We actually ended up taking Monday night off. We needed a night to relax and become re-engaged with our DVR haha. So after a week that's where the reno is, back to painting tonight and getting the carpet up and out of our family room! Stay tuned!

2013 HOME PLANS

Well clearly 2012 was a big year of small changes at Hawthorn Drive, and we aren't slowing down in 2013! When I first met Greg he was on to me. As we sat in his kitchen one night after only dating a couple of months he caught me longingly looking around his kitchen and said, "oh the things I could do in here!". Needless to say I was thoroughly embarrassed but he was right, I was already dreaming about renovating his kitchen. I told him how I thought white cabinets, white trim and wood floors would look. He laughed at me stating his distaste for rooms that are "too white". Fast forward two years and a marriage later and guess what those dreams are coming true!

Hawthorn Drive is your typical builder grade 1990's home, chock FULL of GOLDEN OAK! Gag me. Now don't get me wrong, I love natural wood, if it's done right, but the golden oak in our house is leaving lots to be desired. We also have a very open floor plan with essentially no doors between our rooms on the first floor. However, we have 3 types of flooring, frieze, linoleum and berber. The frieze is in the best shape of them all but it's still nothing to write home about, the linoleum has pulled up in several corners and the berber, well it's berber and a pet hair magnet. Now Murph and I had initially decided to wait on the floors but one day last week he thought we should just see what was out there, so we casually began looking. After a few stops we stumbled into Nebraska Furniture Mart (which does not sell furniture at their Clive location) and found a deal to end all deals. While we lusted aft $13/sq. ft. hardwoods we saw something unbelievable. A handscraped dark laminate marked down to $1.59/sq. ft. Um what?! Were we seeing this correctly? And the answer was yes! After speaking with the staff and taking some quick measurements and home we found they had exactly enough left in stock to cover our ENTIRE first floor. So that's what we are doing!

They have come to measure and Murph and I are beginning the demolition process as he also agreed there would be too much "wood" if we left the golden oak cabinets, so I get to paint those a creamy white color now too. So here is the plan for what I am guessing will take us at least a month:

- Demo floors. This means rip out carpet, linoleum (which we found was not even glued down, just held in place by the quarter round trim) and kitchen subfloor to create a level surface for the installers.
- Remove all of our furniture (I think we will have a full basement and garage)
- Paint cabinets
- Have floors installed. We thought about doing this ourselves but the price was too good to say no to, plus since this is our entire first floor, we thought the pros would wrap the job up faster and we would save our marriage by not doing it ourselves hehe.
- Install new vanity and toilet in bathroom. Buh bye nasty ivory and weird vessel sink, hello something crisp and white
-  Install all new baseboards and quarter round. We are going to white trim too!
- Paint existing door casings, doors and window frames. These will eventually get replaced when we need new windows, that day is not today.

Of course it would have made more sense to do this before we painted but we weren't planning on doing this reno so quickly. Can't wait to continue to share our process with you all! And maybe we will actually take a break after this project ... or not ;)

2012 HOME PROJECT LIST

Since I moved in to Hawthorn Drive I have made it my personal mission to nest on a budget with Murph. He was very understanding when I told him it was hard to feel at home in a home that was his, not mine so we have worked over so much in the last 7 months. Here's a breakdown, well of what I can remember anyway

Laundry Room
- Wall paint, shelf paint and ceiling paint
- Storage baskets and other accessories
- Light fixture
- Spray paint floor grates, hanging bar, and wall fixture
- Outlet covers

Guest Bedroom 1
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- Bedding
- Outlet covers

Guest Bathroom
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- Spray paint light fixtures and floor grates
- Caulk
- Towel bars and shower curtain rod
- Shower curtain, towels, rug, frames and prints
- Outlet covers

Master Bedroom
- Furniture
- Light fixture and ceiling fan
- Bedding x 2
- Wall art

Master Bathroom
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- Spray paint light fixtures and floor grates
- Caulk
- Towel bars and shower curtain rod
- Shelves above toilet and storage baskets
- Shower curtain, towels, rug
- Outlet covers

Living Room
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- Spray paint return grate
- Side table
- Buffet, filled with antique glass
- Lamp
- Frames and photos
- Outlet covers

Kitchen
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- 2 Light fixtures
- Kitchen table
- Spray paint light fixture

Family Room
- Wall paint and ceiling paint
- Fireplace mantle painted
- Light fixtures spray painted
- New ceiling fan/overhead light
- Outlet covers

Powder Room
- Wall paint, ceiling paint, trim paint

Phew that was a lot more than I expected to type! We are in the ongoing process of converting all of the light fixtures to oil rubbed bronze finishes, (only 4 to go!) and making all of our switches and outlets white as the owners changed most on the 1st floor and nothing upstairs, or anything hidden. We are also spraying all of the floor grates and air returns oil rubbed bronze as we go (what can I say I am a sucker for all matching fixtures ... in ORB!). I will eventually show photos, I know I say it all the time, but I will! What an amazing transformation Hawthorn Drive is going through a few hundred dollars at a time :)

2012 HIGHLIGHT REEL

Well, this past year was a busy one but was pretty quiet at the same time. I think that wedding planning/showers/honeymooning took up the majority of the beginning of the year so we tried to cool it down after we got into June. Here are some of my favorite highlights of the past year, and decidedly the best one yet ;)

January - Winter volleyball and wedding planning were about the only things going on, it was the quiet before the storm!

February - I took another new job. Although I was glad to be back into the design field I took a move that would be more beneficial to my work/life/drive/cash-flow balance and began as an assistant to an attorney in downtown DSM. Although this is not a huge push for me mentally I am usually content, so I consider it still to be a positive move!

March - We took off to Omaha for a friends wedding and experienced 80 degree weather, it was amazing! I also had my first bridal shower hosted by wonderful friends in Lake City. I think this is when my emotions started going crazy, as I began to realize just how many people were supporting Murph and I.

April - Welcome to crazy town! We were in KC for Easter, had a shower in Clarion with Murph's family, had my bachelorette party (where I latched onto a serious cold that seemed to last forever!), went to the Drake relays and made our final wedding arrangements back home. Talk about burnout! The last weekend in April marked our 7th weekend in a row being busy, 5 of them were on the road, I am sure I had told Murph to meet me at the courthouse over lunch no less than 10 times at this point!

May - The start of summer volleyball, Murph's bachelor party and a quick trip to LC and a trip to Ledge's where we got engaged took up the first of the month while our wedding day was the 26th and we left for Jamaica on the 28th for a week! By far the best days of my life, I am still looking at our pictures remembering how great those days were. I am glad we have pictures because I certainly don't remember much else about that day, it went too quick!

June - June was pretty quiet, and we liked it that way. We began putting our house together, went to a concert with friends, celebrated birthdays and I went to and 80's bachelorette party for another friend of ours getting married in July. I also officially moved out of the townhome and helped Nic get settled into her new digs, a very bittersweet day indeed.

July - We went to BrewFest at Principal Park, took our 2nd trip to KC and hit up Schlitterbahn with Murph's brothers for the 2nd year in a row and watched our good friends Kyle and Sarah tie the knot. Murph also turned 33! The weather was so hot and volleyball was miserable but we survived thanks to a few cold er warm pitchers of beer.

August - Our annual Booze Cruise birthday bash for Nic and I started the month off right eventhough the weather was terrible (seriously one of the 2 weekends it rained all year). We got some new furniture, hit of the fair for my birthday, I turned 28 and we participated in one of my favorite events of the year Resturant Week! The dinner at Alba was fantastic per usual. We also played in a charity volleyball tournament (it also rained that day) and wrapped up the longest summer of volleyball to date.

September - Iowa Hawkeye football dominated September as they had a home game each weekend except Labor Day which we spent in Clarion.

October - We ran the Color Run with friends and began taking a class at our church called Financial Peace and got our finances in order. I NEVER thought I could live on a budget, but each month gets better and better, and the best part? We rarely ever argue about money! It was absolutely worth the time and effort! We also went to Les Mis at the Civic Center and Murph also kicked butt and ran a 1/2 marathon. We finished out the month with  our 3rd and final trip to KC to see the mini-Murph's and came home sick. It took me over 3 weeks to shake!

November - We finished up our finanical class mid month and Iowa's terrible football season came to an end.  We both took some time off over Thanksgiving to paint the entire first floor of our house and spent time in LC and Clarion and began hibernating! We also hosted a dinner for high school friends at the house which was a lot of fun.

December - It was another quiet month but we managed to attend the Hy-Vee Big 4 Classic to watch Iowa, ISU, UNI and Drake play. We spent a couple days in both LC and Clarion over the holiday's and were again easily reminded of how many people love us. We said a sad goodbye to Murph's little brother shortly after Christmas as he headed to Germany where he will be studying / interning until August. While we are overjoyed with this amazing opportunity he has taken we are also sad knowing we won't see him for the next 8 months.

Clearly 2012 was a great year filled with love and unforgettable memories. Murph and I are beyond blessed and can't wait to see what 2013 has in store!