Snow Frog

Hi folks! We’ve done some redesigning of our bedroom. This is largely in response to us getting a new king size bed and mattress combo. I don’t know how we survived before this - I actually almost like going to bed now. You may not realize how significant that is - I have hated going to bed all my life, even before I started having insomnia all the time. Since I was little, I’ve felt that going to bed is like a punishment, that it’s the end of the fun. Well, it’s not such a punishment anymore!

For comparison, here’s the room before:

And here it is now. The bed is much bigger so we’ve had to be more creative with figuring out the bedside lighting and bedside tables. I also recently completed a major framing and hanging project such that the ‘finished’ rooms also have finished wall decor.

We’ve also moved a good number of ‘leisure’ books into the bedroom which actually works really well and makes these ‘leisure’ books more accessible to Matthew, who does 99% of the leisure reading in the house.

The other backbreaking and stressful project was bringing up the giant mirror that used to be above the mantel in the living room up from the basement (where it’s been in storage for over a year) to the bedroom. This side of the room is still somewhat unfinished - the ultimate plan is to frame the mirror and hang it on the wall. (Right now it is carefully secured with painters tape)

We decided to move our inexpensive arc lamp from the living room into the bedroom where it can serve as our bedside lighting. Matt got the extension cord with dimmer switch shown here so we can actually turn it on and off (and dim it… ) without jumping behind the headboard. Since this picture was taken, Matt has attached the dimmer switch behind the headboard.

In case one of us (Matt) wants to read while the other (Gaja) tries to sleep, we also got this cute little directional light that we can twist behind the headboard when we’re not using it.

That’s all for now!

We’ve been working on a number of larger projects for the past few weeks somewhat simultaneously, or rather alternating between them, and we should have some updates to post about them soon. In the middle of these several projects, our toilets broke again. We’ve had problems with them from the start (they wouldn’t flush, or rather stop flushing), but after Matt tried to fix them again, we were reduced to manually raising and lowering the valves inside the tank. After about two weeks of this, I couldn’t take it anymore: I had literally started avoiding drinking.

Since the toilets were so old, we would’ve had to order custom pieces to repair them and they still would’ve been old and inefficient. Did you know toilets use more water than any appliances in your home? So I checked how much toilets cost (not much), and I learned that installing toilets is supposed to be really easy. So we decided to take the plunge with our main bath toilet.  Other than some trouble removing the old toilet and leveling the new toilet because it turned out our floor wasn’t quite so level, it was really easy! If it hadn’t been for the unlevel floor, it would’ve taken only an hour to install the toilet.

Here are some shots of the process, starting with the before version of course:

Here’s what it looked like after we removed the original toilet. It was actually pretty tough to remove it - we had to smash the base of it. Matt insisted on putting a rag into the opening (a sham wow! actually), but surprisingly there really was no smell…

Here’s Matt practicing with the new toilet bowl:

And here he is putting it in its place:

And finally!

It was so easy, and the new toilet works and is super efficient, using less than a third of the water of the old one! So shortly afterwards we decided to replace the toilet in the half bath too. Actually, the night after we removed the old toilet and bought the new one, Matt couldn’t sleep and decided  to install the new toilet overnight to surprise me! What a nice surprise! I almost wish he had more trouble sleeping…

Here’s the before, which reminds me, the lid for the tank of the old one never fit correctly (how quickly we get used to improvements):

And here’s the new one:

Even Ginger was admiring it (not really, she heard something out the window):

We also changed the toilet-paper holder, which was too small to actually hold the toilet paper:

I can now honestly say that I am no longer avoiding fluids.

Hi everyone! Over the weekends of the past month and a half or so we’ve been busy working on our entryway. Having now at least partially set up  all the rooms we really use, we decided we should prioritize by prettifying the first thing people see when they come in.

I don’t have any images to show you what the area has looked like for the past year, but here’s what it looked like when we bought the house:

and here’s what it looked like after we ripped up the carpets (but before we had the floors done):

And here’s after the wallpaper came off. This is pretty close to what we’ve been living with for a year except for the floors. Yes, it’s quite a familiar view…

We’ve done a lot of stuff here (who knew you could spend so long on what is essentially a hallway?). We painted the walls. I got a little tired of the gobi desert in our living room and our bedroom so I convinced Matt to let me spice it up a bit (I’m not sure it’s legal to ever call beige ’spicy’ but Matt put some tight reigns on me…) by mixing gobi desert half and half with white. It’s barely noticeable, but at least I got to do something a little more interesting. So here it is:

There are a number a changes you can see in this image. The first one you may notice is the light fixture. I’ve been seeing this Ikea light everywhere in recent designs (in particular on apartment therapy) and it’s been slowly growing on me. Finally, I decided we needed some ‘drama’ in the entryway - so here it is.  It actually came with a regular wall plug so Matt bought a cover plate, cut off the cord, and wired it into the ceiling. You can see the new painted walls and trim. You can also see the anti-slip protection we added to the stairs for Ginger (cork drawer-liner material), who had previously been falling down the stairs nearly every day. Finally, you can see some things that are still unfinished, the front door and the unpainted stair rail thingies, but just ignore them, ok? Painting the stair trim and rises was very time-consuming, but I am proud to say that I am now fairly competent at painting edges without any tape.

Here’s a better view of the light and Matt’s handywork:

Matt has also been working on wiring up a new doorbell, which is surprisingly large. It is nice being able to hear when people are at the door though.  He also replaced the old thermostat, which made weird cricket noises constantly that I thought I would never get used to (but I did).

You may have noticed the interesting collage on the stair wall.  This is something I started working on when we visited my parents in June. I scanned, processed, and printed some family photos. Here’s a better view:

I’m kind of disappointed in it, but I’ve spent so long on it that I’m fed up and it’s just going to have to be this way for a while. It’s a family tree, at least my half. You can see me, Matt, and Ginger on the lower right. Each row is a generation, including all direct ancestors and their siblings (up to my grandparents generation). Parents are positioned roughly above their children, which coincidentally come in pairs in my family as a rule. Buying 22 frames can get expensive. I couldn’t find any decent frames in appropriate colors for a reasonable price. I found these on sale at (where else) ikea, but they also didn’t have an appropriate color, at least in stock. So I thought, ‘oh, it’ll be really easy just to spray paint them white’ and ‘it’s such a good price!’. Uh uh, not so much. My efforts spray painting them were a disaster (not sure why, maybe that particular can was faulty). Anyway, to make a long story short, I’ve been painting them white. I got tired of the painting and thought maybe a mixture of white and the original silver would look cool. Well, it doesn’t. It looked cool before I put the pictures/backing/glass in them (like an abstract sculpture), but now it just looks crazy crowded and weird. I guess I will take them down at some point and maybe finish painting them white, but I’m sick of them right now.

Moving on to something more positive, here’s a different view:

and one more:

It’s our new shoe cabinet! I’m not sure it’s coming across in the photos, but we’re very exciting about how it fits in this spot, it looks like it’s meant to be there. It clears up much needed floor space in the entry closet, and gives a very useful surface. Yay.

Last weekend we got an amazing deal on two pieces of mid-century modern furniture at a local consignment store. We didn’t get a chance to rent a pick-up truck and pick them up until yesterday. Matt suggested putting the china cabinet into the living room temporarily since putting it in the dining room would just get in the way of our planned renovations there.

However, as soon as we put in down in the living room, everything fell into place. It looked so good there! That warm wood warmed up and charmed up the whole living room! So I spent a little time rearranging the living room to accommodate the new piece at least for now (… or maybe forever … we’ll see).  And by the way, Matt wants me to add, I didn’t want to buy this piece because it doesn’t actually go with our beautiful but very chunky and rectangular dining table. But he convinced me that we couldn’t pass up the bargain - both pieces for $60!

Here it is:

It has sliding glass doors so that’s why you see reflections. And here’s the view of the rearranged living room facing the entryway (which by the way is under serious renovation right now):

and facing the backyard:

I agreed to buy it after I realized I could use it in my office once it’s remodeled. But at the rate that project is going, it’s probably going to be in the living room for a while.

The second piece we got will actually go in the dining room - it’s a buffet table with a ton of drawers:

Most of it appears to be made of wood (definitely the drawers) though the top is pretty clearly laminate, which I’m not crazy about. That’s ok though, since I have plans to eventually paint the frame/top/sides a smooth white and leave the drawers wood. This idea is inspired by (though inverted from) the new Delano crate and barrel sideboard:

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/family.aspx?c=14259&f=33150

What do you think - will it look cool or weird having wood drawers and everything else white?

I don’t think we’ve posted anything about our bedroom! Kitchen, living room, bathroom, yes, but no bedroom. I’m not sure what accounts for this omission, but I am about to correct it.  First, of course, I need to show you the original room when we bought it:

Here it was back in March. There’s been a few minor changes since then, but it’s basically the same right now. It’s been painted for a while (the same color as the living room). It took us a while to realize that the best furniture layout was with the bed diagonally like this. It’s pretty hard to arrange the bed due to the ridiculously-placed closet (I mean, come on! do people just make design decisions without putting any thought into it at all!??? Why in the world would you take up half of the long wall with a huge extruding closet? It just boggles my mind…) and the radiators. We got a new light fixture, which you can sort of see in this picture. Also, one winter evening, against Matt’s better judgement, I spontaneously decided to spray paint our old tall, pine dresser red, which had previously been destined for garage sale, or more likely, donation. It was dark and really cold, but I was not to be stopped. And I think it looks pretty cool for a couple hours of work, don’t you?

Our main dresser is here. Things look a little different now since we got our 52″ tv for the basement. The old 19″ is now in our bedroom, and this one you see below has been decommissioned.

The other thing we did in the bedroom was the closet doors for the large closet. There were several layers of wallpaper on the original doors. Wallpaper was not meant to be taken off (unfinished) wood, especially in several layers! It was just impossible. So we removed the doors. For a while, I tried to find replacement bifold doors. But it turned out that the closet doors were a custom size, and it wasn’t worth it to buy custom doors (at least not at that point, with so many other projects). But after a few months, I got really sick of seeing all the clothes in the closets all the time. At the time, here’s what it looked like (we had also installed new closets systems in two of the closets to maximize storage space):

So one weekend when I couldn’t stand the cluttered sight of all the clothes any longer, I got the crazy idea to make a padded, fabric covering for the original doors. So that’s what I did! I found some silky fabric that was very close to the wall color - that was not my first choice at the time, but now I’m glad it’s a neutral color so I can be free to change other colors around. Here’s what they look like.

I don’t know how long we’ll keep them like this, but for now, they’re much better than no doors!