New Bedroom Carpet

It's been quite awhile since I made many updates at my house. Most of them happened within a couple years of me buying it. 

But the bedroom carpet needed to be replaced, and it finally happened. 

The installation took just a couple hours and he did a great job.

I knew I wanted a light color and once it was down, I knew I'd made the right choice. 

But now it really makes the living room/hallway carpet look dark and it has way too yellow of a tone. But it's in decent shape so it'll stay for now.

Refinished Nightstand/Storage

I found this nightstand at a friend's garage sale and just knew a little bit of love would make it good as new again.

I sanded it down...

...and gave it a couple coats of primer.

Then it got a couple coats of glossy white paint and a couple new handles, and it was done. There were some really great knobs in Hobby Lobby, but I didn't take the time to fill in the holes and then drill a single hole for new ones. Just trying to keep it simple....oh, and maybe because I don't own a drill. :-)  

I also debated about what color to paint it. The sky's the limit on colors, but since I needed more fabric storage space in my sewing room, I stuck with plain ole white to match the rest of the storage in that room.

The Finished Glider

Mom finished painting the glider and got it all back together before I got home again to help out.

 

 

Love the color we picked out! Read Part 1 here.

A Glimpse of a Refinished Glider

While I was home over the weekend, Mom had a project she wanted help with. She had a glider that sat out in the yard for many, many years, and it was showing its age. It had several coats of varnish on it that was cracking and peeling. 

A couple years ago she got a new one, but it just wasn't as comfortable as the old one. It almost got put on the curb once (maybe twice), but for some reason she kept hanging on to it.

We got our supplies ready and started sanding away. At first we were just going to sand the slats in their places, but we soon found out the many coats of varnish put on over the years needed more than that. And we wanted all the work we were going to have to put into it to last longer than one season.

So we took each one off...some easier than others. 

Then they were sanded and a coat of primer put on.

There was quite a bit of yellowing coming thru the primer so Mom was able to coat them a second time today.

Before I left to come back home, we were able to get a coat of green on four of the slats just so we could see what the color would really look like.

Mom is going to work on it over the next few days and will probably have it finished before I get back to help again.

I can't wait to see the finished project.

House Organizing - Kitchen

One of the projects I'm working on in 2013 is organizing my house. I don't have a lot of stuff (at least I don't think I do), and for the most part, things are were they belong. But I found a website that I'm hoping will help me re-organize/declutter some areas of the house. 

Each day there is an assignment that you're supposed to spend up to 15 minutes on. Sometimes I can do the day's task in just a couple minutes and others it might take me more than 15. Also, if I don't have enough time on a particular day, I'll do another day's task and come back to that one, most often on a weekend.

 

I like having the list at a glance, so I printed the monthly calendar and put it on the frig. You can see there were a few days last month that I skipped. Those were days that I either hadn't gotten to yet or didn't need to do because I don't have that area in my house...like a pantry or organizing toys. 

 

The kitchen was a huge area last month. I had a junk drawer that had accumulated way too much stuff. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

 This is what it looks like now. I had actually organized it once and then decided a few days later that I still wasn't happy with it so I cleaned it again.

Another day it was time for cookbooks so that's when I tackled that and the other half of the drawer that had become full of junk. 

Much better. I moved the container from the drawer mentioned earlier into this one. 

Ever since I moved into this house, I haven't been happy with the drawer space in the kitchen. I just put stuff where it fit and never got around to moving it. The silverware and cooking utensils were all in one drawer. So on the day that the task was to organize the cookbooks, I was able to clear a drawer out by moving them elsewhere. I'm not a big cookbook user so all the extras didn't need to be taking up prime real estate in a drawer.

I bought a few organization dividers to help keep things looking neat.

And then last but not least, I moved the towels/dishcloths into the old cookbook drawer which was bigger and was finally able to separate the cooking utensils into two drawers.

 

After a couple weeks, I'm now used to where I moved things and don't open the wrong drawer first.

New Storage Bench

I had an old desk in my sunroom that was just the right size for my laptop. But lately it seems to have found a new home on the coffee table in another room, so I decided to free up some space for a new storage bench. I had quite the time finding what I wanted. I visited furniture stores around town, but they didn't have anything. I finally found what I was looking for at Home Depot. It's very sturdy and the cushion came with it.

I guess I only got one picture of "before." It took a bit longer to put together than I had hoped. The back piece had tracks that it needed to slide into and it wasn't fitting so I had to go back a couple of steps and do some adjusting. 

 

I found a couple of pretty boxes for one side and two cloth bins for the other. I moved the desk to the basement with the rest of my office stuff. Right now I only have one of the storage boxes filled, but I'm working on organizing and moving things around in the house so I'm sure it won't take long to fill them. The extra seating is nice too since it's right inside the back door. 

 

Bedroom Carpet

One of the things on my to-do list from when I moved into my house was to replace the carpet in the master bedroom. It was really in desperate need, but after moving the furniture in it was a lot more work, so it kept getting pushed further and further down the list.

Until yesterday. This coming week is clean-up days where I live, so yesterday at work it came to me that this should be the year to pull it up and haul it to the curb. And knowing that I wouldn't want to live with a sub-floor for too long would spur me on to get something new more quickly.

 This is what I found in one spot that was really worn...dirt and disintegrated carpet and pad. I don't even want to think about what the carpet was like even though I had shampooed it. Gross!

 At this point I had all of it removed except under the bed.

 I just moved the bed to the other side of the room and rolled the last piece up.

 It took me about two hours to remove it all (and the staples that the pad was secured with). So now I just have to go shopping and decide what I want.



Basement Bathroom

The last room in the house has now been painted. The tiny bathroom in the basement was the final room that needed some work.

The wallpaper came down a few months ago.

 Around the toilet is the most awkward spot. There's very little space on either side. I definitely ended up with a sore neck between that and the painting.

I didn't get a before picture of the light fixture that was here. My dad tried to replace it, but once he got the old one out he found that the box was too shallow for the new light. We ran to Home Depot and picked up what he needed. Or so we thought. Somehow the box was jerry-rigged to stay flush to the drywall and the new box wasn't going in without putting a hole in the drywall of the room next door. He had no idea why it had been done that way, and there were a few choice words said. What should have been an easy project, was quickly going downhill.

There were several other projects that he was helping me with that day, so I told him to just leave the light alone, and I'd get the electrician to work on it when he came to install the outlet for the microwave.

 The ugly, plastic framed gold mirror also had to go...and also needed to be lowered.

I had paint left over from the upstairs bath so I used it here too. And I still have some left.  

The finished room.

 The new light....

 ...and the new mirror.

Sorting out the Storage Room

Another project I worked on over the long New Year's weekend was organizing the storage room. I've always been happy with the three shelves I have in there, but the boxes and other stuff along the walls needed some work. The open space seemed to be getting smaller and smaller.

Once I really got to really looking at everything, I wondered why I had an empty sweater bag hanging on a clothes rack. Probably because when I moved into the house I thought, I have the rack so why not hang something on it. And a garment bag that hadn't been used in 10-15 years. Why, oh why, was I keeping it. It's now on the garage sale pile.

Other things that were driving me nuts were the un-matched boxes that hold the Christmas stuff, the cooler that was always in the way, and the ceiling tiles that just got piled anywhere.

Over a year ago I noticed a few of the ceiling tiles in front of the window were starting to come loose. Over the course of time, gravity just seemed to be pulling more and more of them loose so eventually I took them down so they wouldn't fall and break.

Then when I made plans to have the microwave put in upstairs, the electrician was going to have to run wire through that room to get to the electrical box so it wasn't practical to put them back up until he was finished. That was four months ago! By now I'm so used to part of it missing that it doesn't bother me. And it's a storage room...who needs a finished ceiling. :-) It's on the someday list. Doesn't everybody have one of those??!!

 

 I got rid of one storage rack and moved the boxes along the wall instead of in front of the garment bags. That's another thing to be cleaned out. Someday! There's a cubby hole in the wall (why I don't know) that the ceiling tiles fit in so the edges don't get banged up.

I bought some new bins for the holiday stuff, the cooler is now in the garage, the shelves have been re-organized, and the garage sale pile is larger. 

 All the dead spiders and bugs that you normally find in a basement have been vacuumed up, and the room is clean again.

In this picture, you can see the missing ceiling.

Organization Projects

I had a four-day weekend over New Year's and decided to do a little bit of cleaning and organizing.

I have very little drawer space in my kitchen so this big drawer really gets overstuffed at times. All of a sudden everything was just getting dumped in no matter the weight of the item...like the almond bark on top of a second bag of marshmallows. 

I removed everything from the drawer so I could start with a clean slate. 

The heavier items like the almond bark, brown sugar and chocolate chips went on the bottom. I found a box of freezer bags that belonged in a different drawer. The loose packages of Chex Mix and hot chocolate also found a new home. I didn't gain a lot of space, but I can find things again without digging to the bottom.

The linen closet also needed a quick organize. This one wasn't too bad so I didn't take everything out first. I just restacked a sheet set and threw a couple of pillows in the garbage. Not sure why I kept them to begin with. I had gotten new ones for a reason. And those three candles have been removed since I took the picture. This was just a safe place for them until the Christmas decorations were put away and they could be put out again. 

Next on the list was the spice (and more) cabinet. This one also wasn't too bad, but the middle shelf just wasn't working for me. I have several turntables around the house so I ran to Target and picked up one more.

Once again I took everything out and wiped down the shelves. I found a couple spice duplicates so I combined them into one. I filled all the salt and pepper shakers so the bigger bottles could go in the way back.

Since I'm not very tall, I can just barely reach the things in the front on the top shelf without standing on a chair. I put the things in the back that I only use once or twice a year like the parafin, canning salt, and food coloring.

I love newly organized spaces!

I did a couple more areas and will post about those later.

New Window

Last week I had a window replaced in my sunroom. It's the last big project I had on my list. It feels so great to them finished. Of course, there is still the small project list.

The center pane was rotting because of rain getting in.  

 Here they have the outside trim taken off.

Once they had the window out, it only took them about 10 minutes to get the new one into place. Good thing the snow hadn't started flying yet.

 They did a fabulous job on finishing the window. They matched the stain perfectly. The trim came off great and they were able to put it back up. You would never know that the picture below is the after shot. I didn't have to do a single touchup.

Instead of putting wood trim back on the outside, they put up vinyl. Yay, less maintenance for me!!