More Living Room

Another Living/Dining Room BEFORE:

Living/Dining Room AFTER:

So we are still sleeping in the dining room but will be moving upstairs into the master bedroom in the next couple of weeks. The wallpaper is all peeled off in there(yay!) Anyway-the fireplace came last week & DadKuhn came over to help Zach install a ceiling fan in our living room. We need to put crown molding back up (the stuff that goes where the walls meet the ceiling) then these rooms will be done.

Random Updates!

Here's a photo I forgot to upload a couple weeks ago. DadKuhn got our shower working! (Which means no more showering/getting ready at the gym, awesome!!!)

For those of you who have known me a long time....I had been driving the same car since HighSchool. This car was not going to cut it in upstate NY snow so I got an all wheel drive SUV!

Last weekend at our local mall...yes you are looking at farm animals....

Our first flowers, on the first day of spring!

More of The Office (minus Steve Carell)

The BEFORE photo:

(Mary) So I compromised on the wallpaper thing. I stripped the paper off a wall and we put joint compound over the wallpaper seams then sanded the other 3 walls. I tested my "Concrete" by Valspar color on the walls and hated it because it looked almost lilac purple for some reason, ew! (Michelle-I wish I read your suggestion earlier!) I switched to "Cathedral Gray" by Valspar instead. Hopefully we can find a use for the "Concrete" Color elsewhere...homemade paintballs?

Spackeling:

Sanding (sporting my chemistry lab goggles):

Priming:

Starting to paint!

Tada!!!!

Somehow both Zach and I each own a big padded black leather executive office chair however I have found that I would rather sit in a wooden seat when working & studying (must have something to do with being used to the library or Barnes and Noble chairs)...I don't like how the chair swivels around when you are trying to focus on something...

...so I painted my wooden chair white

Semi set up office
(sorry about the picture quality-I have been using my camera phone since we lost our camera charger)

yay painter's tape!

Green accents in the room:

I still need to finish setting up the space but the big stuff is out of the way. Once I touch up the white paint on the trim & doors-this room will be officially done! Maybe I can call in an interior design expert...LORRAN...to help.... :)

The Office

Mary here.... it's March 8th-and I'm deciding on colors for the home office. I was stuck between 8 or 9 different shades of gray. Inspired by another blogger's home office renovation, I decided that white trim & furniture (plus a glass desk) with gray walls was THE look for me. I am going to add a color accent like green or blue by putting a few vases in the room and adding the same color cushion to my wood chair (which I will be painting white).

I've narrowed my choices down to three, now which to pick?

Legend

Cement

Asteroid

While prepping the walls I noticed a piece of the old paint was chipping, so I ripped it off to find that it was a layer of painted over wallpaper...so I stripped that to find ANOTHER layer of wallpaper...which did not come off easily. Now my painting schedule is pushed back until I spray vinegar/water and embark on a double wallpaper removal project.

This was what was underneath the blue wallpaper..

After spending what feels like pointless time removing this wallpaper-I decided I may leave the other three walls as they are and join the "paint over wallpaper" club. I'm not proud of this but I have too many other things to do and I start work next week so I need my office together by then. While continuing to remove the paper from the wall I'd started, I got to thinking about how much I dislike wallpaper and whoever invented it. My curious side got the best of me and I put down my scraper to Google the inventor of wallpaper...the Egyptians, however years later wallpaper came to America and was first printed in Philadelphia! (For more wallpaper history, go here.

On a better note-the weather has been beautiful so I painted some of my office furniture outside to compliment my new decor!

Before:

After:

Stay tuned for before/afters of the office...

Our Living Quarters

All the hard work Zach put in during the last month enabled us to set up a living quarters while we work on the rest of the house. Other than crown molding these rooms are pretty much done. We set up a temporary bedroom in what will later be our dining room and we started setting up the living room. It's like college all over again in our little studio apartment (complete with mini fridge).


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BEFORE:

AFTER:

Moving Day!!!

We will miss these guys!!!

128 Sumac-our first apartment together.

Mary here. :) We moved all of our stuff out of the Philadelphia apartment on the weekend of February 27th. Our friends showed up in the morning and made the process go by so quickly, I hardly felt like I did anything!